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lizawall's review against another edition
Ha! I feel like I've been reluctantly dragging my feet towards this book for years. I approached it with a heavy heart and a sense of duty. Having gotten the impression that it had destroyed everything I loved (or tried), I thought I had an obligation to hold my nose and research the enemy. I thought it would be pedantic, humorless and polemical. I never thought it would be so much fun! The night I started it I was up until three in the morning reading it, then started again as soon as I woke up and was late to work. Turns out she has a sense of humor AND a sense of style. I felt like I had been living in the joke for years and now here was the punchline. But, sadly, for all the fun, I still didn't leave the book fully convinced.
For one thing, it is so funny to start here, without having read, oh, basically any Derrida, Lacan or Foucault, for starters, and only the littlest bit of Freud. Now that I've gotten a glimpse of all the fun they've been having I'm inclined to check them out as well, and when I do, it will already be through Gender Trouble. So, bam, point for Judith Butler! Way to turn the discourse in your favor. Oh, but that was also part of what raised my suspicion, because I got the impression that she was playing pretty fast and loose, and while running a whirl of words displacing received ideas of meaning and authority, she was also consolidating her own authoritative power! Apparently in spite of herself, but how could that be read other than a little disingenuously? At one of my favorite points, referring to an argument that she made she starts "I have argued" and then tries to excuse this seeming exertion of the subjective self with the following parenthetical: "('I' deploy the grammar that governs the genre of the philosophical conclusion, but note that it is the grammar itself that deploys and enables this 'I,' even as the 'I' that insists itself here repeats, redeploys, and-as the critics will determine-contests the philosophical grammar by which it is both enabled and restricted.)..." Come on, really? Really?? To me this gives a wonderful sort of characterization, like something someone would say in a novel. I love the absurdity and how, it is in trying to disavow her own self-hood that she gives such a human sense of it in the anxiety and frustration of the tone!
So here is the other thing: I am so all for her project to the extent that her project is to expand "the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality." Subversive bodliy acts sure are fun, aren't they? But in order to do that is it really necessary to dismiss any notion of interiority or a pre-discursive or non-discursive self? I hope not, because I'm fond of it. Here is a quote from a poem I just read by Suzanne Gardinier: "If not this what are you touching then/Inside me all night If not my soul."
Particularly when she goes to Nietzsche, I'm troubled: "The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche's claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that 'there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming;
"the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything.' In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results." If one is really to take as an assumption that there is no being, the corollary here seems entirely superfluous. Of course that being has no gender if it doesn't exist! It is like the house has already been knocked down and we are swinging at the empty air. Rather than getting more radical, this seems to be working backwards.
There is something suspect about the way in which she is seeming to reject the notion of authenticity, but at the same time seems to be operating under the assumption that a more liberated (and therefore more authentic!) form of gender understanding would be possible. She surely succumbs to her own romanticisms, and I'm glad she does, but I just wish she would be more out with it. I found something sweet in this: "Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, gender can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible."
I'm glad this book exists. Reading it I really was struck by how much it's shaped the discourse I've been raised in, and to my advantage. I was glad that it played more than I expected, but I wish it had played more than it did because what else is the point of living in a phantasm?
For one thing, it is so funny to start here, without having read, oh, basically any Derrida, Lacan or Foucault, for starters, and only the littlest bit of Freud. Now that I've gotten a glimpse of all the fun they've been having I'm inclined to check them out as well, and when I do, it will already be through Gender Trouble. So, bam, point for Judith Butler! Way to turn the discourse in your favor. Oh, but that was also part of what raised my suspicion, because I got the impression that she was playing pretty fast and loose, and while running a whirl of words displacing received ideas of meaning and authority, she was also consolidating her own authoritative power! Apparently in spite of herself, but how could that be read other than a little disingenuously? At one of my favorite points, referring to an argument that she made she starts "I have argued" and then tries to excuse this seeming exertion of the subjective self with the following parenthetical: "('I' deploy the grammar that governs the genre of the philosophical conclusion, but note that it is the grammar itself that deploys and enables this 'I,' even as the 'I' that insists itself here repeats, redeploys, and-as the critics will determine-contests the philosophical grammar by which it is both enabled and restricted.)..." Come on, really? Really?? To me this gives a wonderful sort of characterization, like something someone would say in a novel. I love the absurdity and how, it is in trying to disavow her own self-hood that she gives such a human sense of it in the anxiety and frustration of the tone!
