From the very beginning, it’s filled with raw, naked poetry flirting as prose, limned and fleshed in primal, visceral honesty… It was that honesty about love and Light, of sense of self and purpose, written with an unabashed admiration and respect for life itself, the glories and discomforts, the deeper truths of what it means to be human-not regardless of physicality but because of it and its inherent fluidity-it shocked me, stunned me, grabbed my heart and head and showed me that this was a Writer writing about Life, about real emotion and sex and heart no matter how fictional the story might be. I first discovered this book on-line and have picked it up through two published editions. The queers just put more thought into it.”
And every time I open it, I find something new again.Ĭhosen by JD Glass, author of Lambda Literary Finalist Punk Like Me, Punk and Zen, Lambda Literary and Ben Franklin Finalist Red Light, American Goth and the newly published X. I have not only drawn her ideas in Gender Trouble for all three of my books - without having drawn the well of ideas dry, or even drained it significantly – but I continually return to it for new inspiration.
Her work was a giant leap forward, which no one since has replicated. Sedgwick, Butler is responsible for the rise and prominence of queer theory. Although the middle section strikes me as incredibly obscure pomo-babble, the beginning and ending chapters are undeniably brilliant. Gender Trouble not only achieved the long-sought theoretical bridge between feminist and gay theory, but did so by undermining the very ideas of Woman and Homosexuality. It's a bravura performance, almost rude in its relentless intelligence and willingness to undo old, established ways of thinking. In just the first, blazing 10 pages, she undermines most of the assumptions under which feminist theory had operated for the last two decades, and rewrites the tools by which we think about bodies, gender and sexuality. The main influence on my thinking, particularly about gender, has to be Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1995).
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