Breaking through to the other side Book

Revised from Judy B's 1984 Yale philosophy dissertation. It's interesting to see the intellectual context that allowed Butler to think Gender Trouble, published the following year, and you can see some of the germs of those ideas popping up briefly here in unexpected places. Also, this convinced me that I absolutely needed to read Hegel.

The book is, of course, dense and slow-going, perhaps even more than Butler's later work, but definitely recommended for theory nerds. Especially worth taking a look at are the overview in C.1 of Hegel's view of the subject in Phenomenology of the Spirit and the C.4 discussion of Hegel's anti/influence on theorists who we would more likely label as precursors to queer theory: Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Kristeva.