A review by ralowe
Undoing Gender by Judith Butler

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.