Undoing Gender

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence, anti-gay bias, transphobia, and sexual assault.

Feminism, gender theory, and queer theory are interrelated but divergent fields within academia. Feminism originated as the promotion of sexual difference and equality, citing the harmful nature of the patriarchal structures of society. In short, male hegemony is the pattern of social structures that favors, implicitly or explicitly, masculinity and maleness over femininity and femaleness. The result, the patriarchy, is a social system that underprivileges, underrepresents, and oppresses women. Feminism stands in opposition to this system, though it does not necessarily encompass points related to sexual difference, gender identity, or sexuality. Instead, discussions involving these latter concepts make up the field of gender and sexuality, or queer, theories.

Gender theory, often linked to Butler’s Gender Trouble, sees gender as another social structure, like the patriarchy. Instead of simply favoring one end of a binary, gender theory posits that gender is a system of performance through which people are categorized as either masculine, feminine, or neither. The “neither,” in this case, is what Butler analyzes as unintelligible of Undoing Gender, and gender theory has not yet come up with an innovative way to describe nonbinary gender coherently beyond the negation of the binary.