Undoing Gender (2004) is comprised of a collection of eleven essays, all of which derive from Judith Butler’s theoretical work on gender and sexuality. In writing Undoing Gender, Butler sought to rework her theories on gender performativity as presented in her work Gender Trouble (1990), and, in doing so, engage with her critics. Butler asks us to imagine gender and sexuality outside societal norms, in that these norms, and in particular gender as a norm, “figures as a precondition for the production and maintenance of legible humanity” (11). Those individuals who fall outside the hetero-norm, such as transsexuals, intersexuals, and homosexuals, put into question their very existence as human beings. In this

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Published 02 November 2009

Citation: Riley, Samantha Michele. "Undoing Gender". The Literary Encyclopedia. 2 November 2009.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=27763, accessed 21 November 2009.]