Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

Samantha Michele Riley (Penn State University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Domains

Cultural Studies

Dates

First circulation or publication 2004

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Commentary / criticism

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Undoing Gender

(2004) is comprised of a collection of eleven essays, all of which derive from Judith Butler's theoretical work on gender and sexuality. In writing

Undoing Gender

, Butler sought to rework her theories on gender performativity as presented in her work

Gender Trouble

(1990), and, in doing so, engage with her critics. Butler asks us to imagine gender and sexuality outside societal norms, in that these norms, and in particular gender as a norm, “figures as a precondition for the production and maintenance of legible humanity” (11). Those individuals who fall outside the hetero-norm, such as transsexuals, intersexuals, and homosexuals, put into question their very existence as human beings. In this ontology of selfhood and Otherness, Butler wants to know, if norms author our…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2378 words

Citation: Riley, Samantha Michele. "Undoing Gender". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 November 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=27763, accessed 26 November 2024.]