ABSTRACT
In her preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler asks a series of questions that reveal how gender, particularly the idea of a normative gender, functions as a vehicle for social control.1 She writes:
What continues to concern me most is the following kinds of questions: what will and will not constitute an intelligible life, and how do presumptions about normative gender and sexuality determine in advance what will qualify as the 'human' and the 'livable'? In other words, how do normative gender presumptions work to delimit the very field of description that we have for the human? (Butler, 1999, p.xxii.)
Butler's questions articulate the importance, indeed the urgency, of studying and teaching gender. Certain genders are 'intelligible', 'human' and 'livable'; they are real and legitimate. Others are not. Certain genders may be thought and articulated. Others cannot. These distinctions suggest the powerful political ways in which gender may be invoked and deployed in order to naturalize and so dismiss the oppression of various gender and sexual minorities. Throughout, Gender Trouble provides a theoretical framework for understanding the punitive social consequences of gender and sexual transgression.
