Undoing Gender

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Academic Context: Feminism, Gender Theory, and Queer Theory

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence, anti-gay bias, transphobia, and sexual assault.

Feminism, gender theory, and queer theory are interrelated but divergent fields within academia. Feminism originated as the promotion of sexual difference and equality, citing the harmful nature of the patriarchal structures of society. In short, male hegemony is the pattern of social structures that favors, implicitly or explicitly, masculinity and maleness over femininity and femaleness. The result, the patriarchy, is a social system that underprivileges, underrepresents, and oppresses women. Feminism stands in opposition to this system, though it does not necessarily encompass points related to sexual difference, gender identity, or sexuality. Instead, discussions involving these latter concepts make up the field of gender and sexuality, or queer, theories.

Gender theory, often linked to Butler’s Gender Trouble, sees gender as another social structure, like the patriarchy. Instead of simply favoring one end of a binary, gender theory posits that gender is a system of performance through which people are categorized as either masculine, feminine, or neither. The “neither,” in this case, is what Butler analyzes as unintelligible of Undoing Gender, and gender theory has not yet come up with an innovative way to describe nonbinary gender coherently beyond the negation of the binary. Queer theory, on the other hand, primarily deals with sexuality, exploring, like gender theory, how the categorizations of straight, gay, or bisexual are insufficient, with bisexuality forming a tenuous compromise between the binary options of straight and gay. Queer theory has focused on analyzing the ways kinship, sexual expression, and identity intersect and do not conform to heteronormativity, forming another area of unintelligibility explored in Undoing Gender.

Socio-Historical Context: Violence Against the Other

Butler’s call to action in Undoing Gender relies on an operating framework of urgency and violence, noting how people at the fringe of intelligibility are often targeted for violence in the form of hate crimes. Because these individuals are socially unintelligible, Butler questions how society rejects claims for greater protection and grief over such crimes. Therefore, it is critical to examine two of the instances that Butler cites regarding such violence: Gwen Araujo and Brandon Teena.

Gwen Araujo was a transgender teenager who was murdered in 2002 by four men when those men found out that Gwen was transgender. In addition to the violence of the attack, the men made use of a so-called “trans panic defense,” in which they attempted to argue that their violence was justified by the shock of finding out that Gwen was trans (Holden, Alexandra. “The Gay/Trans Panic Defense: What Is It, and How to End It.” American Bar Association, March 31, 2020). Though Gwen identified as a woman, and two of the men who assaulted and murdered her had been intimate with Gwen, the reason that they cited for her murder was her penis, which the men discovered through a forced inspection. Gwen’s murder highlights the ways in which trans youth are disproportionately affected by sexual violence, as well as the institutional means by which hate crimes are excused.

Similarly, Brandon Teena was a trans youth who was murdered by a group of men who discovered that Brandon was a trans man. Like in Gwen’s case, a group of men assaulted and murdered Brandon after they forcibly revealed that Brandon had a vagina. They harassed Brandon prior to his murder, but law enforcement did not take Brandon’s claims seriously because they found it odd that Brandon acted like a man. Following Brandon’s murder, the sheriff, Charles Laux, neglected to arrest or charge the two men responsible for Brandon’s murder because of his prejudice against Brandon as a transgender man. As with Gwen’s murder, Brandon’s murder and the subsequent legal proceedings expose how the legal institution discounts those who are deemed unintelligible, while implicitly rewarding those who use violence against others to “enforce” the norms.