Gender Trouble (Routledge Classics)
EUR 12,18
I thought feminism was boring until I read this !! - Most important ideas for me : Feminism as identity politics is ambivalent. From deconstruction does not follow a nihilist political statement. A law creates what it needs to repress.
Intellectual Pretension - This book only has one useful function, and that is to demonstrate how NOT to construct a solid, sound, logicical argument. The problem is that everything dissolves basically into Butler s bizarre form of logic and thinking: IF this is so, then... Read this book and check out how often she employs this way of writing. Well...the IFS multiply and multiply, and could be thoroughly challenged and critiqued at every single stage. However, she needs these extremely thin IFs to construct the bogus positions she wants to deconstruct. Her reading of Lacan--which she then goes on to challenge-- is a total fantasy, specious, and wrong. How can we seriously consider anything she says when her mode of writing is so untenable to begin with? Do not be blinded by Butler s pretensions to being a deep thinker, she is not, she is merely a person with decided OPINIONS, and that s all this book is, someone mouthing off about their opinion. But it is not a real work of thought.
Nonsense masquerading as substance - Terribly written, illogically explained, totally uninspired. I was forced to read this during my graduate studies. Oy vey. This text offers nothing new, nothing fresh, nothing appealing. I defy anyone to email me and present to me an original topic that this woman tackles. As for the reviewer here who wrote Would you attack cancer researchers for their obscure language? No, because cancer researchers are attempting to break down complex chemical and biological processes to their simplest explanations. They strive for clarity. They attempt to explain. I know cancer researchers. I have read their textbooks. Ms. Butler is no cancer researcher. Readers and not engineers, literature is not a science. Literature is the study of the human experience and the human soul, and the pretentious Ms. Butler has shown us her soul--and we find it empty.
ten years later, still state-of-art - Gender Trouble is simply the best available survey and critique of the philosophical work of the leading theorists of French intellectual feminism from Beauvoir on down to Irigaray, Wittig, and Kristeva. Her work owes a significant debt to Michel Foucault s work on discourses of power, a debt which is chiefly acknowledged in the simple fact that everyone except Foucault takes a serious bashing. Beyond the pleasures of intellectual fireworks, the book is politically important for two reasons. First, it shows where many feminist positions fall into the traps of categories which reproduce the conditions they seek to evade, second, she addresses the question of action. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron warned twenty five years ago that real feminism needs two parts: a theory of women s oppression and a plan of action. Butler, unlike many feminist intellectuals, proposes a plan of action. The book is ideal as a cap to a course of readings in feminist theory. One final note: recent attacks on Judith for her obscure language are unfair and misguided. Would you attack cancer researchers for their obscure language? What about the engineers whose obscure calculations enable us to drive the highways or take an elevator with relative safety? Judith is a specialist who has mastered the language of her field. She is simply the best we have. The book requires patience, but the rewards of thoughtful reading and re-reading are great. Thanks, Ms B.
Important read - Difficult to read for the first time, but ultimately rewarding. Butler draws on Wittig, Foucault, and Lacan to question our assumptions about sex and gender, and ultimately, identity itself.