Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Please, could you write an analysis (not summary) of the 1999 and 1990 prefaces of Gender Trouble? I just need the one analysis to include both. Thank you.

Any analysis of these two documents, separated by nine years, must begin with a statement of the argument of the book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, that contains them. Essentially, the book applies some of the ideas best described as poststructuralism to gender construction. Among many other things, poststructuralists understood most of the ways we categorize ourselves—race, gender, and so on—as generated through our interactions and our discourse. Butler, like the French thinker Michel Foucault, argued that discourse was the site of power relations between people. Much of feminist thought, she claimed, was rooted in a discourse that, intentionally or unintentionally, constructed gender in binary terms. According to Butler, the creation of binary genders was highly destructive to many people—lesbians, transgender people, and others—who did not fit in this construction. In other words, they caused "gender trouble." The real problem, Butler argued, was that the everyday views of womanhood and femininity that undergirded much of modern feminist thought tended to perpetuate these norms. It is difficult to go much further with an analysis of the preface because typically an analysis of an argument would include a discussion of the evidence a writer uses to support it. However, one important way to analyze these works is to look at what the 1999 preface includes that the 1990 one does not.
In the 1999 preface, Butler directly relates the tone and the theory of the book to her own life, which included her "tempestuous coming out at 16," one of many events that subjected her to "strong and scarring condemnation" even as it did not prevent her from "insisting on a legitimating recognition for [her] sexual life." Beyond this vital examination of her own point of view, she goes on to explain many of the parts of the book that elicited the most comment in the nine years since its publication. For instance, Butler explains her comments on drag not as an attempt to recommend attempts to subvert popularly understood notions of gender, but to show that the assumptions behind drag are very good examples of how discourse creates our notions of gender norms:

If one thinks that one sees a man dressed as a woman . . . then one takes the first term of [this perception] as the "reality" of gender: the gender that is introduced through the simile lacks "reality" and is taken to constitute an illusory appearance.

The 1999 preface gives Butler an opportunity to address some of the misunderstandings and criticisms of her work (many of which Butler views as legitimate) and to underscore her core argument that "naturalized knowledge of gender operates as a preemptive and violent circumscription of reality." We can understand after reading the 1999 preface how Butler, as she wrote in 1990, was trying to "facilitate a political convergence of feminism, gay and lesbian perspectives on gender, and poststructuralist theory."
https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/butler-gender_trouble.pdf

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