Gender Trouble

“We regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right,"

--Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).

When I was much younger, and much more obnoxious (yes, really), and exploring gender studies at Berkeley, I read Gender Trouble- a book that continues to influence my thought and my life. I'm not the only one. Anyone who is truly interested in studying gender should read this book. Written by Judith Butler, a renowned postmodern queer theorist, Gender Trouble deconstructed and challenged essentialist notions of gender.
According to Butler,

Gender is thus a fantasy enacted by "corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations." In other words, gender is an act, a performance, a set of manipulated codes, costumes, rather than a core aspect of essential identity. Butler's main metaphor for this is "drag," i.e. dressing like a person of the "opposite sex." All gender is a form of "drag."

Pretty heady stuff. And that's just the beginning. But it took me a while to realize though that not everyone reads about or thinks about gender. In fact, most people run around in the world without thinking about it at all or don't feel the need, like Butler, to dismantle it.

And yet, while most may not be thinking about it consciously, I frequently see every day men and women torture themselves because they are not performing their gender correctly according to the social norms.

A friend of mine who is gay was thrilled to move to San Francisco. Not because he could be openly gay but because his gender wasn't an issue here. When he lived on the East Coast he was too "femme." But when he moved here he was practically butch revealing that there was not a core aspect to his gender identity.

I was pleased to see that Butler had written a new book called Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. I just read a review of her book in Tikkun. The review is worth a read and if you have the time, pick up some of her books.

But the reviewer ends with the line "identity is a problem with no final solution." I would argue that Judith Butler sees gender and identity not as a problem but as both fascinating and joyful in its complexity and incoherence. And she would encourage radical gender performances to undermine the notion that there is stability in gender...

The part that really makes me happy (and yes, I am a geek) is that her book is a shot over the bow for those that thought postmodern theory was dead.

Indeed, while the American public was rallying around the executive branch, intellectuals began affirming the "end of theory" and the death of postmodernism. Some notable postmodern and postcolonial thinkers began distancing themselves from the theories. Shortly after Sept. 11, the New York Times and Chicago Tribune ran articles equating postmodernism with moral relativism and calling such theories "ethically perverse" because they require "a form of guilty passivity" in the face of the attacks. Meanwhile, scholars like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington enjoyed renewed popularity on college campuses with their arguments of ages-old struggles between civilizations and their reduction of the world to an "us"-versus-"them" face-off.

Butler suggests otherwise. Not only is postmodern theory still alive, it was made more imperative — not obsolete — by the attacks on Sept. 11. "It is not a vagary of moral relativism," she argues, "to try to understand what might have led to the attacks on the United States." Rather, such a quest for understanding is rooted in ethics, in a response to grief and the empathy one feels at the violence inflicted on fellow humans.

From a review in Flak Magazine.

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