![]() Our bodies can challenge the norms we encounter, but we also recreate those norms through our bodies.īutler is less approving in her treatment of Monique Wittig, who she describes as “alarming.” Wittig saw gender as a weaponized delusion. Less a radical act of creation, gender is a tacit project to renew a cultural history in one’s own corporeal terms. To choose a gender is to interpret received gender norms in a way that reproduces and organizes them anew. The choice to assume a certain kind of body, to live or wear one’s body a certain way, implies a world of already established corporeal styles. In this early piece, Butler had already settled on a style characterized by a readiness to tackle contradictory aspects of gender:īecoming a gender is an impulsive yet mindful process of interpreting a cultural reality laden with sanctions, taboos and prescriptions. Bodies are both the site of oppression and the means of escape. The body’s social involvement can be experienced as a kind of oppression, but it also grants a license for liberation through “re-articulation,” or self-definition. While never outside a social context, the body was also always active. Through our bodies, we can reinterpret existing mores, customs, and expectations. Beauvoir proposed the term situation to describe the body’s status. As Butler asked: “How can gender be both a matter of choice and cultural construction?” Beauvoir’s treatment of embodiment offered one way of answering this. As Butler puts it, if this view holds true, “then both gender and sex seem to be thoroughly cultural affairs.” (This phrasing echoes in the title of a great essay Butler would pen a decade later: “ Merely Cultural.”)īodies are both the site of oppression and the means of escape.īut this argument left a dilemma. As Butler puts it, gender is “an incessant project, a daily act of reconstruction and interpretation.” This existentialist position implies a greatly expanded role for human behavior. ![]() Womanhood was never a settled matter it changed across time. ![]() For Beauvoir (and Butler) there could be no “I” which predated cultural involvement, no aloof “thinker within,” staring into life from outside. Beauvoir held that there was no separable self, a self able to stand apart from the process of thinking. Most of the essay focuses on French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, and particularly her great feminist treatise The Second Sex. The first of Butler’s early essays, “Variations on Sex and Gender in Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault” was published in 1985. Before Gender Trouble, Butler explored this idea repeatedly. But Butler’s basic idea is that our experience of society is always through our bodies. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies. The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations. As Butler summarized it in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”: The French social theorists Butler addresses viewed our bodies as being immersed in social norms, in legal definitions, and in everyday routines. This idea is critical, and bears repeating: Butler is attacking the commonly assumed sex-gender distinction. This perspective opposes any tidy distinction between sex as both natural and bodily and gender as both cultural and historical. Between these six pieces, Butler outlines a distinctive view of gender as tangled up with embodiment. Each essay addresses a particular concern, in most cases focusing on a single thinker. Between 19, Judith Butler published six short essays introducing ideas she would return to throughout her career. Thankfully, a more rarely read set of texts can rescue a reader from despair. Many students have been daunted by the book, and deriding especially challenging snippets has become something of a rite of passage. The book’s wide-ranging line of inquiry, unforgiving style, and often abrupt shifts in focus are well known-and widely lamented among readers. ![]() Judith Butler’s famous 1990 book Gender Trouble features on countless undergraduate reading lists in the humanities. ![]()
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