Educational Media Reviews Online

Providing little more than a passing glance at her ideas, this French production will best serve as a light introduction to the personality of prolific American gender theory luminary Judith Butler, following her abroad for teaching appointments, speaking engagements, and interviews, from UC Berkeley, where she is a Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, to Paris and Berlin. Butler, whose rise to prominence across multiple domains of the humanities -- queer theory, feminism, literary criticism, political philosophy, psychoanalysis and more—began with her 1990 book Gender Trouble, is perhaps most widely known for her constructivist and anti-essentialist views about gender and sexual identity. Irrepressibly mutable and fluid, identity on her view is neither fixed by biology nor wholly capable of construction by purely individual determination, but "performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results."

The documentary is broadly organized by the themes designating each of its seven chapters, beginning with an introduction in which Butler describes her upbringing in Cleveland, OH, in which, as a "problem child," her intellectual precociousness began to find expression, and her budding interest in issues of identity developed from her experience of her Jewish family's efforts to assimilate themselves into the scheme of Americana. The remaining chapters ("Gender Trouble," "Undoing Gender," "Gender Norms," "Gay Rights and Israel," "Homosexuality", and "AIDS") capture Butler in interviews ranging widely but shallowly across her trademark pre-occupations with gender issues, as well as providing glimpses of her views on such matters as Jewish philosophy, the Israeli Occupation, and the importance of raising the profile of public mourning of AIDS victims.

Those reluctant to try penetrating beyond the impression of ungainly obscurity not infrequently produced by Butler’s writing will hardly find in this documentary cause for reconsideration; nevertheless, her stature and influence warrant its inclusion in most academic video collections complementing the subject areas – pre-eminently Gender Studies – in which, for better or for worse, her influence is indisputable.