Genderturbulentie Editors: Annemie Halsema and Marije Wilmink
Introduction: Annemie Halsema
Translation: Ineke van der Burg and Niels Helsloot
Amsterdam: Boom/Parrèsia 2000
ISBN 90 5352 620 x
144 pp.
At the moment, the American philosopher Judith Butler (1956) is without doubt one of the most influential and inspiring philosophers in the field of questions of gender and sexuality. She unsettles current ideas on sexual identity and heterosexuality and makes a stand for those who are excluded by the dominant two-sex system, like homosexuals and transvestites.
Genderturbulentie includes, in translation, a selection of Butler's most interesting texts, in which she shows that gender (the cultural interpretation of sexual difference) is not given with the body, but is created time and again by the appropriation and repetition of cultural norms of femininity and masculinity. In Butler's eyes, gender is 'doing' instead of 'being'; the body therefore is not a fixed basis for identity anymore.
Niels Helsloot
At the moment, the American philosopher Judith Butler (1956) is without doubt one of the most influential and inspiring philosophers in the field of questions of gender and sexuality. She unsettles current ideas on sexual identity and heterosexuality and makes a stand for those who are excluded by the dominant two-sex system, like homosexuals and transvestites.