This is an incredibly challenging book (for me) and an incredible rewarding one. It points in so many directions and opens up so many ways of thinking that it's quite dizzying. My feelings while reading this were mostly 'oh my god, I didn't even know my brain could encompass these ideas? how could someone invent them?!' I also kept thinking about that one episode of Doctor Who that I found incredibly nauseating and offensive, in which the mother of two children is the only one who can carry spirits from one world to another because she is a) a woman and b) a mother. So by implication, the only 'real' woman is a mother, bearing children is a woman's greatest function in the world and that is what makes women 'great' or 'strong' or whatever. This book goes against all views like that (which is basically what a lot of second-wave feminism boils down to), and argues against finding any essence of gender. Butler takes up various influential theories of gender and/or sexuality and demonstrates how they are based on underlying essentialist assumptions about sex and/or gender. Along the way, she provides very clear explanations of these theories, which I found very helpful, since I either didn't know or didn't understand many of them. I'd say that the two theses of this book are 'gender is performative' and 'heterosexuality is a joke'. I loved Butler's idea of deploying parody to combat repression, because I'm also interested in theories of humour and the comic. Her very elegant idea is that we need to stop searching for any sort of original individuality that precedes sex, gender, or any kind of cultural inscription, because, a) it doesn't exist and b) if it does/did, it is inevitably lost to us. Instead, she wants to look to the future and 'redeploy' the power and violence of oppressive structures to show their contingency and mock them. Next time somebody says 'oh, you'll change your mind, you'll want children some day', I will throw this entire book at them.
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