Undoing Gender (edit title/settings)

Quotes edit

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• One only determines 'one's own' sense of gender to the extent that social norms exist that support and enable that act of claiming gender for oneself. One is dependent on this 'outside' to lay claim to what is one's own. The self must, in this way, be dispossessed in sociality in order to take possession of itself.

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• The terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable.

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• Gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes.

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• Gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalized, but gender might very well be the apparatus by which such terms are deconstructed and denaturalized.

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• Terms such as 'masculine' and 'feminine' are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose.

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• But the terms that make up one's own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself).

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• To understand gender as a historical category, however, is to accept that gender, understood as one way of culturally configuring a body, is open to a continual remaking, and that 'anatomy' and 'sex' are not without cultural framing (as the intersex movement has clearly shown). The very attribution of femininity to female bodies as if it were a natural or necessary property takes place within a normative framework in which the assignment of femininity to femaleness is one mechanism for the production of gender itself.

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• If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.

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• Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.

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• The critique of gender norms must be situated within the context of lives as they are lived and must be guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life, what minimizes the possibility of unbearable life or, indeed, social or literal death.

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First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Judith Butler (Author)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 305.3

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Psychology & Counseling › Sexuality › Human
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Gender Studies
• Books › Literature & Fiction › History & Criticism › Criticism & Theory
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Books & Reading › Women Writers & Feminist Theory
• Books › Nonfiction › Education

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history