"Gender Trouble"

Paper Summary:

In "Gender Trouble", Judith Butler provides an in-depth inquiry into the nature of social differences between the genders in the tradition of feminist critical theory. This paper explains how, building upon the traditional theories of those such as Julia Kristeva, Butler addresses the role of women in the psychology of Freud, Lacan, Foucault and others. It shows that, rather than taking Kristeva's approach, however, Butler critiques Freud in another way, questioning the idea of male or female self-identification. Butler wishes to demonstrate that gender is an act, a set of customs and norms that are internalized for the sake of maintaining social ties and interactions in a "male vs. female" world.

From the Paper:

"Butler illustrates that there is a category, "woman," and seeks to discover its nature. She notes that in the work of Lacan and his contemporaries, "woman" was always the other of "man," and that women were not part of the equation: if one could say that psychology has a protagonist, the protagonist of the work of psychologists like Lacan and Freud was male or at the very least traditional. However, she notes that in feminist theory, the existence of the same category, "women" precludes other categorical notions that could preclude gender identity, such as race or class identity. As such, she claims that women are estranged in both psychoanalytical and feminist equations and that "women" is seen as a stronger category than other qualifiers such as class or cultural tradition."

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• Analytical Essay # 142260 : "Poverty and Gender in "The Tin Flute"

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