ABSTRACT
Judith Butler seems emblematic for such a deconstructive concept of gender that tackles the binary character of gender in German Gender Studies debates. In the new materialist, Deleuzian feminist discourses, Butler often gets to play the constructivist, linguist ignorer of matter, stubbornly attached to both post-structuralist mantras and to a Hegelian frame, committing representationalism. In 'The End of Sexual Difference?' Butler engages with Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference in a surprisingly positive way. In her 1990 book Gender Trouble Butler does question sexual difference, or rather the hopes in a feminine imaginary, and a feminine symbolic, that would overthrow the 'logic of the one'. At the very beginning of Gender Trouble Butler describes two different angles on the problem of the binary opposition between the masculine and the feminine as given by Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. Butler considers the obligatory, embarrassed 'etc'. at the end of lists of categorizations of difference.
