Gender Trouble - Judith Butler

This is a challenge of a book, for which you need to go into training with psychoanalytical terms like “cathexis” and philosophical terms like “ontology” and “juridical”. If you have heard about it already that will probably be through reports that the author Judith Butler has said in it that gender is performed and therefore drag queens are important. That idea is to be found, extracted from the book, elsewhere on this site, as theory, and Judith Butler’s other thoughts and ideas are also well-represented in here often as part of interviews and profiles, so you have no excuse for not giving them the attention they deserve. For all that any idea that “Gender Trouble” is “about” us in all of our transness would be misleading. Its subtitle is “Feminism and the Subversion of Identity”. We trans come up in various passages relating to gender, particularly in Chapter Three, “Subversive Bodily Acts”, but the big idea is much more complicated. It is, essentially, about feminism and the feminine, and about the need for a re-definition of the latter to bring the former to a closer allegiance with present realities so that it can fulfil its historic destiny of locating women more fully in history. And if I haven’t, in that one statement, offended pretty much everyone across the spectrum of feminism by the banal nature of my thought I haven’t it in me to do it more completely. It's not anyway up to me to summarize the book and its ideas, but I can point out a few which challenge the way we trans have in recent times come to think about ourselves. One recent assumption is that gender as binary simply has to be loosened up a little to accommodate all shades of gendered-ness for all to be well, whereas it is actually the idea of gender itself which is the problem. This connects to the older idea that male and female or man and woman are not simply two sides of the same coin which can be flipped but that power-relations have given the masculine principle the ability to set the rules and that the game is always played on its terms. A related idea is that the phallus is the defining sign of power and that life is about the energies generated by a contest for its power. As for gender, it can be seen as something created through language and the law which therefore prevents us from expressing what is beyond it. Thinkers like Foucault would have it that “sex” is what emerges from “sexuality” and not the other way round. And in “Gender Trouble” Judith Butler quotes appreciatively the words of Gayle Rubin, - “each child contains all of the sexual possibilities available to human expression.” And that, in my clumsy fashion, is just for starters. All of which at its simplest says that if you want to do some advanced thinking about gender and sex there’s plenty to be done, and that we trans have our role to play in the drama of understanding what it is to be human. If of late “feminism” has for us been associated with aggression and defensiveness there is here expressed the possibility of something more accommodating in the name of feminism with which we can unite to subvert power for everybody’s good. If you never read “Gender Trouble” (but you really should have a go at Chapter One) be grateful at least that it was written.