Course:Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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Scholar Judith Butler (they/them) published Gender Trouble in 1990, and it has since become a landmark analysis of feminism and the binary gender system. Butler unpacks the patriarchy’s construction of femaleness and calls into question the idea that there is an essentialness or innateness to this category. Butler focuses on gender as an action: something that exists because it is performed. In Butler’s view, gender is not something we have; it is something we do:
There is no gender identity beyond the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results. (p. 34)
When I first read this book, I finally felt companionship in how I see society. It was incredibly validating to hear and also felt like a spur to action. I began to allow my perspective on gender to show through in my writing more, and I embraced the idea of radicality as a good thing. Like Butler, I seek to call societal categories into question and investigate the construction of concepts that we automatically believe to be foundational. This investigation into the nature of things and how they are constructed is a point of reflection for my poetry. When working on a poem, I ask myself what the “givens” are: what my audience may take for granted and what I take for granted. Then I seek to pry that open, question it, and complicate it. I see meaningful creative work as something that pushes conversations forward because those authors, like Butler, are interested in roots and unafraid to court controversy when digging into them.