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...

The emergence of AIDS in contemporary culture has not only produced a vast discourse about the disease but has provoked an anxious proliferation of sites of erotic danger. In Erotic Welfare, Linda Singer argues that we are currently living in an age of epidemic, fuelled by a panic logic in which the very discourses on various social problems proliferate according to a logic of contagion. It is not merely that AIDS has come into contemporary discourse as a contagious disease, but that contemporary discourse on sexuality has itself come to replicate the course of contagion. For Singer, the...

The use of theory in feminist analysis has been said to threaten feminism as a political force. This collection of work by leading feminist scholars engages with the question of the political status of poststructuralist theory within feminism. Against the view that poststructuralism necessarily weakens feminism, this book affirms the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential. The essays in Feminists Theorize the Political speak to the questions that emerge from the convergence of feminism and poststructuralism: What happens to feminist critique when traditional...

A debate on the politics of theory is being conducted within literary studies. What is meant by politics? What is meant by theory? This book brings together not only outstanding questioners, but outstanding questions.

A debate on the politics of theory is being conducted within literary studies. What is meant by politics? What is meant by theory? This book brings together not only outstanding questioners, but outstanding questions.

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...

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...

Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss--of warfare, disease, and political strife--this eloquent book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Plumbing the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, and AIDS activists--expose the humane and productive possibilities in the workings of witness, memory, and melancholy.

Among the sites of loss...

The Judith Butler Reader is a collection of writings that span her impressive career and trace her intellectual history.

• Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built her international reputation as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity
• Organized in active collaboration between Judith Butler and Sara Salih
• Collects together writings that span Butler's impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works
• Includes an introduction and...

The Judith Butler Reader is a collection of writings that span her impressive career and trace her intellectual history.

• Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built her international reputation as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity
• Organized in active collaboration between Judith Butler and Sara Salih
• Collects together writings that span Butler's impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works
• Includes an introduction and...