Judith Butler's GENDER TROUBLE: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity radically claimed that the sexed body is a fallacy, discursively constructed by the performance of gender. A.W. Strouse has undertaken to rewrite Butler's classic tome into an octosyllabic poem. Inspired by the rhyming encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, Strouse transforms each of Butler's sentences into punchy medieval couplets. This performative repetition of Chapter 1 of Butler's now classic treatise on gender, identity, and sexuality, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire," deconstructs Butler's deconstruction. Relishing in the campiness of rhyme and meter-in the bodily pleasures of form-Strouse's GENDER TROUBLE COUPLETS, Volume 1 is an imitation for which there is no original. Butler's GENDER TROUBLE, perhaps, was poetry all along. "In the tradition of the Revolutionary Cookbook ("Eggs Benedict Arnold"), teaching Structuralism through Hipster vs. Amish beards ("Is that beard ironic?"), and literary hostess gifts ("Lady Macbeth's Soap"), comes this brilliant rhymed couplet version of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Rarely has a poet applied his gifts to a more deserving subject. Strouse is the the Jeff Koons of queer theory, the Kim Kardashian of différance, the Lisa Frank of same-sex. In the grand tradition of rhymed pedagogical commentary - think Chaucer teaching Litel Louis how to use the Astrolabe - this funny and useful book will be an instant bestseller, a perfect gift for the nerd and hipster in your life, and the best Valentine cadeau for your secret queer crush whom you want but cannot quite name." Anna M. Klosowska, author of QUEER LOVE IN THE MIDDLE AGES (Palgrave, 2005) A.W. STROUSE teaches medieval literature at The New School, and has published a wide variety of creative works, including MY GAY MIDDLE AGES (punctum, 2015) and with Patty Barth, TRANSFER QUEEN (punctum, 2018).

With intellectual reference points that include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray, this is one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years and is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought.

This book investigates challenges to the U.S. military’s gender regime of hetero-male privilege. Examining a broad set of discursive maneuvers in a series of cases as focal points—integration of open homosexuality, the end of the combat ban on women, and the epidemic nature of military sexual assault within its units—Stephanie Szitanyi examines the contemporary link between gender and military service in the United States, and comprehensively analyzes forms of gendering produced by the military as an institution. Using feminist interpretivist methods to analyze an impressive combination of visual, textual, archival, and cultural materials, the book argues that despite policy changes since 2013 that may be positioned as explicit episodes of degendering, military officials have simultaneously moved to counteract them and reinforce the institution’s gender regime of hetero-male privilege. Importantly, these (re)gendering processes continue to prioritize certain forms of service and sacrifice, through which a specific version of masculinity—the masculine warrior—is continuously promoted, preserved, and cemented.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is a perfect example of creative thinking. The book redefines feminism's struggle against patriarchy as part of a much broader issue: the damaging effects of all our assumptions about gender and identity. Looking at the factionalism of contemporary (1980s) feminism, Butler saw a movement split by identity politics. Riven by arguments over what it meant to be a women, over sexuality, and over class and race, feminism was falling prey to internal problems of identity, and was failing to move towards broader solidarity with other liberation movements such as LGBT. Butler turned these issues on their head by questioning the basis that supposedly fundamental and fixed identities such as 'masculine/feminine' or 'straight/gay' actually have. Tracing these binary definitions back to the binary nature of human anatomy ('male/female'), she argues that there is no necessary link between our anatomies and our identities. Subjecting a wide range of evidence from philosophy, cultural theory, anthropology, psychology and anthropology to a renewed search for meaning, Butler shows both that sex (biology) and gender (identity) are separate, and that even biological sex is not simplistically either/or male/female. Separating our biology from identity then allows her to argue that, while categories such as 'masculine/feminine/straight/gay' are real, they are not necessary; rather, they are the product of society's assumptions, and the constant reproduction of those assumptions by everyone around us. That opens up some small hope for change: a hope that – 25 years after Gender Trouble's publication – is having a huge impact on societies and politics across the world.

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in Gender Trouble, Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in Gender Trouble and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory.

International development efforts aimed at improving girls’ lives and education have been well-intended, somewhat effective, but ultimately short-sighted and incomplete. This is because international development efforts often operate under a reductive understanding of the term 'gender' and how it influences the lives of girls and boys. Gender is more commonly conceived by international efforts as characteristics which are ascribed to girls as norms for behaviour. In particular, the analysis in Gender Trouble Makers focuses on the social constructions of gender and the ways in which gender was reinforced and maintained through a case study in rural Nepal. In developing countries like Nepal, promoting access to and participation in existing formal education programme is clearly necessary, but it is not, in itself, sufficient to transform gender power relations in the broader society. When gender is properly addressed as a process, then all stakeholders involved - researchers, governmental officials, and community members - can begin to understand and devise more effective ways to increase both girl and boy students’ enrollment, participation, and success in school.

Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.