Judith Butler Gender Trouble Sparknotes

In theatre, when the curtains roll up, the stage comes to life. The lights, the sounds, the actors and the props play complementary roles in enhancing the theatrical performance. In music; the musicians, the instruments and the sound systems are all key factors in making sure that the show is a success. Similarly in works of literature; the language, the grammar, the punctuations and the words make or break the piece. Though these are only condiments to help enhance the flavor of the content; they play an extremely crucial role in preventing the piece from turning bland. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is no less of a performance art; her language and use of quotations acting as props to the stage.

In her book, Butler reinforces the belief
Quotations are often used to signify the importance of a word, to cite another source or to mock the use of a certain term. She often uses them to denote words like “women” and “subject” which is to showcase her disapproval of the constructed gender; “woman” and her displeasure of the gender being used as a common “subject” during representations. She clearly belongs to the cultural feminist category discussed in class and roots for the importance of identifying all women individually with different brackets for race, culture, ethnicity and other such criteria. In Conclusion: From Parody to Politics she emphasizes her unhappiness with the use of the term “et cetera”. She states that “ T(t)his is a sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself.” However at some points during the text the quotation marks cease to make any sense. For example in the line,” Juridical power inevitably “produces” what it claims merely to represent…”(Butler 5) the word produces has been placed in quotations for no apparent reason. These go out to show how she uses these quotations to imply a certain importance to improve the metaphorical