Viviane Namaste, “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory”

Since the early 1990s, Anglo-American feminist theory has articulated a project of critical reflection in which the lives, bodies, and realities of transsexual women are front and center.1 With the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990[a]), followed by Bodies That Matter (1993[a]), feminist theory has interrogated the ways in which categories of both “sex” and “gender” are constituted.