What can I say? This is one of the most important works of philosophy, certainly of our own time, if not all time.

This philosophy book from 1990, though controversial and completely new at the time, has so thoroughly influenced and defined the era we’re living in that even if you’ve never read it, you already feel its conclusions in your bones.

Conclusions like: 
▪️ gender isn’t a simple binary;
▪️ gender isn’t a natural fact; 
▪️ the delineation and social reproduction of gender (understood as a norm or regulative fiction) isn’t neat and tidy;
▪️ gender norms are hegemonic, oppressive, heteronormative, and inherently exclusionary; and 
▪️ gender is performative rather than an ontological.

If you think any of these things, congratulations, you’re a third wave feminist and an intellectual descendant of Judith Butler. 

This book was a fascinating intersection of my two favourite things: academic chops and real world experience. Because Judith Butler definitely Knows Her Shit. She borrows, alters, and critiques ideas from Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Irigaray, and more, along with her contemporary academics. But also, she was openly queer, involved in the 1980s drag scene, had an intersex family member, and was just generally struggling with the way second wave feminism excluded her from its restrictive definition of womanhood. 

Even though this book has become a cornerstone of pop culture, this wasn’t a pop non-fiction book. And while some could find the academic references dense, I loved it all—because Judith Butler is that unicorn academic: a “classically trained” philosopher with groundbreaking ideas.