ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction: Acting in Concert

chapter 2|17 pages

Gender Regulations

chapter 4|27 pages

Undiagnosing Gender

chapter 5|29 pages

Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?

chapter 6|21 pages

Longing for Recognition

chapter 7|9 pages

Quandaries of the Incest Taboo

chapter 8|13 pages

Bodily Confessions

chapter 9|30 pages

The End of Sexual Difference?

chapter 10|28 pages

The Question of Social Transformation

chapter 11|19 pages

Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?