Written as an intervention into the heterosexism then dominant in feminist theory, the book begins by questioning the idea that the identity at the core of feminism, “woman,” is a fixed category. Nonetheless, a layperson’s summation of the book might go something like this: Gender Trouble, whose title is in part a reference to the 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble, attempts to complicate our notions of gender-what it is and where it comes from. One also suspects that Butler, a staunch critic of anti-intellectualism, might object to the very concept of such reductionism. It would be impossible to do justice in a single paragraph to a 250-plus-page text that is famously dense and complex. It catapulted Butler to international fame-as The Cut reported in 2016, the scholar’s office at the University of California, Berkeley, was eventually moved to the art history department to escape the crowds-and introduced new ways of thinking about gender, not just to academic discourse but to popular culture. That philosopher was Judith Butler, and the book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, sold more than 100,000 copies, was translated into more than a dozen languages, and continues to be taught in college classrooms across the United States. The same spring that I was running around my parents’ backyard in Brooklyn with no shirt on, a 34-year-old philosopher at Johns Hopkins University published a book that would transform the conversation around gender and queerness. From food to crime to gender to exercise to music to technology to activism to foreign policy to environment to politics, the period set the stage for the turmoil of today. This article is featured in The Nation’s blockbuster special issue, “ The ’90s: Cradle of the Present,” a fascinating look at the ways that the decade forged the current moment.
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