Let's talk about Judith Butler

[Novelafemme]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

I am taking a literary theory class, and this week is "Feminism week," so our assigned readings included "Gener Trouble," by Judith Butler
I found it very triggery! And I am kinda feeling like holding her responsible for a lot of the "shoulding" i went through throughout the 90's

Basically, what i think she says in "Gender Trouble" is that there is no innate masculinity or femininity and we are all just performing arbitrary social constructions

I feel like she is telling me i don't exist! That my butch does not exist! That transitioning FTMs/MTFs are putting themselves through surgery for nothing!

I need to be ready to discuss this by Wednesday, and I see that she has written a lot more since "Gender Trouble"- so maybe it is possible that she refined her views?

I am kinda crowd-sourcing this inquiry since I have to write a paper about Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" this weekend and so I do not have time to follow up on Butler like I would like to

So I am asking ya'll- does anyone else feel this way about that piece? Does she revise her views later on?

How am I going to talk about her as a theorist without personalizing the issue?

What that really be so bad if i DID personalize the issue?

I read her work very differently. I see her as challenging the binary of sexual "normativity" as a social construct in and of itself. She takes the intersectional nature of gender (the social construct of race, class and sexuality) and then deconstructs it by way of questioning its validity and ability to stand on its own without the narrative of performance that inevitably informs it as more than a theoretical abstract. Can gender exist without heteronormative binaries? Can there be an absence of gender? Are male/female gender binaries accessible without acknowledging desire? She very much aligns herself with Foucaultian epistemology by way of defining human sexuality as more than the sum of just gender and sex. She urges her readers to view gender as a performance so that women are not relegated to patriarchal heteronormative constructs based in and on power alone.

She is not attempting to invalidate how anyone identifies, rather she is trying to disassemble the way gender is constructed as a social norm. She wants us to look at gender presentation as a performance based more on desire rather than gender based on sex alone.

These are just my musings. I hope they make a little bit of sense. Sometimes what makes sense in my brain makes zero sense once it leaves my mouth.

And as far as I know, Butler identifies as Butch.