Book of the day: Imitation and Gender Insubordination by Judith Butler

Judith Butler is a philosopher and gender theorist. In her book “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, she explores the production of identities such as homosexual and heterosexual and the limiting nature of identity categories. According to Butler, homosexual identity categories cannot be stable and if they became stable they would stop being appealing to her because she is attracted by their instability. She says, “I'm permanently troubled by identity categories; consider them, as sites of necessary trouble. In fact, if the category were to offer no trouble, it could cease to be interesting to me: it is precisely the pleasure produced by the instability of those categories which sustains the various erotic practices that make me a candidate for the category to begin with.”