By Judith Butler is a preeminent gender theorist and has played an extraordinarily influential role in shaping modern feminism. She’s written extensively on gender and her concept of gender performativity is a central theme of both modern feminism and gender theory. Butler’s essays and books include Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993) and Undoing Gender (2004). However, the concept of gender perfomativity has been used – and some would assert – abused to support a number of positions that misconstrues Butler’s work. Malayalam Kambi Kathakal Ebook Download. I therefore wanted to ask Butler about what she really thinks about gender and the trans experience. Along the way Butler specifically addresses TERFs and the work of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond.

Cristan Williams: You the surgical intervention many trans people undergo as a “very brave transformation.” Can you talk about that? Judith Butler: It is always brave to insist on undergoing transformations that feel necessary and right even when there are so many obstructions to doing so, including people and institutions who seek to pathologize or criminalize such important acts of self-definition.

I know that for some feels less brave than necessary, but we all have to defend those necessities that allow us to live and breathe in the way that feels right to us. Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs – it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one’s gendered life. CW: I think it’s safe to say that many gender theorists are controversial in one way or another. Crack Url Filtering. Some have lumped your work together with the work of gender theorists such as Sheila Jeffreys, [Transsexual surgery] could be likened to political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I suggest that transsexualism should best be seen in this light, as directly political, medical abuse of human rights. The mutilation of healthy bodies and the subjection of such bodies to dangerous and life-threatening continuing treatment violates such people’s rights to live with dignity in the body into which they were born, what Janice Raymond refers to as their “native” bodies.