It was the second time I read this book. As an avid sociologist reader pursuing my Master’s degree, I devoured it in a week or two. For the course, I probably had to read only the third (and last) part of the book, but I became mesmerized by the radical critique and ended up reading the entire book. It felt like a punch in the face, like What the heck is going on with all my beliefs? I remember I couldn’t shake off the discomfort of losing some ground, and at the same time, it was appealing and substantive; I couldn’t just let it go.
That book changed my life; I was pretty sure about it. But I would realize the impact was even greater than I imagined around six years later when I started to question my own gender and ended up coming out as non-binary. Ten years after my first read, I decided to re-read it. It was probably January 2023, or sometime around that winter.
I expected it to be a dense read, a book I would read throughout that semester, or even that year. I remembered bits of it. What I realized in the first dozen pages is that while I was focusing on graduate courses, my academic mind was friggen sharp. Years have passed since I finished my PhD I became immersed in digital activism, civic tech, and, later, technology in general and my mind was not prepared for that punch the way it was in 2013. It took me over two years to re-read the book I read in two weeks ten years ago. Some days I would read three pages, maybe two and a half and feel exhausted. Exhausted and amazed. The book remained vibrant, provocative, and remarkable.
Unlike my days at the University of Essex, reading three pages and letting it sit in was not a problem. I had no deadline, no rush to learn about gender as performative. So I allowed myself to taste it slowly this time. And it was worth it, oh, it definitely was! As a (now) queer person, some parts felt different: I felt hugged, understood, and embraced. I could easily relate to a bunch of new reflections that felt alien when I used to identify as a cishet man. And I could better articulate a lot of what I’ve learned over the last few years of living openly as a queer person.
As groundbreaking as the book is, I still struggle to wrap my mind around the fact that it was first published in 1991. At least this allows me to mention its core ideas freely without fear of spoiling them. The big deal is: gender is not related to sex (as in genitals) and not related to sexuality (as in who one is attracted to). Gender is performative. Yes, a performance. A hook from the book to discuss this dissociation between genitals, sexuality and gender (as performance) is drag:
The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender or the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance.
If sex is usually oversimplified as a binary (as in penis or vagina), gender as a performance is not limited by these anatomical distinctions and can be multiple. Philosophically speaking, there are grounds for a multitude of genders:
If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old. Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness.
There are no words to describe the impact that it has on me, and I say that in the most intimate way. Thank you, Judith Butler. When I was an 8-year-old, you were already paving the way for me to become who I am.
Originally published as a review on my Bookwrym.