One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.
This is, hands down, the most difficult book I have ever read. Butler makes reading a thesaurus seem as a fun pass-time in comparison.
The core argument of Gender Trouble is that there is no such thing as a "woman" or "man". These are concepts created by language itself, which then are repeated over and over until the distinction seems natural. Though I can't fully follow Butler's explanation through psychoanalysis and such, I agree with her (in 1990) quite radical viewpoint that there is no "true" sex or gender.
