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breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.25
paracosm's review against another edition
4.0
Pretty interesting. This book is at least 20 years old, so some of the topics feel outdated, but the majority still stands. You can even see some of the essays as prefaces to problems we have now.
hushed's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
meri_uwu's review against another edition
4.0
psychoanalysis part was difficult other than that this was very good, some of the language was outdated, the first part of the book is quite progressive and clearly ahead of its time. the book ends in a quite touching story about Butlers of life.
questionablechilli's review against another edition
it has never been more obvious that english isn't my first language than when i tried reading this book, i struggled comprehending even 10% of what judith butler was saying. i will try this again in my first language bc what i did understand was really interesting
ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
i finally did it. i read a judith butler book. i know it was at a slower pace considering its just around 200 pages, but it's not because the book was excessively obtuse. i was struck by how accessible this book is. this might be the one book that she has written like this. it was almost a little bit too accessible. judith butler turns her eye to a number of common run-in's with the state or similarly consequential authority: she takes looks at gender essentialism vs. gender self determination, marriage, the GID in the DSM-IV. she sketches out a non-prescriptive space of indeterminacy between two opposing viewpoints on these ideas. her move is very generous, but i often wonder if for the sake of rhetoric or pedagogy it is more productive to take a (for lack of a better word) totalizing stance on such issues. she is clearly wanting to deepen the terrain she is credited with defining, and hoping to make an intervention on what winds up being septic and paralyzed analysis. like the utility of marriage is not lost on me but does allowing for meditation upon the issues' greys wind up fortifying the mainstream gay movement? i have less trouble with the consideration of essentialism, because everybody i know lapses into it, always with a lot of self-reflexive cringing. or maybe i intuit cringing. does essentialism threaten me less than marriage? reading this got me stoked to read more butler because it's proven to me beyond everyone else's insistence otherwise that she is in fact a human being (i mean that in a nice way, not the evil western enlightenment way) and not some robotic spellcasting mythological creature. i really want to read her earlier hegel work. she taught hegel at cal last semester and i'm bummed i couldn't beg to sit in.