So here is the other thing: I am so all for her project to the extent that her project is to expand "the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality." Subversive bodliy acts sure are fun, aren't they? But in order to do that is it really necessary to dismiss any notion of interiority or a pre-discursive or non-discursive self? I hope not, because I'm fond of it. Here is a quote from a poem I just read by Suzanne Gardinier: "If not this what are you touching then/Inside me all night If not my soul."
Particularly when she goes to Nietzsche, I'm troubled: "The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche's claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that 'there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming;
"the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything.' In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results." If one is really to take as an assumption that there is no being, the corollary here seems entirely superfluous. Of course that being has no gender if it doesn't exist! It is like the house has already been knocked down and we are swinging at the empty air. Rather than getting more radical, this seems to be working backwards.
There is something suspect about the way in which she is seeming to reject the notion of authenticity, but at the same time seems to be operating under the assumption that a more liberated (and therefore more authentic!) form of gender understanding would be possible. She surely succumbs to her own romanticisms, and I'm glad she does, but I just wish she would be more out with it. I found something sweet in this: "Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, gender can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible."
I'm glad this book exists. Reading it I really was struck by how much it's shaped the discourse I've been raised in, and to my advantage. I was glad that it played more than I expected, but I wish it had played more than it did because what else is the point of living in a phantasm?
emilymcglynn's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
So difficult to read but I’m glad I stuck with it, I definitely benefited from evolutions in my thinking about gender and feminism.
cardboard_triptych's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
ekfmef's review against another edition
I love Foucault but this really next level... I guess I need to read more critical theory.
casparb's review against another edition
4.0
4.5 I had high expectations for this one and was still impressed. JB delivers.
Particularly loved sections 1 and 3 - 'Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire' and 'Subversive Bodily Acts'. The first section is actually more wholly philosophico-political than one might expect from the reputation of this book. There's a fantastic note on pragmatic coalitionism, which I think just about everybody ought to read in order to defuse the tedious arguments we see so often.
'Subversive Bodily Acts' seemed the most accurate to the book's reputation. This is where Butler becomes more confident, prescriptive, and begins to open up the fields of feminist critique and gender studies on an almost uniquely radical level. Lovely to see her appreciation of Foucault here too. :)
A note on style - I see loads of people complain about Butler's writing as obscurantist. I think I mentioned this when I read Precarious Lives. Gender Trouble is not especially difficult on a conceptual level. I think a lot of people stumble at the style because it is very academic. But it's no huge barrier to reading. I'll read this again some day, mostly for the sake of memory - a good sign, from a text so full as this.
Particularly loved sections 1 and 3 - 'Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire' and 'Subversive Bodily Acts'. The first section is actually more wholly philosophico-political than one might expect from the reputation of this book. There's a fantastic note on pragmatic coalitionism, which I think just about everybody ought to read in order to defuse the tedious arguments we see so often.
'Subversive Bodily Acts' seemed the most accurate to the book's reputation. This is where Butler becomes more confident, prescriptive, and begins to open up the fields of feminist critique and gender studies on an almost uniquely radical level. Lovely to see her appreciation of Foucault here too. :)
A note on style - I see loads of people complain about Butler's writing as obscurantist. I think I mentioned this when I read Precarious Lives. Gender Trouble is not especially difficult on a conceptual level. I think a lot of people stumble at the style because it is very academic. But it's no huge barrier to reading. I'll read this again some day, mostly for the sake of memory - a good sign, from a text so full as this.