Rating: 
Summary: Cowards Theorize. The Brave Act.
Review: It really is this simple: Muddled language equals muddled thought. While Butler might have an interesting idea or two, her language leaves so much open to debate that she has effectively shielded herself from criticism.Some here have said that Butler has 'boldly' delved into theories of 'performance gender.' Have these people ever read Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Nigth?' The man wrote about such things 400 years ago. Such ideas have been addressed since the Greeks and are -- sorry if you disagree, but it is true -- unworthy of the expenditure of time it takes for serious study. Such study does nothing to advance knowledge of self; such study weakens scholarship and allows one to dawdle in one's own head. We've got an academy full of philosophy professors, but no philosophers. Buildings stuffed full of literature majors, but no novel readers. Universities packed with English PhD.'s, but cities overflowing with illiterate adults. It is easy to live in the Butler world of half-baked pretentious 'theory.' But oh, how difficult to live in the world of today.
Rating: 
Summary: Consider women working for slave wages in Honduras
Review: making clothes....think of the Butlerian strategy of it all!
Are they undoing gender? Wow! And on pennies a day, too!
Think of the androgynous gay boy who might wear the same clothes as his bestest girlfriend. Think of the subversiveness of it all!
Consider the fact that maybe the slave woman in Honduras made those clothes!
How Butlerian, indeed!
Rating:
Summary: Nonsense masquerading as substance
Review: Terribly written, illogically 'explained,' totally uninspired. I was forced to read this during my graduate studies. Oy vey. This text offers nothing new, nothing fresh, nothing appealing. I defy anyone to email me and present to me an original topic that this woman tackles. As for the reviewer here who wrote 'Would you attack cancer researchers for their obscure language?' No, because cancer researchers are attempting to break down complex chemical and biological processes to their simplest explanations. They strive for clarity. They attempt to explain. I know cancer researchers. I have read their textbooks. Ms. Butler is no cancer researcher. Readers and not engineers, literature is not a science. Literature is the study of the human experience and the human soul, and the pretentious Ms. Butler has shown us her soul--and we find it empty.
Rating: 
Summary: Hrm...
Review: This book is where post-structuralist feminism all began. Butler presents an interesting and groundbreaking critique of the fixity of gender, and the relationship of gender to human subjectivity. Put simply, for Butler, femininity doesn't represent any essential woman-ness; rather, femininity PERFORMS woman-ness (which is thus rendered contingent). This doesn't mean that we can choose our gender, but it does present an interesting theorization of the way in which gender norms are established, regulated, and transgressed in contemporary society. Perhaps those who object that Gender Trouble is "unconvincing" are missing the point. Perhaps Butler's purpose is not to prove that gender is performative, but rather to theorize gender as being performative. To think of Butler as a struggling intellectual (cf. Deleuze and Foucault in "Language, Counter-Memory, Practice"), and to think of her theories as toolkits seems to rescue her from a lot of this criticism. The idea is perhaps not so much to make a set of arguments on the subject of gender so much as it is to actually DO something--to actually liberate gender from the constraints of essentialism and modernism. In this respect, Gender Trouble certainly fulfils its task; the proliferation of post-structuralist feminism over the past decade has been astounding. I must admit that I often find some of Butler's writing frustratingly unsatisfying. She often sets up other thinkers as straw men without really explaining their theories, and criticizes statements that they have made without really explaining the relationship of these statements to the rest of their work. Also, many of the phenomena that Butler critiques don't really exist at the level of practice. For example, she might criticize a certain theory for "reifying gender norms," but where does this occur? When we "contest meanings" and break them apart, does that mean that they go away? Obviously not. But Butler doesn't really tell us what's going on when we "forclose possibilities," "reify identities," or "contest meanings." On what plane is this struggle occuring? What are its concrete effects? Often Butler leaves us wondering what is at stake in these struggles in the first place! But even if you don't agree with Butler's thesis, her work inoculates us against essentialistic understandings of sexuality and sexual orientation that are often both over-inclusive and under-inclusive, and provides us with a useful theoretical tool for resisting normative understandings of gender.
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual Pretension
Review: This book only has one useful function, and that is to demonstrate how NOT to construct a solid, sound, logicical argument. The problem is that everything dissolves basically into Butler's bizarre form of "logic" and "thinking": "IF this is so, then..." Read this book and check out how often she employs this way of writing. Well...the IFS multiply and multiply, and could be thoroughly challenged and critiqued at every single stage. However, she needs these extremely thin "IFs" to construct the bogus positions she wants to "deconstruct." Her reading of Lacan--which she then goes on to "challenge"-- is a total fantasy, specious, and wrong. How can we seriously consider anything she says when her mode of writing is so untenable to begin with? Do not be blinded by Butler's pretensions to being a deep thinker, she is not, she is merely a person with decided OPINIONS, and that's all this book is, someone mouthing off about their opinion. But it is not a real work of thought.
