Caleb Zimmer’s Reviews > Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity > Status Update

I’m not buying into Monique Wittig’s theory of sex and gender, but I get how she got there. It’s actually not too wild. What I cannot ascribe to is her idea that lesbians cannot be directly labeled as women or men.

Part 2 went over my head. It felt like Butler’s main focus was comparing different theories against the modern paradigm. She is, at times, susceptible to a literalist understanding of expression. I wish she had focused on her own perspective, instead of those of Wittig, Irigary, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault. However, I am thankful for her summaries. I am now determined to look into Luce Irigaray’s work next.

Little did Judith Butler know that she would be calling out the closeted homosexuality of men like Andrew Tate and Clavicular almost 50 years after she wrote this 😂:

“Disavowed male homosexuality culminates in a heightened or consolidated masculinity - one which maintains the feminine as the unthinkable and un-nameable.”

“This text continues… to [ponder] the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power to make gender trouble - not through figure[ing] a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization… and proliferation of… those categories that… keep gender in it’s place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity.

“Gender is the repeated stylization of the body: a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”

“The unity of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The force of this practice is through an exclusionary apparatus of production to restrict the relative meanings of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality…”

“A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is, in fact, only the mark imposed by the oppressor.” - Monique Wittig

1. Judith Butler moves FAST
2. I’ve noticed that the books about feminism that I’ve read are centered around philosophical discussion. It is surprising to me that the problem of unfair treatment towards those who are hoped to be supported by feminist ideals is more dependent on culture, thought, and belief, rather than the tangible bodies which are so often blamed and abused. I should not be surprised, but I am.

So far Butler has urged us that the regular goal of feminist work to categorize which types of people need it’s advocacy is not a good idea. She listed like a million good reasons why that’ll blow up in our faces. She instead posits that “paradoxically, representation will [only work] for feminism only when the subject of ‘women’ is nowhere presumed.” (Butler)

This book was not written for casual readers. I’m struggling to keep up with the slashing pace at which Butler rolls out her contingent paths of thought. I will often re-read paragraphs sometimes more than once. Judith Butler’s brilliance is so fierce that I find myself sometimes squinting or looking away to blink the spots from my vision before continuing.