The Declared Self

In 1990 a book about gender appeared that nobody in publishing expected to sell. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies and was translated into twenty-seven languages. Its central claim was that gender is not something a person has but something a person does - a stylized repetition of acts with nobody standing behind them doing the repeating. Judith Butler thereby became, depending on who was speaking, the most influential living philosopher of identity or the individual personally responsible for everything that has gone wrong since. This book does neither the celebrating nor the denouncing. It conducts an audit. The method is borrowed from the sciences, where it has become necessary to ask of any loud conclusion a quiet question: which parts of this were measured, which were declared, and which were derived from the first two? Declared components are not lies. They are choices - a coordinate system, a starting assumption, a referent - that have to be carried openly, because every conclusion inherits their weight. Applied to gender theory, the question turns unexpectedly sharp. Butler's most disputed move was to declare that the inner core of gender identity has no referent at all, and then to build an entire apparatus on the vacancy. Whether that is a fatal weakness or the single most disciplined act in the whole literature is a question this book takes seriously enough to answer. Along the way: why repetition is the only thing holding any structure in existence, from a hydrogen nucleus to a habit; why two accurate descriptions of the same person can be incompatible and both correct; why the point at which you calibrate an instrument decides the answer it gives you; and why an argument that fails the audit cannot be quoted against Butler either. The closing chapters turn the same instrument on the auditor, which is the only way anyone should be trusted to hold one. >Keywords: gender theory, performativity, philosophy of science, identity, epistemology, methodology, Judith Butler