Undoing Gender. Judith Butler. New York &amp; London: Routledge, 2004; 267 pages; ISBN 0-415-96923-9; $31.05US (paper).
Contemplative, incisive, and highly readable, this compilation of Judith Butler's recent essays engages with a wide range of themes important to feminist inquiry. Gathered from previous presentation in scholarly journals, edited volumes, and at

conferences, this collection of eleven revised essays presents Butler's most current meditations on gender, sex, and sexuality, and engages with the "New Gender Politics" sprung from the productive ruptures in feminist and queer theory invoked by trans studies and the intersex movement.
Drawing on psychoanalysis and fresh readings of Foucault, Butler reconsiders the incest taboo, the (heterosexual) structure of kinship, the confession, social recognition, survival and vulnerability, and technologies of sex and gender. Underlying all of these essays is a profound questioning of what it means to "be human" and how expressions of sex, sexuality, and gender can make for impossible (or indeed "unlivable") lives under dominant relations of power. Equally, these compiled writings reflect on the ways in which normative categories of "the human" come "undone" under the rupturing effects of embodied lives that through living challenge regulatory regimes. Speaking especially, and even intimately, to those of us "who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether […] in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage" (20), Butler raises the urgent question of what "community" - and especially communities of resistance - might look like given complexities and differences that seem, at times, to thwart the possibility of "acting in concert." While many of these writings will be of particular interest to trans and non-trans embodied theorists grappling with the difficulties of "doing justice" to the complex intersections of "race," class, sex, gender, sexuality, power, social regulation and recognition in their studies, these essays will also appeal more generally to feminists who take a critical and/or philosophical position with respect to discourses of human rights.
It is perhaps the two essays "The End of Sexual Difference?" and "The Question of Social Transformation" that most closely reflect on the still productive question of what "sexual difference" and/or "gender" has to do with feminist politics, feminist theory, and for anything approaching a collective feminist position. If "gender" and "sexual difference" do not provide a stable foundation for feminist thought and critique, what does? In the latter of the two essays Butler includes a sensitive reconsideration of her early Gender Trouble, a book

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written prior to her securing a stable position in the academy.
For readers meeting Butler for the first time, this is an excellent volume with which to become acquainted with the startling, and always thoughtful, range of her engagements with gender, sex, sexuality, and politics. For those already familiar with her work, this volume might be found to be pared down and clarifying, certainly characteristically nuanced and provocative, and marked by a slight shift in tone. The essays collected here are at times tender, and carry a sense of urgency - thoughtfulness and wisdom that seem to come at us with a great speed, and with a request for a response. The writing is at once reflective and illuminating - Butler at her very best.
Melissa Autumn White York University

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