Summary of Gender Trouble by Judith Butler.pptx

Gender Trouble summary by Judith Butler

1. Minu. V M. Phil Scholar, Institute of English Judith Butler

2. Born in Ohio in 1956 Received PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School. Who is Judith Butler?

3. Contributed to the fields of feminist philosophy, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. Research in the fields of Literary theory Modern philosophical fiction Feminist, gender and sexuality studies 19 th and 20 th century European literature and philosophy Kafka Jewish Philosophy Butler’s work

4. Seeks to radically re-conceptualize how we understand gender, sex and the subject- and by extension, social theory, political critique etc. How is gender rendered ‘intelligible’? What norms and exclusions are in play during the production of gendered subjects? How did gender come to define us so fundamentally? (Foucault-sexuality is the truth of us) How should we understand the ‘subject’ and its place within politics? Butler’s work

5. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive limits of “Sex” (1993) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) Undoing Gender (2004) Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire (2005) Important Works

6. Woman as a subject and the relation with power Butler hold that power is the very factor which creates the subject it regulates. She rejects ontological and essentialist descriptions of being a woman. Gender performance is a series of repetitions. Gender Trouble

7. Gender Trouble Butler’s critique of early theorists Simone de Beauvoir- She considered woman in stark contrast to men, who she said possessed freedom and radical subjectivity. Women aspired these qualities. Luce Irigaray - She considered women as unrepresentable and unsignifiable because the very process of signifying is masculine. De Beauvoir Irigaray

8. Levi Strauss’ Structural Anthropology Formula of exchange in the world. Women- a type of location for relation between men. Women as exchange between men, who is the real subject. Women in the form of brides and gifts. Gender Trouble

9. Gender Trouble Lacan Symbolic Order Signifying activity starts to dominate us. Humans also enter a series of prohibitions in this stage. Human subject/identity is constituted through repressions and loss

10. Lacan Positions of male and female Male- Having the phallus Female- Being the phallus These two phases are interdependent. Gender Trouble

11. Lacanian take on Lesbianism Lesbianism is a kind of disappointed heterosexuality. After refusal or rejection by a male, the lesbian female tries to cope by showing male attributes in her own identity. Interiorizing masculine. Joan Riviere’s account of masquerade- women who wish for masculinity put on a mask of womanliness as a defence to avert anxiety and retribution feared from men. Gender Trouble

12. Critique of Freud Concept of Melancholia : One deals with a traumatic loss by incorporating the lost object into one’s own identity. Butler questions the way melancholia and homosexuality are linked together. For her, gender identity is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized. Gender Trouble

13. If we regard gender as a social construct, there arises a tug of war between anatomical determiners of body and the notion of gender. Gender Trouble

14. Critique of Julia Kristeva Lacan posits that the Symbolic order is a paternal or masculine entity because in it, for a person to enter into the realm of language and culture, repression of the feminine is required. Kristeva coined the semiotic- she claimed that in poetic language, there was a surfacing of maternal body, uncontrolled by the paternal logos. Butler claims that Kristeva’s notion of maternal and the return to maternal body through poetry is an essentialist trap. Gender Trouble

15. Critique of Foucault Foucalut’s publications on Herculine Barbin Foucault writes about the early days of Barbin when s/he was able to live her gender or “sex” as she wished, as a “happy limbo of nonidentity”. Butler says that it is only Foucault’s romanticism. This idea contradicts his work in The History of Sexuality. Gender Trouble

16. Drag Queens and Gender Performance Drag queen is a cultural phenomenon which exposes the performative nature of gender Instability of the relationship between sex and gender. Gender Trouble

17. Gender Trouble The construction of gender identity is produced through repetitive performance of behaviours , physical stylistic expression, without which man/woman distinction has no sense.