- AlexaTheRockstar:
- Judith Butler suggested that identity and gender performance are connected - so it was to study whether or not the lack of identity caused people to search for 'meaning' in their life through transsexualism etc. I'm afraid we haven't done much on it yet so I'm a little shakey with the knowledge.
Judith Butler is, by far, the most grossly misunderstood contemporary thinker. Mostly because she uses everyday words in a special meaning like 'performance' (which is not a theatrical performance
at all, it's Derrida's kind of performance and he picked up the term from J.L. Austin - it means to consciously do or accomplish something not to act out something like in a play, e.g. the priest
performed the wedding ceremony.) and because after she talks for several chapters about how gender boundaries are wrong in
Gender Trouble, she turns around, appropriates the experience of trans people and says we should all wear "drag" because it would be a clever way to "defy" authority.
That being said, a lot of her ideas about heteronormativity are quite good and, in my view, pretty accurate (she talks specifically, e.g., about how we're meant to believe that desire originates in gender differences and can only travel between male and female or how the idea of a 'biological' sex is absurd because 'sex' is as much tied in with cultural norms as gender is). And beside her frankly stupid comments about "drag", (from what I've read) what most trans people take issue with in her work is the fact that she argues against the idea that a person has any kind of metaphysical, essential gender which they then act out through their body (e.g. by the way they dress). She argues that mind/body separation is rationalism (as in, Descartes rationalism) residue, but now we know (e.g. because of modern advances in psychology) that the body is not a separate entity which is the "slave" of the mind or soul.
BUT the main problem with this assignment is how much reading you're going to have to do. To give it any kind of depth you'll have to read not just Butler's books (at least
Gender Trouble, which I've read and it's not an easy read at all, but she has four other books on identity, gender and performance), but also Derrida, Foucault, J.L. Austin and, ideally, some earlier feminists as well just to put it all in context e.g. Beauvoir, Kristeva, Wittig, etc - not to mention articles and books commenting on everything. It's a lot of material and most of it is
extremely hard to understand even for somebody with more training in philosophy and semiotics than an A Levels student. If you want to survive this assignment in one piece, just pick another theme.
