It's a difficult book, but making a commitment to the “difficult and demanding” is what intellectuals are supposed to do--and it changed how a whole generation of feminists thought
So, as one who hasn't read Gender Trouble and indeed is hesitant to consider sacrificing time on it, what I've surmised in reading other's accounts of the book is that the essential message is that "gender is performative" and that gender identity "is not intrinsic". I wouldn't have any trouble with these statements, they seem to square quite neatly with my own thinking on the subject, but how then in a short space of 15 to 20 years have we got from there to a sacrament more or less which openly and contrarily declares gender identity to be precisely intrinsic, and which has become so sacred that you can lose your job for daring to challenge it? And moreover which Butler has been given the credit for bringing about? I can't make sense of this.
Yeah, the journal Rethinking Marxism was informed by a postmodern reading of Marx which centered the production distribution & redistributions of the Social Surplus.
So, as one who hasn't read Gender Trouble and indeed is hesitant to consider sacrificing time on it, what I've surmised in reading other's accounts of the book is that the essential message is that "gender is performative" and that gender identity "is not intrinsic". I wouldn't have any trouble with these statements, they seem to square quite neatly with my own thinking on the subject, but how then in a short space of 15 to 20 years have we got from there to a sacrament more or less which openly and contrarily declares gender identity to be precisely intrinsic, and which has become so sacred that you can lose your job for daring to challenge it? And moreover which Butler has been given the credit for bringing about? I can't make sense of this.
Yeah, the journal Rethinking Marxism was informed by a postmodern reading of Marx which centered the production distribution & redistributions of the Social Surplus.
Dear Prof Potter/Claire, Marxist & feminist economics were also deeply affected by Judith Butler’s decentered subject. Susan