@Eden@weirder.earth @distel yes, the other thing to note is that womens studies programs are at this time only a few decades old. prior to that point, the people in academia who were writing about women were predominantly men articulating a model of femininity which was primarily not feminist or even grounded in actual women’s experiences. womens studies programmes were invented to combat this problem, and butler is acknowledging that they have been successful in contesting it, but in so doing they have also, in a way, been contesting themselves (how can you have womens studies when the very concept of woman is problematic?)
now many of those programmes have changed their names to things like “gender studies” which i think is attributable a great deal to Gender Trouble
@Eden@weirder.earth @distel so what i’m saying is “The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms” is, on the one hand, an acknowledgment of all the great strides that feminists and academics have made in problematizing and complicating and deepening our understanding of gender and womanhood, but, on the other hand, can and should be read as a real moment of crisis, shall we say “gender trouble”, for womens studies departments everywhere, who now do not even really know what subject they are nominally studying
it's a lot of meaning in a very short phrase and the fact that it means both is kind of the point Butler is making