Rating:
Summary: Gender Trouble
Review: This book was instrumental to the completion of my thesis. I commend Judith Butler for her progressive stance and startling way of expression. "Gender Trouble" was recommended to me by my Feminist Activism professor, and I in turn have furthered its distribution to friends and even to my father. That alone says a lot for the power of the message, and furthermore it was warmly received.
Rating: 
Summary: Required Reading
Review: This is a densely written but repeatedly rewarding study of the constructions of gender and sex as they relate to women, lesbians and gay men, and, to follow the logic of Butler's argument, all of us. This work shows not only the relativity of our cultural understanding of femininity but also the limits of our scientific understanding of female-ness. For feminists, Butler's book offers a much-needed examination of what exactly the female subject is and how woman is defined in (or by) our particular culture. Butler goes far beyond Foucault in examining sexuality as socially contructed and, in the process, offers valuable insights to (and critiques of) the writing and thinking of Beauvoir, Kristeva, Lacan, and Wittig. The book's one flaw is a turgid, sometimes redundant prose (i.e. phrases like "judical law" and "'he' [sic]") all too common in technical and philosophical writing, especially, alas, of the postmodernist variety. But once the reader survives the first quarter of the book, he [sic] will find Butler's observations not only accessible but fascinating and, for whatever it's worth, socially important.
Rating:
Summary: difficult, but important
Review: Though I agree with what others have written of Butler's prose, I think her approach to the ubiquitous "nature versus nurture" question of gender is an important one (politically, socially, culturally, psychologically...) At times her rhetoric is questionable & her ideas somewhat biased (to the point of bordering on... well, less than practical). However, that should not, by any means, dissuade anyone from reading her work. Despite the difficulties it might present, "Gender Trouble" is challenging, thoughtful and thought-provoking-- an enlightening experience for anyone willing to put forth some effort.
Rating:
Summary: Sokal didn't get it all right
Review: To the previous reviewers who criticize Butler's work as evidence of postmodernism's failure to communicate to those not of the academy, or to those poor girls who have not yet learned to read, I would submit that you are profoundly missing the point. The strength of Butler's text should not be judged on its ability to "help" people; she is an academic whose work was one of the, if not the, seminal text in the area of postmodern feminist theory. Stop using the Sokal debacle as proof of the inapplicability of Butler's work to people's "real" lives. The drag queens certainly wouldn't appreciate it. Rather, Butler is writing in and responding to, highly complicated texts that have preceded her and that demand a vocabulary which challenges its readers. Either meet the challenge or stop blaming it all on postmodern nomenclature which, though difficult, has offered an important and necessary body of literature to academia. Sokal's article (while indeed funny) made its point that postmodernism can sometimes get carried away with itself. But it also demonstrated the refusal of reactionaries to take seriously the essentialism and shortcomings of structuralist theory. When those poor girls learn how to read (and for all you know Butler could have spent twenty years as a literacy volunteer), I'll be sure to hand them a copy of Gender Trouble before sending them off on their merry way to subvert the dominant paradigm.
Rating:
Summary: DENSE
Review: When will these theory writers learn to make their work more accessible? It toubles me to think that a large portion of Butler's intended audience ("women," although she may cringe at my use of this term) would get lost in her language and ignore the important message of the book. Are white, upper-middle class, educated females the only women who deserve to subvert patriarchy? Judging from the way this book is written stylistically, yes. While I have no problem with Butler's message, I do chastise her for overflowing this book in elevated language and an expectation of education she should not demand out of her readers. The first three quarters of the book recapitulate the popular theoretical (and only popular if you read theory) underpinnings of Wittig, Freud, De Beauvoir, Feucault, and others. Even having read most of these other theories, I get lost in Butler's language. Further, her recapitulation offers her opportunity to spend too much of the book critiquing the works of others instead of explaining her own theory. This tactic gets old, and it gets old fast. The beauty of this book is not found until the FINAL subchapter of the FINAL chapter, where Butler explains her theory of "performativity." If it were not for this short subchapter, this book would be rubbish, and, quite honestly, I feel cheated by not having the knowledge to skip to the end. I give this important information to you. Please use it. I simply cannot believe this book is considered indispensable in feminist theory. Further, I wish writers like Butler would write for women and not at them.
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