xiv, 172 p. ; 24 cm "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." - Amazon.com Includes bibliographical references Includes index Preface -- Subjects of sex/gender/desire -- "Women" as the subject of feminism -- The compulsory order of sex/gender/desire -- Gender: The circular ruins of contemporary debate -- Theorizing the binary, the unitary, and beyond -- Identity, sex, and the metaphysics of substance -- Language, power, and the strategies of displacement -- 2. Prohibition, psychoanalysis, and the production of the heterosexual matrix -- Structuralism's critical exchange -- Lacan, Riviere, and the strategies of masquerade -- Freud and the melancholia of gender -- Gender complexity and the limits of identification -- Reformulating prohibition as power -- 3. Subversive bodily acts -- The body politics of Julia Kristeva -- Foucault, Herculine, and the politics of sexual discontinuity -- Monique Wittig: Bodily disintegration and fictive sex -- Bodily inscriptions, performative subversions -- Conclusion: From parody to politics