Gender Trouble

⚖The case for it

Gender as something done and redone rather than something you have: performativity is the vocabulary readers say they finally got here, and it reorganizes what they notice outside the seminar. Butler's first move is against feminism itself, questioning whether a unified category called woman can hold, and readers name that as the opening the field walked through. One admirer calls her “a strangely poetic writer,” another rates the whole book “close to perfect.” The 1999 preface is the friendlier door, Butler explaining and partly walking back her own difficulty nine years on, and several recommend starting there. Even skeptics admit academics “can make themselves quite clear when they want to.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The sentences are the fight. Readers call them “opaque, tortuous sentences,” and one grants “some great ideas rendered in utterly unreadable prose.” The middle stretch on Lacan and Kristeva is a slog out of proportion to the rest, what one reviewer calls a “dense, brain-bending smoothie.” Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva and Beauvoir are assumed rather than supplied, so coming in cold means getting lost quickly. Butler has said the book was written for a few hundred expected readers, which readers cite to explain a style “grossly inaccessible to most people.” Much of its influence runs through paraphrase, since so few finish it.

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings