ABSTRACT
This really is odd, though, because almost everybody regards Butler as the creator of modern queer theory. She owes a debt to Foucault and other earlier figures, but the thing we call queer theory today definitely starts with
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. (Also important, within the version of queer theory which is concerned with literature rather than social identities, is the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, which challenges assumptions about sexuality in literature.)
It is also worth mentioning that Butler is unlikely to win any awards for clarity of writing style. (On the contrary, indeed, she once won an annual international award for having produced the most incomprehensible academic text.) Her prose is unnecessarily dense and long-winded, and almost never fails to use jargon even where much more accessible vocabulary is available. Some people defend this, saying that academics should be allowed to develop complex terminology to express their sophisticated ideas – after all, nobody expects to read journals about rocket science and understand all of it straight away. However, although Butler’s writing is like an explosion in a dictionary factory, if one takes time to dig through the rubble one finds that her ideas are actually quite straightforward. So let’s get started.
