zofoklecja's review against another edition
Styl Judyty jest nieprzenikniony, a ja za słaba z filozofii i psychologii :/
imclaugh's review against another edition
5.0
The most beautiful book that ever happened ever. Also those reviewers who smugly relegate "Gender Trouble" to "its time" (the 1990s? really?) need to drop their fetc. condescension at the front cover.
byrix's review against another edition
Amazing book and the ideas presented are fascinating. However, the text itself is unbelievably dense. Better to just find some summaries instead than forcing myself through
leelulah's review against another edition
The opening sentence of this Butler classic and feminist (if it can be called as such at all) reference, says what's happening of late. The definition of gender is the crumbling point for feminism, as gender theorists and radical feminists have this rivalry that endangers the theorical unity of the movement, and maybe it's very purpose. Why call it feminism at all if now it can be about every single gender expression out there? Why would its concern be women, when gender minorities might be some made up gender you just thought of?
But I digress. She reflects on the theory that preceeded her, namely Beauvoir and Sartre, and their problematization of female otherness, sometimes in an euphemism known as "mystery" (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with the feminine mystery that John Paul II speaks of). A genderist would deny the existence of mystery in a positive sense. Everything is a question of power, dialectic, marxist relations. This is going to be a fun ride, I thought to myself as I read this.
What would happen if we tackled presumptive heterosexuality? "I must get in trouble", the sentence reads. No matter what the cost. "I must be a rebel". And the loathed expressions such as "compulsory heterosexuality" start. Now, it's funny because genderists stumble between arguments on whether homosexuality, or all sexuality is a choice. And if heterosexuality is compulsory, someone forces you to feel that way, which would mean that you can choose your way out. And same for homosexuality, even if for these movements it's an expression of freedom, you could choose out if you wanted to. A big 1-0 for the radfems and the horrible, horrible religious right.
The question of femaleness arrives. Is it a performance? Is it really "natural"? Foucault is her base for asserting that what must be investigated are the political institutions which hold certain practices as "natural", when in reality they're just imposed. There are two institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality.
There's not much sense in being a woman or a female altogether, if we're not defined as such in opposition to other, so for the time being, the only solution Butler finds acceptable is to do away with the conception of identity and never ask about it anymore. Systems of power settle the question: the subject which will be reduced to a concept and later represented, all this process is done by a system of power. So, the definition of woman itself is a product of a system of power, which responds to its requierements.
"Woman" is not a common identity, and the notion of patriarchy oppressing women does not apply equally in all parts of the world. Feminism can't be universally representative of every woman, because in order to work as an encompassing discourse it has to have some restrictions. An ode to vagueness. Feminist aims are exactly the contrary of what its limited discourse encompasses. If I have to define what a woman is, I'm also defining relationships, therefore no emancipation is possible. But here's the deal: every political idea has to have definitions to work from, whether these definitions might be perceived as reductionisms or not. Butler wants a war against language, by using language. If languages didn't work with concepts, and words to represent them, communication would be impossible altogether. Or maybe she has a better method, but this is honestly turning confusing.
The sex / gender distinction makes gender "the cultural interpretation of sex". It also establishes the idea of a "natural sex". She takes the notion of Beauvoir that women are not born as such but become such by cultural practices, and then applies it to the idea that follows, which is even crazier: becoming a woman is not a question of biological nature, but cultural instead. Since it doesn't stem from sex, anyone can become a woman (well, this is the corner stone of transexualism, isn't it?)
Since women escape the representation of a phallogocentric language, they can be anything. Then she questions the need for unity in political action. She's trying to deconstruct feminism because she's not happy with how it succumbed to the categories of language it said to despise. Is genderist approach even marxist at all? Or some weird kind of individualism? By not defining gender entirely, anyone can participate in the struggle (which kind of going against, or probably for the monthly adding of one letter in the LGBT acronym, or something like that)
But what is identity to Butler? What is a person? Is identity a normative ideal? Can identity be understood at all? The institutionalization of heterosexuality opens the door for the creation of binaries and oppositions that make reality understood in these terms. This leaves a lot of identities out.
The whole work turns into an epistemological question: what can really be understood at all? A critique of poststructuralist french feminist school ensues. And it's surprising, because in many ways, Butler is rejecting what allowed her to start with all this nonsense in the first place. Her conclusions about Beauvoir and Wittig's anaylisis is even more outrageous: the construction of the notion of sex is made for men's enjoyment. Women and lesbian are, therefore, not the same, and lesbian is a cop out from the oppression.
