Book
Undoing gender
Publication Information
New York ; London : Routledge, 2004.
Physical Description
viii, 273 pages ; 24 cm
Summary
"Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to 'do' one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies 'undoing' dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the 'New Gender Politics' that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory."--Provided by publisher.
Contents
- Introduction : acting in concert
- Beside oneself : on the limits of sexual autonomy
- Gender regulations
- Doing justice to someone : sex reassignment and allegories of transsexuality
- Undiagnosing gender
- Is kinship always already heterosexual?
- Longing for recognition
- Quandaries of the incest taboo
- Bodily confessions
- The end of sexual difference?
- The question of social transformation
- Can the "other" of philosophy speak?