One of the most influential books in recent liberal arts education is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. Butler questions the standard definitions of gender, naturalized sex, feminist theory, and seeks to re-engage these thoughts through performativity Here is a thought-provoking passage on shifting ones thinking from gender as expressive to gender as performative:"That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender's performative character adn the perfomative possibilities fro proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, gender can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible" (p. 180).
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