She takes the case for hermaphrodites as an impossible identity in the sex binary. Identity is, for Foucault, a regulatory fiction. At least she recognizes that Wittig does not aim to take language out as something purely evil in nature, but yet misogynystic in its applications, a reason why it can be transformed for good purposes.
This is, undoubteddly, the most confusing book on Earth. I was planning to read it as to see what else I'm opposing to, when I speak of my opposition to gender theory. While the idea is to escape essentialism, all the other concepts seem vague, or to go nowhere. Maybe her personal anecdote of wanting to be in trouble since it was unavoidable, shown in the preface, is the principle of this book.
There's some re-readings of Freud and Lacan whose work I'm not very familiar with. A few more references to juridical "fictions" and constructions of the subject (then again, how is possible to understand anything at all if you don't make a cut somewhere?) I get that it is important not to make assumptions which end up being damaging to human relationships. To propose that nothing can be understood is a bit frustrating. And how can you propose such a thing if nothing really can be understood?
Even lesbianism is not a liberated sexuality for Butler. She says it's the result of a lesbian appropiation of Foucault which allowed for the thought of this utopia to take place (interesting, because Foucault gave no thought to lesbians as far as I'm concerned, and I've read his History of Sexuality, while the radical feminist whose work I'm interested in, Sheila Jeffreys, acknowledges this and despises Foucault and Butler likewise for their childish desires of "sexual liberation").
Perhaps Butler is not too far from arguing for some other kind of sexual liberation which claims to be better. To oppose female sexuality to male sexuality is problematic. Everything is problematic. The existence of feminism trying to define what a woman is, is as problematic as the existence of a woman herself. Everything is reductionism, so let's be incredibly vague about notions, and criticize notions to appear to be more inclusive.
This paragraph below is one of the most intelligible paragraphs of the whole book (and even so, it's quite frustrating), which summarizes what I just said. Don't get into the binary logic, don't coin other terms for alternative sexualities, because it's impossible:
"If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is 'before', 'outside', or 'beyond' power is a culturally impossibility and a politically impracticable dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive posibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself. This critical task presumes, of course, that to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination".
The heterosexist discourse has not permeated homosexual relationships by perpetuating stereotypes as "butch" and "femme" (though both are parodical representations of maleness and femaleness, as other feminists acknowledge). To reconstruct these categories in the homosexual ambient legitimates heterosexuality, and Butler can't have that.
I wonder if Butler knows what she wants and what she means, because 33 pages in, I just don't know. I wonder how many people who applaud this book really understood a word. I'm not the most versed person in philosophy around, but this screams rebellion for rebellion's sake to me, and not clear definitions at all.
So maybe, radical and liberal feminism have something in common: an anarchist desire. At least, radical feminists bother to define something, no matter how outrageous it might seem.
I just thought, this is a short book. I need to give it a chance before I get further into the radical feminist critique of transexualism. Oh, boy. How wrong I was.
But I digress. She reflects on the theory that preceeded her, namely Beauvoir and Sartre, and their problematization of female otherness, sometimes in an euphemism known as "mystery" (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with the feminine mystery that John Paul II speaks of). A genderist would deny the existence of mystery in a positive sense. Everything is a question of power, dialectic, marxist relations. This is going to be a fun ride, I thought to myself as I read this.
What would happen if we tackled presumptive heterosexuality? "I must get in trouble", the sentence reads. No matter what the cost. "I must be a rebel". And the loathed expressions such as "compulsory heterosexuality" start. Now, it's funny because genderists stumble between arguments on whether homosexuality, or all sexuality is a choice. And if heterosexuality is compulsory, someone forces you to feel that way, which would mean that you can choose your way out. And same for homosexuality, even if for these movements it's an expression of freedom, you could choose out if you wanted to. A big 1-0 for the radfems and the horrible, horrible religious right.
The question of femaleness arrives. Is it a performance? Is it really "natural"? Foucault is her base for asserting that what must be investigated are the political institutions which hold certain practices as "natural", when in reality they're just imposed. There are two institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality.
There's not much sense in being a woman or a female altogether, if we're not defined as such in opposition to other, so for the time being, the only solution Butler finds acceptable is to do away with the conception of identity and never ask about it anymore. Systems of power settle the question: the subject which will be reduced to a concept and later represented, all this process is done by a system of power. So, the definition of woman itself is a product of a system of power, which responds to its requierements.
