BOOK REVIEW

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Apurva Roy (12014914), CSSS

In her book,Undoing Gender, Judith Butler extends her ontological claims

about a wide variety of issues ranging from transgenderism, intersexuality,
kinship to the nature of philosophy in the academic space. The book
contains eleven chapters dealing with these issues, but it is the eleventh
OVERVIEW chapter i.e. ‘Can the Other of the Philosophy Speak’ which is reflexive and
helps us gauge the social location of Judith Butler. The social ecology of an
♀ Judith Butler author becomes an integral component of the analysis of their work, to
understand the focus of the thinker’s attention, choice of their problems, and
 Undoing Gender
their approach to the development of concepts to address the same (Coser,
½ NY 1971). One could locate Judith Butler within influences from continental
philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, the Frankfurt school, and
 2004 German Idealism. Her emphasis on the desire for existence and ethics of
§ Book Website responsiveness is Spinozian, and her focussed attention on the ideas on
recognition and conflict in this book, and most of her works makes Butler a
true Hegelian. The countless mentions of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan point
at their importance in shaping Butler’s philosophy.

Butler’s Undoing Gender cannot be understood in disassociation from her

previous works, especially Gender Trouble (1990). The theory of Gender
Performativity finds its roots in J.L Austin’s notion that utterance is also an
enactment. For Butler, Gender is fluid and performative and rests on the
repetition of acts. She has tried to contend the normative heterosexual matrix
in all her works. But it is in Undoing Gender, that hitherto ‘fringe issues’ such
as transgenderism and intersexuality receives the attention that they
deserve. Butler uses the tools of argument by elimination or support
throughout Undoing Gender, dealing with notable scholars such as Sylviane
Agacinski, Jessica Benjamin, Gloria Anzaldua, Gayatri Spivak, and the like. In
her first chapter, Besides Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy, Butler
talks about whose lives are livable and grievable. Contrary to notions of
Individualism, conformity to the normative structure makes one ‘normal’, and
thus their lives become grievable. While for Michel Foucault, the body is
disciplined by power, for Butler body is an effect of specific practices and has
a pre-discursive existence. In her book, The Psychic Life of Power(1997), Butler
talks about corporeal vulnerability and the perpetual nature of human
dependency. The body is the medium through which the ‘Other’ is
encountered, and this produces a communal effect. Her ideas become much
more pronounced in Undoing Gender, where Bulter claims that that humanity
itself is social. Ecstacy and Grief which Butler argues places the individual
outside oneself, reveals the extent of the relationship between the Self and
the Other. Loss imbibes a process of dispossession. The body exposes us to
the ‘Gaze’ of others which subjects those outside the normative matrix to
violence. Insensitivity to the violence inflicted upon these ‘lesser humans’ by
mainstream media representation is all the more telling. Digressing from the
discussion on Butler, one could talk about the lack of media representation
about the migrant workers of India during COVID-19 pandemic and their
‘grief’ through a similar lens that Butler is providing us with. This example is
indicative of Butler’s theory that ties corporeal vulnerability and violence is
not only valuable to feminist studies, but to other spaces of thinking as well.

Foucault argues that it is regulatory power which acts, shapes and forms the
subject, and thus defines the limits of normativity. The production of the
individuals involves the processes of management, utilization and
surveillance. According to Butler, Gender is a site of both the production and
deconstruction of normative definitions. Gender pre-exists its regulation.
Butler contests the Lacanian model of ‘Symbolic Law’, through her argument
that there is a difference in the notion of culture in cultural studies and
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Gender is the regulatory force that sets the limits of
personhood. However, It is malleable, and holds the conditions for its own
undoing. Butler then turns her attention to intersexuality in general and
sex-reassignment surgery in particular. She focuses on the case study of
David Reimer, which helps her argue her case in the face of arguments by
those who believe that biology is destiny and those who contend the
proposition altogether. However, both these positions assert the importance
of medical intervention. However, this quote by Reimer mentioned by Butler
in the book helps one understand why is it necessary to expand the notion of
the ’human’. That self description must be allowed beyond the ’language that
is saturated with the norms’, and this strengthens Butler’s position that argues
against the absolutism of the distinction between masculinity and femininity.

