Butler Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

London: Routledge, 2006. — 272 p. — ISBN-10 9780415389556; ISBN-13 978-0415389556.One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.Preface (1999)
Preface (1990)Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire'Women' as the Subject of Feminism
The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate
Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond
Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance
Language, Power and the Strategies of DisplacementProhibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual MatrixStructuralism's Critical Exchange
Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade
Freud and the Melancholia of Gender
Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification
Reformulating Prohibition as PowerSubversive Bodily ActsThe Body Politics of Julia Kristeva
Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity
Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex
Bodily Inscriptions, Performative SubversionsConclusion - From Parody to Politics