Gender trouble : Feminism and the subversion of identity
Judith Butler (Author), Routledge (Firm) (Publisher)
"What best way to trouble the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality? Consider the fate of 'female trouble,' that historical configuration of a nameless female indisposition, which thinly veiled the notion that being female is a natural indisposition. Serious as the medicalization of women's bodies is, the term is also laughable, and laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for feminism. Without a doubt, feminism continues to require its own forms of serious play. Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance, or is 'naturalness' constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? What other foundational categories of identity--the binary of sex, gender, and the body--can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable? To expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formation of power requires a form of critical inquiry that Foucault, reformulating Nietzsche, designates as 'genealogy.' A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. The task of this inquiry is to center on-- and decenter-- such defining institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality."--from Preface
Print Book, English, 1990
Routledge, New York, 1990