Search
Close
Search
Advanced Search
Search Menu
AI Discovery Assistant

Extract

MAYBE it’s just me. And I know I benefit from thirty-plus years of hindsight. But I cannot help but read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” together. After all, they came within three years of one another. “Mama’s Baby” was published in 1987; Gender Trouble in 1990. And they share similarities: the focus on embodiment (but, given that these are both feminist texts, that should not surprise anyone); and the critical use of psychoanalysis to expose normative gender dynamics. Gender Trouble and “Mama’s Baby” move in similar conceptual terrain. They engage in similar modes of immanent critique. So, when I read them together, I could not help but feel like they are talking to each other.

But there are differences, too. A conversation is not always premised on agreement. In “Mama’s Baby,” the terms “female” and “male” seem to invoke a space “before” or “beyond” binary gender’s normative constraints, and I am not sure Gender Trouble would ride with that.1 But the flipside is true, too: “Mama’s Baby” would be suspicious of Gender Trouble’s emphasis on gender as inescapable. Gender Trouble thinks with bodies; “Mama’s Baby” prefers flesh. Although these texts converge at certain points, they also disagree on others.

Issue Section:
Roundtable on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity at Thirty?or Thirty-Five
You do not currently have access to this article.
Download all slides