å "it dawned on me that these people gotta be

pretty shallow if that’s the only thing they think
I’ve got going for me; that the only reason why
people get married and have children and have a
productive life is because of what they have
between their legs . . . "(Butler,2004, pp.68) æ
Further, Butler argues that the question of recognition of GID (Gender Identity
Disorder) within an institutional framework that occupies an ambiguous place
in the feminist community. While some queer activists argue for a place
within the DSM due to the cost of medical surgeries, others oppose the
pathologization of queerness. According to Butler, trans diagnosticians and
therapists could improve matters. She urges a change in the existing
relationship between gender identity and mental health in order to overcome
the ‘paradox of autonomy’ even if it involves a certain degree of unfreedom.

However, for Butler marriage is not a tool for gaining acceptance but a
constraint. Marriage usually involves hetero-normative assumptions that
exclude alternative kinship organizations such as non-monogamous,
divorced, same-sex parents, etc. This brings our attention to bodies that do
not fit the mold. Moreover, Butler is skeptical of the drive for legalization of
queer marriage and contends that giving the State the authority over
deciding what is permitted and what is not is a futile exercise. However, it
could be argued that same-sex couples seeking legitimacy helps them
move from the domain of the pathological to the domain of the normal if one
was to talk in a Durkheimian tone. This move helps them become a part of
the collective representation over time, which could mean a significant fall in
the violence against queer couplings.

The question of possibility remains an ever-important avenue of discussion in

Undoing Gender and is what helps tie the chapters Longing for Recognition,
Bodily Confessions, The End of Sexual Difference, and the Question of Sexual
Transformation together. The ‘possibility’ argument is Hegelian. To work with
the ‘Other’ causes a disturbance within the Self, which is what propels history.
While Jessica Benjamin focuses on comfort when talking about this
encounter, Butler is in favor of dialectics of conflict and destruction which
opens up the possibility of ‘newness’. She is against the frozen binaries of the
Self and the Other and talks about their triadic relationship with the third pole
i.e. the therapist. She undoes a ‘smooth association’ between the two poles,
as in the moment of recognition facilitated by the third pole, there is an act of
undoing. Butler sees the potential of unbecoming in the psychoanalytic
moment of confession, where you shed the previous self through speech and
open the Self up to new possibilities. However, for her it is the act of speaking
than the content of the speech itself that needs to be focussed upon.

While Rosie Braidotti in Metamorphosis argues for a version of non-gendered

sexual difference that is open to endless revision and leads to a whole set of
new possibilities. Butler is not for any new possibility or difference for the
sake of difference. She doesn’t shy away from the idea of negativity, and thus
critiques the posture that views only ‘endless good possibilities’. For Butler,
people are aware of things that are accepted in their minds through
theorization, which opens up the possibility of social transformation. She
resists essentialist positions and is in support of positions that challenge the
knowledge and power that motivates normativity, and in doing so they
challenge sexism, racism, and homophobia. In the light of Anzaldua’s theory
about identities and the capacity of mediation between worlds and Spivak’s
Fractured Self, Butler argues for risk and openness and the expansion of our
capacity to imagine the human, outside the comfort of the Self. Butler
promotes openness in disciplines too, by promoting interdisciplinarity within
the discipline of philosophy which opens up the gate to new possibilities.

Although the book Undoing Gender, contains within itself a number of

valuable insights, it lacks a coherent narrative. Moreover, Butler to someone
who does not have a prior knowledge of the history of philosophy is close to
incomprehensible. This limits the book’s engagement with those within the
academic circle. However, a few chapters, such as the one on David Reimer
and the one dealing with the question of heterosexuality within Kinship
relationships still remain more accessible than the other chapters in the
book. Moreover, Butler’s arguments remain from a theoretical and
philosophical standpoint devoid of any material lens, and their worth to
existing realities that involve real bodies that occupy a subordinated space in
public life and social institutions, for the bodies that undergo struggles every
day, remains questionable.

REFERENCES
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Simons, J. (2013). From Agamben to Zizek: Contemporary critical theorists.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Durkheim, E., Halls, W., amp; Lukes, S. (1982). The rules of sociological method:
And selected texts on sociology and its method. London: Macmillan.