Book Description
Undoing Gender addresses the regulation of sexuality and gender that takes place in psychology, aesthetics, and social policy. These essays revisit the problem of kinship in light of new challenges to the family form, interrogate the meaning and purposes of the incest taboo, and challenge the ways in which intersexuality and transsexuality are pathologized.

About the Author
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Among her books are Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech, all published by Routledge.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern - and fail to govern - gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

SYNOPSIS