57 pages • 1 hour read
Judith ButlerA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
In her conclusion, Butler rehashes her major arguments and circles back around to the question that motivated the beginning of her work: do we need this thing called women to have coherent feminist politics? Her answer is no, we do not need it. If we were to disconnect politics from some “ready-made subjects” (203) called women, who are firmly constrained by the terms of the debates about gender and sex identity, “a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old,” (203), Butler concludes.
Butler’s major contribution to this ongoing conversation about gender is an elaboration on her idea that gender is made by doing, not a thing one expresses. This notion of gender does not require that there be some true, essential core inside of a person that is expressed through gender. Although heterosexual gendering is part of the dominant culture/ideology (what Butler calls hegemony), even the gender of heterosexuals is performative. Butler’s notion of gender as performative is also attentive to how what looks natural looks like that because of what she alternately labels as sedimentation, or a congealing of conventions—how we dress, gestures we make, how we walk. These actions are part of a public repertoire that has a traceable history.
By Judith Butler
Bodies That Matter
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
Judith Butler
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory
Judith Butler
Precarious Life
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Judith Butler
Undoing Gender
Undoing Gender
Judith Butler