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JUDITH BUTLER'S UNDOING GENDER, NEW YORK: ROUTLEDGE, 2004
To say that Judith Butler's Gender Trouble changed my life would, I suppose, be an overstatement. But not by much. My experience reading it was much like my contemporaneous encounter with graduate school: heady intellectual thrills punctuated by baffled incomprehension and the rare squib of boredom. There was something deliciously sophisticated, even sexy, about the butch attitude of its high theory and the sheer electricity of some of it, the excitement of the ideas, the moments of crystalline clarity.
Gender Trouble was a masterful act of synthesis. It brought together the insights of Irigaray, Derrida, Foucault, and Marx to unpack the essentially Althusserian question that feminist theory had so far not been able to answer: if gender is so much trouble, why do we even bother? Why might we even take some pleasure in a construct that has been the source of endless violence and pain? In the brief autobiographical moments in the text, readers could glimpse that pain, a profound queer melancholy: the loneliness of the dyke teenager, smoking cigarettes and reading philosophy, counting down the days until she could escape.
While wary of cheap psychologizing, I raise the idea that Gender Trouble is a form of mourning because I believe that Butler's newest work, Undoing Gender, operates as a kind of companion text-a way to face the troubles that gender causes, and to make some progress in undoing them. Undoing Gender provides the same kind of thrills as Gender Trouble. But it is also much more satisfying, more moving. It is an ethical text, a book that meditates on the textures of life as it is lived, without resorting to simplifying appeals to "experience."
The central question of Undoing Gender is "What is a livable life, and how can a life be lived...