amazing performance

Given the illegible text the reader was heroic. Lots of interesting ideas elucidated. the epistemology hinges on ' if Simone DB is correct in saying x, then y and z is true.' Sadly lots of empirical evidence to show that gender is made up of both socially constructed and biological factors, but that's just the constructionalist in me ;-)

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2 people found this helpful

Very thorough

Enlightening. Everyone should read, listen to this book at least twice. It has completely changed the way I see the world.

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An absolute classic let down in its performance

I was very excited to listen to this seminal text by Butler, an erudite writer whom I follow with a passion. However, no matter how much I try I cannot get on with the performance of this text - the reading is frequently monotone and lacks appropriate intonation for an English reader, it makes this an incredibly difficult audio book to engage with.

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6 people found this helpful

Interesting but bloody confusing

I enjoyed the couple of chapters I could make out, but the vast majority is written as if to dissuade its own comprehension. If you can sit through reading written books then it’d probably make more sense like that when you are able to go back over things more easily.

Overall you’d be better to learn about Butler’s ideas from a secondary source as their writing is practically unintelligible most of the time.

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Heavy

I didn’t overly enjoy this book at all. I find it extremely heavy and really difficult to understand in parts.

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1 person found this helpful

Difficult to follow

You need to have engaged with academic theories of sexuality and gender to understand this text. Though I have done this, I still struggled to follow this text and felt it was unnecessarily difficult to follow. I found the narration jarring and too fast.

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5 people found this helpful

Incomprehensible

To be fair to this book, it deals with some complex ideas and difficult concepts so it might be that it was just beyond me. It's also possible that I was unfairly expecting it to be something else.

However, I don't think I could actually tell you what most of the points Butler makes in this book are (let alone how she supports them). The writing is dense and unyielding and (in my opinion) relies on unnecessarily complex constructions.

The book itself is also mainly a textual survey of how other writers ideas can be viewed. Although there is an attempt at synthesis there's no real sense of cultural, social or historical context.

Some ideas were interesting but it was frustrating not to be able to fully follow her arguments and (because of the book's age) aren't as ground-breaking as they might have been when published.

I didn't get a lot out of this but if you're interested in gender there's not a lot to choose from on Amazon.

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3 people found this helpful

I suffered through it so you dont have to.

The authors deliberately obtuse style is unsuited to an audio book, if you want this title i suggest getting a standard book, which would allow you to reread sections more efficiently.
Parsing out the authors point is a futile endeavour, little of substance is actually covered. Like many bitter uncreative intellectuals the authors intelligence comes with little wisdom, unable to justify her beliefs with rational thought she just basically calls logic and language inherently biased.
This book was recommended to me by pro Transgender feminists as a starting point to understand their arguments. Having listened to the entire book, I now firmly believe the suggestion was in bad faith. No one would recommend this book to anyone other than a specialist in the theory, i can only conclude their intention was that i would give up on this title after the first chapter, then i could be discredited as not having an open mind.
The manner in which I was recommended the title, along with how the author talks about some theories, leads me to believe the book itself may be a bad faith argument. The book repeatedly refers to significant social taboos and psychological theories in such an confusing prose, it would be a miracle if many readers failed to take a discussion for advocacy, and upon publically accusing the author of supporting obscenities, the accusor could be discredit. When you have no rational thoughts supporting your arguments, tricking a proponent into misrepresenting your position is a clever if cynical tactic.

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