Undoing Gender

by Butler; Judith

• ISBN13: 9780415969239
• ISBN10: 0415969239
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-17
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Undoing Genderconstitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity fromGender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Acting in Concert	1	(203)
1 Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy	17	(23)
2 Gender Regulations	40	(17)
3 Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality	57	(18)
4 Undiagnosing Gender	75	(27)
5 Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?	102	(29)
6 Longing for Recognition	131	(21)
7 Quandaries of the Incest Taboo	152	(9)
8 Bodily Confessions	161	(13)
9 The End of Sexual Difference?	174	(30)
10 The Question of Social Transformation	204	(28)
11 Can the "Other" of Philosophy Speak?	232	(19)
Notes	251	(10)
Works Cited	261	(8)
Index	269