COP 3 Reading: Undoing Gender by Judith Butler

Undoing Gender - Judith Butler 

Gender Regulations:

‘gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalisation of masculine and feminine take place’

‘to assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the masculine and feminine is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance’ 

‘gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalised’

‘gender might very well be the apparatus by which such terms are deconstructed and denaturalised’

‘whether one refers to ‘gender trouble’ or ‘gender blending’, ‘transgender’ or ‘cross-gender’, one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalised binary’

‘a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a regulatory operation of power that naturalises the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkably of its disruption’ 

Gender Norms:

‘persons are regulated by gender, and this sort of regulation operates as a condition of cultural intelligibility for any person’

The question of Social Transformation p204 

‘something besides theory must take place, such as interventions at social and political levels that involve actions, sustained labour and institutionalised practice’

‘although we need norms in order to live, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us’

C - social norms are needed to an extent in order for society to know what is acceptable, behvouire wise, however some norms such as those traditional norms surrounding gender and sexual orientations can cause more harm than good as they can damage a persons perception of self an society attitude towards those who are different to the norm such as homosexuals, transexuals etc. 

‘when we defy these norms, it is unclear whether we are still living, or ought to be, whether our lives are valuable, or can be made to be, whether our genders are real, or can even be regarded as such’.

C - explores the idea that gender is only real in the context of societal norms, therefore questions the construction of gender, looks at gender as a social contracted created surrounding the norms of ‘real’ men and ‘real’ women 

‘when we talk about what binds us as humans, and what forms of speech or thinking we seek in an effort to find common bond, that we are, inevitably, seeking recourse to socially instituted relations, ones that have been formed over time, and which gives us a sense of ‘common’ only be excluding those lives which do not fit the norm’ 

‘we see the norm as that which binds us, but we also see that the norm creates unity only through a strategy of exclusion’

C - society creates norms to feel secure and create a connection but only by excluding those who do not fit within the norm 

Gender Trouble and the Question of Survival:

‘women and men exist, we might say, as social norms, and they are, according to perspective of sexual difference, way in which sexual difference has assumed content’

Butler, J. (2009). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.