In Gender Troubles: Audre Lorde And Judith Butler

Lorde and Butler
Society has a strange fixation with placing anything and everything into one category or another. Talking to any person today can show just how different and similar one can be to another. For instance, when you think of a writer, how many varying faces and personalities’ rushes through your head? Audre Lorde and Judith Butler are two such writers that share a connection through their craft and their meaning. Though they may have these general similarities, they have their own approaches to specific problems and issues. In society, people are thrust into categories previously developed to further relate one to another. For both of these theorists, the groupings that individuals are thrown into are lacking to say mildly. Judith Butler believed that feminism had made a mistake when its claim of being the union of all women. In this, she states that by claiming this, feminism is agreeing to the binary structure of gender that society has constructed. By doing this, feminism is effectively ignoring the differences and choices people have made by forcing them into a category that it to broad to truly express who they are. Audre Lorde refused to be put into any category, instead, she created her own, “a …show more content…
The performance is not an insight as to who a person truly is, but what a person does at a specific time. Her idea that identity is a free-floating form and not a description of some core essence is a key part of queer theory. With this and her thoughts of how sex, male and female, are not connected to gender, masculine and feminine, and desire, to the other gender, leads her to have a very open view of sexuality in itself. Judith Butler, along with her wants to end the binary construct that we know as gender today for a more expressive system, is an acceptance as well as an advocate for equal treatment for people of all