hooks and Butler

bell hooks speaks to Butler’s Gender Theory when she writes in her chapter “Teaching to Transgress” about the importance of “challeng[ing] and deconstruct[ing] the category ‘woman’ — the insistence on recognition that gender is not the sole factor determining constructions of female-ness” (63). This dismantling of the concept of the “woman” is a central topic of Butler’s work, in which she questions whether “being female constitute[s] a ‘natural fact’ or a cultural performance” (xxviii). Of course, through this questioning, Butler argues that female-ness is indeed simply a cultural performance, thus rendering feminism’s reliance on this rigid sexual categorization troubling. hooks stresses the importance of making theory accessible to everyone, and Butler’s deconstruction of gender serves this purpose.