Conclusion: From Parody To Politics
Here Butler attempts to construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the gendered pronoun has been removed or not presumed to be a reasonable category. She claims that even the binary of subject/object, which forms the basic assumption for feminist practices - "we, 'women,' must become subjects and not objects" - is a hegemonic and artificial division. The notion of a subject, instead, is for her formed through repetition, through a "practice of signification" (144). Butler offers parody (for example, the practice of drag) as a way to destabilize and make apparent the invisible assumptions about gender identity and the inhabitability of such "ontological locales" (146) as gender. By redeploying those practices of identity and exposing as always failed the attempts to "become" one's gender, Butler believes that a positive, transformative politics can emerge.
All page numbers are from the first edition: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990).
Read more about this topic: Gender Trouble
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