Review of Undoing Gender

Student’s Name:
Professor:
Course:
Date:
Review of Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender
The text, Undoing Gender contains 12 articles written by Judith Butler, a feminist thinker and a professor specializing in Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies. In the text, Butler does not adopt any specific guiding principles, with the articles she presents covering a wide range of themes including intersex and transgender issues and psychoanalysis. Butler examines the different ways that people can undo the restrictive norms that characterize sexuality and gender. She argues that while norms are necessary, they have to be exceeded for the sake of humanity’s future. The author largely focusses on things that make a gender livable.
Undoing Gender builds upon Butler’s earlier text, Gender Trouble in which she presents her theory of construction of sexuality and gender performativity. However, in her latest text, she moves beyond the binary frame in which gender is taken as a symbol of the basic self. Butler brings out the categories of gender, sex, and desire as being the outcome of certain power structures. Much of the theoretical and conceptual framework in the text takes from Gender Trouble, but the critique of how gender norms come about is situated within an understanding of the complicated relationship between social transformation and survival that is materially based. Unlike in the earlier text in which Butler’s main focus was on gender as a doing, the main concern in Undoing Gender is on how to unperform the hegemonic modes of sexuality and gender.

She describes gender as “practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint (2).” She points out in the introduction that the text provides an understanding of how the concepts of gendered life and sexuality, which have been made restrictively normative, can be undone. Throughout the text, Butler’s main emphasis is that the process of undoing the restrictively normative conceptualization of gendered and sexual life cannot be deemed to be either positive or negative, but is instead trapped in the paradoxical tension involving individual agency and societal-mediated survival.
From a theoretical perspective, Butler’s writing is quite dense. Her ideas and arguments are strongly rooted in the poststructuralist ideology while making reference to the queer and feminist theory to examine the norms that govern gender and sexuality. This is an approach she also utilizes in her previous work and many people within the feminist community have in the past not found it appropriate. Butler’s utilization of this approach has attracted a lot of criticism, with many of the critics describing her content as being poorly written and obscure. While the ideas Butler presents in Undoing Gender are quite complex and difficult to understand, the manner in which she brings out her arguments is not very much demanding to be viewed as incomprehensible. In this text, the author also seems to be addressing the critics of her previous works. She puts forward the argument that personal bodily agency is conditionally enshrined within a collective whole and by this addresses the critics who viewed her previous text, Gender Trouble as promoting the desire of humanists for a gendered autonomy. For Butler, desire is found within the ideas of social normativity and power. She goes ahead to ask what gender wants and by doing this creates a bridge between desire and recognition in a Hegelian perspective. She points out that it is by the experience of recognition that humans are taken as social beings. By having Hegel’s notions of desire as well as recognition as the basis of her analysis, she brings before the readers a personality that doesn’t come on its own in the world but which is created through its association with culture and is later undone repeatedly over time.
Throughout the text, the issue of sexuality as well as gender is theorized largely in terms of recognition together with desire. Butler is also able to examine the lived lives of people known to be gender deviant. This is evident in the article in which she responds to the criticism of Sylviane Agacinski, a French philosopher. She is able to respond to feminist Deleuzism promoted by Rosi Braidotti and at the same time reflect on the real-life story of Brandon Teena. She points out that “no anatomy enters gender without being done in some way (143).” Butler also reflects on David Reimer, an individual born with the male genitalia but who was forced to change his gender after the penis was heavily damaged in a circumcision gone wrong. In her examination of this real-life story, Butler questions the medico-juridical discussions that informed transgenders, intersexed people as well as the transsexuals’ futures.
In another article “Longing for Recognition,” Butler (131) looks at the psychoanalytic works of Jessica Benjamin on intersubjective recognition. Butler praises Benjamin for availing new and useful approaches for looking at gender, the self as well as desire and which are in line with the binary model of relationality. Butler points out that Benjamin’s work has always been grounded in clinical theory as well as critical social theory and that many of her passages in the different texts provide a sense of what recognition actually entails. Butler switches to her personal struggles in the field of philosophy in the last article titled “Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?” She describes herself as being a philosopher who is, to some extent, outside the borders of philosophy but who has made heavy investments in the field (232).
Prior to the current text, Butler had never wholesomely and sustainably addressed the entire GLBTQI topic. She particularly turns her gaze towards the intersex and the transgender, thereby helping push against the boundary of a field she played an influential role in establishing. The entire text comes out as a provocative as well as thoughtful response to the contemporary gender politics, with the author doing a great job of when it comes to using philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and even queer theory. Butler is careful in her inquiry of the contemporary culture and examination of issues critical to the GLBTQI studies. However, it is worth noting that lay readers will definitely find the text a tough reading and that a reasonably technical and specialized background in queer theory, feminism and post-structuralism is required to understand the main ideas she presents fully.
In conclusion, Butler, in Undoing Gender, does not adopt any specific guiding principles, with the articles she presents covering a wide range of themes including intersex and transgender issues and psychoanalysis. Butler looks at the different ways that people can undo the restrictive norms that characterize sexuality and gender. Butler brings out the categories of gender, sex, and desire as being the outcome of certain power structures. However, the language used is quite complex, with as reasonably technical and specialized background in queer theory, feminism and post-structuralism being necessary to understand the main ideas she presents fully.

Work Cited
Butler, Judith. Undoing gender. Psychology Press, 2004.