Gender Trouble

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial.

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.

Definitions:
Exegesis: an explanation or critical interpretation of a text (yr. 1619)

Epistemology: the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity (yr. 1856)

Juridical: 1: of or relating to the administration of justice or the office of a judge 2: of or relating to law or jurisprudence (yr. 1502)

Metonymy: a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated (ex. suit for business executive) (yr. 1547)

Ontology: 1: a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being 2: a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence (yr. 1721)

Synecdoche: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (yr. 12th - 15th century)

Quotes and thoughts while reading:

"Foucoult points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent... the subjects regulated by such structures, are by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures..." (p 2)

"If one "is" a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered "person" transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out "gender" from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained." (p 4)

"Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations? And is not such a reification precisely contrary to feminist aims? To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix? If a stable notion of gender no longer proves to be the foundational premise of feminist politics, perhaps a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable to contest the very reifications of gender and identity, one that will take the variable construction of identity as both methodological and normative prerequisite, it not a political goal." (p 5)

"When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily a female one." (p 6)

"Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the "masculine" not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general." (p 20)

"This text (Gender Trouble) continues, then, as an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble, not through the strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity." (p 34)

"As in the existential dialectic of misogyny, this is yet another instance in which reason and mind are associated with masculinity and agency, while the body and nature are considered to be the mute facticity of the feminine, awaiting signification from an opposing masculine subject." (p 37)

"Published in 1929, Joan Riviere's essay, "Womanliness as a Masquerade" introduces the notion of femininity as masquerade in terms of a theory of aggression and conflict revolution...." (p 50) Definitely look more into the essay.

"Inasmuch as gender is the cultural transformation of a biological polysexuality into a culturally mandated heterosexuality and inasmuch as that heterosexuality deploys discrete and hierarchized gender identities to accomplish its aim, then the breakdown of the compulsory character of heterosexuality would imply, for Rubin, the corollary breakdown of gender itself. Whether or not gender can be fully eradicated and in what sense its "breakdown" is culturally imaginable remain intriguing but unclarified implications of her analysis." (p 75)

"By projecting the lesbian as "Other" to culture, and characterizing lesbian speech as psychotic "whirl-of-winds", Kristeva constructs lesbian sexuality as intrinsically unintelligible." (p 87)

"In opposition to this false construction of "sex" as both univocal and causal, Foucoult engages a reverse-discourse which treats "sex" as an effect rather than an origin. In the place of "sex" as the original and continuous cause and signification of bodily pleasures, he proposes "sexuality" as an open and complex historical system of discourse and power the produces the misnomer "sex" as part of a strategy to conceal and, hence, to perpetuate power-relations." (p 95)

Page 108 brings up the notion of naturally born XX-males and XY-females with seemingly correct appearing outside genitalia, but sterile reproductive organs. What makes these person XX-males or XX-females?

"Hence, for Wittig, we might say, one is not born female, one becomes female; but even more radically, one can, if once chooses, become neither female not male, woman nor man." (p 113)

"Consider that a sedimentation of gender norms produces the peculiar phenomenon of a "natural sex" or a "real woman" or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and that this is a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes existing in a binary relation to one another. If these styles are enacted, and if they produce the coherent gendered subjects who pose as their originators, what kind of performance might reveal this ostensible "cause" to be an "effect"? (p 140)

"There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics, for gender ontologies always operate within established political contexts as normative injunctions, determining what qualifies as intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality, setting the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility." (p 148)