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.
It has it's high points and low ones, so I hesitate between 4 and 5 stars. Some of the discussion on psychoanalysis is very boring if you're not interested in psychoanalysis (which seems like a very obvious thing to say?) so I skipped one of the essays, 'Quandaries of the Incest Taboo', I think, just because I really couldn't bear to read all about Freud etc again. That being said, the high points are very high and some of the essays are not only very reader, but almost touching - or more than almost? very? do I feel hesitant in admitting that theoretical texts can be deeply emotional? is 'theory' and / or 'philosophy' meant to be cold and emotionless? Hmm, Butler touches on these kinds of concerns about the nature(s) and purpose(s) of 'theory' and / or 'philosophy', especially in the last essay of the collection 'Can the "Other" of Philosophy Speak?' - among other things so I'm inclined to consider them. I think what I like best about this, though, is that the version of gender 'theorizing' / 'troubling' / 'undoing' / 'doing' / etc that this book expounds is a lot more personal and / or 'intimate' than Gender Trouble (although I also think it's unnecessary to counterpose the two books) - and, as such, I think it runs fewer risks of imperialist universalization, though I continuously long for more inclusion of nonwestern / nonUSian issues / perspectives / contexts.
Do You like book Undoing Gender (2004)?
I don't find Butler especially helpful on transgender issues and so skip lightly over the chapters of this book that engage them. Nonetheless I love this book's introduction, where Butler does some great thinking about mourning, and also about what it means to resist interpellation into debased/spoiled identities. I see these sections as a sort of unintentional companion to the Intro to Jose Munoz's _Disidentifications_. Also the chapter on the heterosexuality of kinship has been very helpful to me in my current project on gay marriage.
—ian
Her discussion of what it means to be "human" and socially intelligible made me cry.Specifically: "To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind... But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human" (218).Similarly, I appreciated her thoughts on the nature of philosophy in the last essay, "Can the "Other" of Philosophy Speak?".
—Kate Hunc
Another Butler banga. If you're pretty deep into feminism (or feminist philosophy) the essays towards the beginning are probably more up your alley. If you're more in the philosophy side of feminism and gender (as I am), then the last three are good. I returned the book to the library so I'm not 100% on the title but the essay titled "The End of Sexual Difference" is especially good even for those uninitiated with Butler or even someone who wants an introduction to contemporary gender theory. Enjoy! I'm moving on to Foucault....again.
—Justin
