Undoing Gender is a book written by Judith Butler

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...

. It was published in 2004 by Routledge

Routledge

Routledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...

. Undoing Gender examines gender, sex, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people. Focusing on the case of David Reimer

David Reimer

David Reimer was a Canadian man who was born as a healthy male, but was sexually reassigned and raised as female after his penis was accidentally destroyed during circumcision. Psychologist John Money oversaw the case and reported the reassignment as successful, and as evidence that gender...

 who was medically reassigned from male to female after a botched circumcision, Butler reexamines the theory of performativity

Performativity

Performativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and language in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to intervene in the course of human events. The term derives from the work in speech act theory originated by the analytic...

 that she originally explored in Gender Trouble

Gender Trouble

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler is a highly influential book in academic feminism and queer theory. It is also the book credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern/poststructural feminism.-...

. While many of Butler's books are intended for a highly academic audience, Undoing Gender reaches out to a much broader readership.

See also

• Gender Trouble
  Gender Trouble
  Gender Trouble by Judith Butler is a highly influential book in academic feminism and queer theory. It is also the book credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern/poststructural feminism.-...
  
  
• Queer theory
  Queer theory
  Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
  
  
• David Reimer
  David Reimer
  David Reimer was a Canadian man who was born as a healthy male, but was sexually reassigned and raised as female after his penis was accidentally destroyed during circumcision. Psychologist John Money oversaw the case and reported the reassignment as successful, and as evidence that gender...
  
  
• Intersexuality
  Intersex
  Intersex, in humans and other animals, is the presence of intermediate or atypical combinations of physical features that usually distinguish female from male...