Review: Judith Butler: 'Undoing Gender.' Routledge: New York. 2004

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: Undoing Gender assembles eleven of Butler's most recent contributions to debates on gender and sexuality, in her own words, "on the question of what it might mean to undo restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life" (1). The title henceforth already marks Butler's slight shift in perspective. If her landmark study Gender Trouble (1990) for the most part investigates how gender is performatively reiterated, Undoing Gender focuses on how gender rather is continuously undone. The issues she takes up to illustrate possible disruptions of binary gender concepts concern the socio political implications of transgender identity and transsexuality, gay marriage, questions arising from new arrays of kinship, as well as feminist/queer psychoanalysis and their status within philosophical frameworks. In most of these essays she expounds the problems of the continuous and often ambivalent negotiation between individual autonomy and governing social norms. As she expounds, her reflections are always "guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life, what minimizes the possibilities of unbearable life, or, indeed, social or literal death" (8). What Butler highlights in Undoing Gender is how "human rights" often entail the risk of exclusion, or worse, of degrading those who fail to comply.