Gender Trouble

⚖The case for it

Butler's sentences are hard work. Push through anyway, because what you get is not a thesis you can summarize but a change in what you notice. After Gender Trouble, gender stops looking like a fact about a body and starts looking like something people perform, badly, constantly: a stranger arranging himself at a bus stop, your own voice dropping half a step when your father calls. The famous drag passage is the least interesting part. The lasting jolt is watching a supposed truth of biology turn out to be rehearsal, run so many times that everyone forgot it was rehearsal.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Butler's core claim takes ten pages to state; the book spends the rest wrestling Lacan, Kristeva, and Wittig in prose so clotted that Butler later wrote a preface, then another book, clarifying what the first one meant. The drag argument has been misread for thirty years, partly because the original sentences permit almost any reading.

— the honest librarian