"Woman" is not a common identity, and the notion of patriarchy oppressing women does not apply equally in all parts of the world. Feminism can't be universally representative of every woman, because in order to work as an encompassing discourse it has to have some restrictions. An ode to vagueness. Feminist aims are exactly the contrary of what its limited discourse encompasses. If I have to define what a woman is, I'm also defining relationships, therefore no emancipation is possible. But here's the deal: every political idea has to have definitions to work from, whether these definitions might be perceived as reductionisms or not. Butler wants a war against language, by using language. If languages didn't work with concepts, and words to represent them, communication would be impossible altogether. Or maybe she has a better method, but this is honestly turning confusing.
The sex / gender distinction makes gender "the cultural interpretation of sex". It also establishes the idea of a "natural sex". She takes the notion of Beauvoir that women are not born as such but become such by cultural practices, and then applies it to the idea that follows, which is even crazier: becoming a woman is not a question of biological nature, but cultural instead. Since it doesn't stem from sex, anyone can become a woman (well, this is the corner stone of transexualism, isn't it?)
Since women escape the representation of a phallogocentric language, they can be anything. Then she questions the need for unity in political action. She's trying to deconstruct feminism because she's not happy with how it succumbed to the categories of language it said to despise. Is genderist approach even marxist at all? Or some weird kind of individualism? By not defining gender entirely, anyone can participate in the struggle (which kind of going against, or probably for the monthly adding of one letter in the LGBT acronym, or something like that)
But what is identity to Butler? What is a person? Is identity a normative ideal? Can identity be understood at all? The institutionalization of heterosexuality opens the door for the creation of binaries and oppositions that make reality understood in these terms. This leaves a lot of identities out.
The whole work turns into an epistemological question: what can really be understood at all? A critique of poststructuralist french feminist school ensues. And it's surprising, because in many ways, Butler is rejecting what allowed her to start with all this nonsense in the first place. Her conclusions about Beauvoir and Wittig's anaylisis is even more outrageous: the construction of the notion of sex is made for men's enjoyment. Women and lesbian are, therefore, not the same, and lesbian is a cop out from the oppression.
She takes the case for hermaphrodites as an impossible identity in the sex binary. Identity is, for Foucault, a regulatory fiction. At least she recognizes that Wittig does not aim to take language out as something purely evil in nature, but yet misogynystic in its applications, a reason why it can be transformed for good purposes.
This is, undoubteddly, the most confusing book on Earth. I was planning to read it as to see what else I'm opposing to, when I speak of my opposition to gender theory. While the idea is to escape essentialism, all the other concepts seem vague, or to go nowhere. Maybe her personal anecdote of wanting to be in trouble since it was unavoidable, shown in the preface, is the principle of this book.
There's some re-readings of Freud and Lacan whose work I'm not very familiar with. A few more references to juridical "fictions" and constructions of the subject (then again, how is possible to understand anything at all if you don't make a cut somewhere?) I get that it is important not to make assumptions which end up being damaging to human relationships. To propose that nothing can be understood is a bit frustrating. And how can you propose such a thing if nothing really can be understood?
Even lesbianism is not a liberated sexuality for Butler. She says it's the result of a lesbian appropiation of Foucault which allowed for the thought of this utopia to take place (interesting, because Foucault gave no thought to lesbians as far as I'm concerned, and I've read his History of Sexuality, while the radical feminist whose work I'm interested in, Sheila Jeffreys, acknowledges this and despises Foucault and Butler likewise for their childish desires of "sexual liberation").
Perhaps Butler is not too far from arguing for some other kind of sexual liberation which claims to be better. To oppose female sexuality to male sexuality is problematic. Everything is problematic. The existence of feminism trying to define what a woman is, is as problematic as the existence of a woman herself. Everything is reductionism, so let's be incredibly vague about notions, and criticize notions to appear to be more inclusive.
This paragraph below is one of the most intelligible paragraphs of the whole book (and even so, it's quite frustrating), which summarizes what I just said. Don't get into the binary logic, don't coin other terms for alternative sexualities, because it's impossible:
"If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is 'before', 'outside', or 'beyond' power is a culturally impossibility and a politically impracticable dream, one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking subversive posibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself. This critical task presumes, of course, that to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination".
The heterosexist discourse has not permeated homosexual relationships by perpetuating stereotypes as "butch" and "femme" (though both are parodical representations of maleness and femaleness, as other feminists acknowledge). To reconstruct these categories in the homosexual ambient legitimates heterosexuality, and Butler can't have that.
