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  • Gender Trouble

  • Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
  • By: Judith Butler
  • Narrated by: Emily Beresford
  • Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (41 ratings)
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Gender Trouble

By: Judith Butler
Narrated by: Emily Beresford
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Summary

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past 50 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.

©2006 Routledge (P)2018 Tantor

What listeners say about Gender Trouble

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

amazing performance

Given the illegible text the reader was heroic. Lots of interesting ideas elucidated. the epistemology hinges on ' if Simone DB is correct in saying x, then y and z is true.' Sadly lots of empirical evidence to show that gender is made up of both socially constructed and biological factors, but that's just the constructionalist in me ;-)

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2 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars

An absolute classic let down in its performance

I was very excited to listen to this seminal text by Butler, an erudite writer whom I follow with a passion. However, no matter how much I try I cannot get on with the performance of this text - the reading is frequently monotone and lacks appropriate intonation for an English reader, it makes this an incredibly difficult audio book to engage with.

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6 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Interesting but bloody confusing

I enjoyed the couple of chapters I could make out, but the vast majority is written as if to dissuade its own comprehension. If you can sit through reading written books then it’d probably make more sense like that when you are able to go back over things more easily.

Overall you’d be better to learn about Butler’s ideas from a secondary source as their writing is practically unintelligible most of the time.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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Heavy

I didn’t overly enjoy this book at all. I find it extremely heavy and really difficult to understand in parts.

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Difficult to follow

You need to have engaged with academic theories of sexuality and gender to understand this text. Though I have done this, I still struggled to follow this text and felt it was unnecessarily difficult to follow. I found the narration jarring and too fast.

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Pure nonsense

This post modernist and ambiguous approach to gender is one of the most excruciating books I've ever encountered. Only one in a deep, deep echo chamber could agree with most of what is said here

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Incomprehensible

To be fair to this book, it deals with some complex ideas and difficult concepts so it might be that it was just beyond me. It's also possible that I was unfairly expecting it to be something else.

However, I don't think I could actually tell you what most of the points Butler makes in this book are (let alone how she supports them). The writing is dense and unyielding and (in my opinion) relies on unnecessarily complex constructions.

The book itself is also mainly a textual survey of how other writers ideas can be viewed. Although there is an attempt at synthesis there's no real sense of cultural, social or historical context.

Some ideas were interesting but it was frustrating not to be able to fully follow her arguments and (because of the book's age) aren't as ground-breaking as they might have been when published.

I didn't get a lot out of this but if you're interested in gender there's not a lot to choose from on Amazon.

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3 people found this helpful