• Gender Trouble
• by Judith Butler
• Read: Aug 6, 2023

I don’t remember how I got to this book as I had never heard of Judith Butler before given I’ve not really had any philosophy or literature classes on a higher education level and haven’t read much about academic feminist or gender theory. So I went into this book pretty unprepared and I was immediately in for a rude awakening. I’ve always thought of my English being pretty decent for a second language but there were so many sentences in this book that even on the third try I wasn’t able to grasp. The fact I haven’t read Freud, Lacan, Foucault, or any of the other works that “Gender Trouble” discusses and bases a lot of arguments on definitely also didn’t help. Only while I was already somewhat deep in did I find out that Butler is somewhat notorious for having a difficult and dense writing style. Nevertheless I stayed curious enough about the topic to get through the book and it was definitely interesting. I had heard of gender being a social performance before but reading it in a more academic context and having more (albeit difficult to grasp) discussion around it was pretty insightful for me. I don’t know if I’d recommend it unless you’re really into the topic and have maybe read some of the referenced material. But I don’t regret reading and struggling through it.