I wonder if Butler knows what she wants and what she means, because 33 pages in, I just don't know. I wonder how many people who applaud this book really understood a word. I'm not the most versed person in philosophy around, but this screams rebellion for rebellion's sake to me, and not clear definitions at all.
So maybe, radical and liberal feminism have something in common: an anarchist desire. At least, radical feminists bother to define something, no matter how outrageous it might seem.
I just thought, this is a short book. I need to give it a chance before I get further into the radical feminist critique of transexualism. Oh, boy. How wrong I was.
gabrielle_ibarra's review against another edition
I want to say I’m shaken to the core of my being but what is a being and what is the core of being? Is not the core illusory and reflected and enacted only by and through the surface?
I can’t believe how impactful this has been to me in trying to articulate my frustrations with the binaries (not just genders) and the idea of a ‘natural’ sex. I fucking love this book please read it.
I can’t believe how impactful this has been to me in trying to articulate my frustrations with the binaries (not just genders) and the idea of a ‘natural’ sex. I fucking love this book please read it.
stratosphere's review against another edition
3.0
SHE WAS INSANE FOR THIS hubo muchas cosas (especialmente la primera parte) que no entendí en absoluto pero después del 40% como que se me abrió la mente y me dejó 0____0
ben_smitty's review against another edition
3.0
Gender Trouble is one of the founding texts of queer theory. I don't share Butler's social constructivism regarding sex and gender, so we disagree off the bat, but this is still a fun-ish read.
From what I understand (and correct me if I'm wrong), Butler's arguments rest on certain assumptions:
1. Language itself is inherently patriarchal—we equate words like "weak, emotional, passive" etc. with femininity. Language does not incarnate consciousness and the objective—rather, language (as well as repeated actions or "performance") puts ideas that are socially constructed into fixed structures (i.e. words). These words are then repeated over and over until these ideas become "objective" in everyone's minds.
2. Because language is patriarchal, being a "feminist" automatically means playing on the losing team. Women are defined by lack (of phallus, of selfhood, etc.) and therefore can never gain ground in a patriarchal world.
3. For feminism to really win, radically redefining these inherently patriarchal structures is necessary. Deconstructing the binaries that make up the social world via performance (cross-dressing, refusing to adhere to binaric gender pronouns, playing language games etc.) can slowly unveil the emptiness behind what's often deemed as objective.
Like many other postmodern ideas, Butler's arguments are dense but interesting. I couldn't follow most of the beef she had with Lacan and Freud, but she seems to be criticizing them for automatically assuming heteronormativity? Aren't these just differences in metaphysical presuppositions?
I also think that if language is inherently patriarchal, it's gonna take something more radical than performativity to solve that. Is a new language necessary? one that's free from the restraints of patriarchy? Maybe, idk.
From what I understand (and correct me if I'm wrong), Butler's arguments rest on certain assumptions:
1. Language itself is inherently patriarchal—we equate words like "weak, emotional, passive" etc. with femininity. Language does not incarnate consciousness and the objective—rather, language (as well as repeated actions or "performance") puts ideas that are socially constructed into fixed structures (i.e. words). These words are then repeated over and over until these ideas become "objective" in everyone's minds.
2. Because language is patriarchal, being a "feminist" automatically means playing on the losing team. Women are defined by lack (of phallus, of selfhood, etc.) and therefore can never gain ground in a patriarchal world.
3. For feminism to really win, radically redefining these inherently patriarchal structures is necessary. Deconstructing the binaries that make up the social world via performance (cross-dressing, refusing to adhere to binaric gender pronouns, playing language games etc.) can slowly unveil the emptiness behind what's often deemed as objective.
Like many other postmodern ideas, Butler's arguments are dense but interesting. I couldn't follow most of the beef she had with Lacan and Freud, but she seems to be criticizing them for automatically assuming heteronormativity? Aren't these just differences in metaphysical presuppositions?
I also think that if language is inherently patriarchal, it's gonna take something more radical than performativity to solve that. Is a new language necessary? one that's free from the restraints of patriarchy? Maybe, idk.
freshofall's review against another edition
4.0
Probably one of the most influential and important texts about sex and gender from the last century. As with a lot of philosophical texts it's very dense and hard to get through - but it's worth it.
If you are interested in the theoretical background of modern feminism Butler's work is essential to read.
If you are interested in the theoretical background of modern feminism Butler's work is essential to read.