Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Written by Judith Butler
Narrated by Emily Beresford
4/5
()
About this audiobook
Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, "essential" notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category "woman" and continues in this vein with examinations of "the masculine" and "the feminine." Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is the author of several books including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, Excitable Speech, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, and The Force of Non-Violence. In addition to numerous academic honors and publications, Butler has published editorials and reviews in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Nation, Time Magazine, the London Review of Books, and in a wide range of journals, newspapers, radio and podcast programs throughout Europe, Latin America, Central and South Asia, and South Africa. They live in Berkeley.
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Reviews for Gender Trouble
317 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Is there an English translation?
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Filled with jargon. Author is trying really hard to make the book incomprehensible and succeeds.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Non scientific nonsense that can not quote 1 peer reviewed research study
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It is a comprehensive book, but a little too theoretical for me. It was hard to keep up.
It proposes a lot of background for its various propositions, and a very convincing logic.
I enjoyed the different angles from which it tackles the various questions and aspects of gender.
Definitely a must if you are on a learning path about gender and its effects on society and the individual. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The book was interesting and it made me more curious about different identities.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Honestly, I hate postmodernist academic language. Its completely uneccessary, elitist, and designed to enrage and obfuscate. Its edgelord stuff for the educated. It covers up lack up knowledge or meaning with difficult language, meaning that most of us have to read and reread each sentence, trying to tease out meaning and understand what the writer is saying. If you don't understand it, you assume that you aren't clever enough. But there is no need to write like this, its just showing off. Very few concepts require impenetrable language, and the struggle with most of those concepts is making it accessible. Only a handful of humanities subjects aim for inaccessibility and they all have one thing in common - the requirement that the subject is not studied too closely. I spent two nights reading this book, got most of the way through chapter one, and then tossed it away. The problems are twofold. Firstly, content. Big claims require big evidence, and Butler makes lots of big claims but provides no evidence whatsoever (unless this is done later on). Whats more, the claims are made in a way that enables the author to deny that they are claims, rather they could be rhetorical statements, philosopher's questions. But claims they are, and there were three main claims I disagreed with: that gender is completely disconnected from biological sex and always has been; that feminist philosophy is actually anti-feminist because it doesn't realise this and in fact is evil and stupid because by insisting that gender is a cultural construction applied to people perceived to be of one or other sex it actually creates an oppressive gender role for women; and that there is actually no such thing as biological sex. The third of these is particularly interesting because I had a conversation with a friend a while back where I said that those of our comrades who kept saying things like biological sex isn't real were a great recruiting ground for the far right, and was told that no-one said biological sex wasn't real and that this was a terf meme that told lies about us. But here we are. So, because of the second bit problem with this book, I tossed it aside. The second big problem is that it is unreadably difficult unless you're a big brain. If it had been easier to read I would have carried on reading it to learn if any of these claims are taken back, amended, or evidence provided. Perhaps anyone reading this review could let me know if they care enough. Life is too short to read difficult nonsense. Perhaps I need a beginner's guide!
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An interesting take on what it means to be a feminist.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The best argument for (relatively) contemporary Continental Philosophy and Feminism being senseless, masturbatory pap is this book.
The vast majority of it is dedicated to an exegesis of exegeses of Freudian and Lacanian theories of gender formation; perhaps, at most, a page or two's worth, total says something interesting about gender in an useful context.
An exemplar of academic insularity and the peacock's tail effect at their finest. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My academic and professional background is in public policy/program evaluation, so I have some academic theory under my belt from social science courses, but it's in political science and sociology, not gender studies. As a result, there are some parts of Gender Trouble I struggled with as I have never read Foucault, Zizek, and other "pure" theorists. There are passages I had to reread to understand. I'm getting the big picture takeaways, though. I'll also note that in my version, which is a recent revised edition, Butler's own introduction notes critiques of the book that have helped me understand it -- mostly regarding the evolving views of gender that young third-wavers interested in intersectionality (which is where I count myself) might better connect with.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Still groundbreaking, nearly 25 years after its first publication.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This book, which I unfortunately had to read twice, says that gender doesn't really exist; it is merely a social construction. If you don't know that already, you might give this book a skim, though it is really poorly written and often self-contradictory. However, if you understand that, and want to to move on in some direction, there's nothing here to grab onto. Just as an example of the the kind of morass this book leads you into: If there is no gender, than there is no such thing as homosexuality or heterosexuality, since those labels are applied to people based on the gender of their love object. On one level, I can go along with that. But here's the problem: I am attracted to humans with facial hair and penises and so are my gay male friends. But I'm perceived by the world as a heterosexual woman and can pursue my interests without societal approbation or interference. My gay friends can not. In Butler's world this has no meaning (except for an appreciation of the different gender performances each of us puts on). The book makes no acknowledgment of this oppression, nor does it provide a theoretical base to work from if you're going to do anything about it.