The first week of May, 2022 saw hundreds of American citizens take to the streets in outrage over the possible reversal of the landmark abortion rights judgement Roe v Wade. While the judgement and the ensuing discussions based themselves on the idea of reproductive justice for women, there are other categories of persons who also benefitted from this judgement, such as trans persons, intersex and non-binary persons in need of abortion facilities in the United States. Today, we use broader terms like “people with uteruses” to refer to all persons in line for receiving such reproductive care. However, often, this proclivity for inclusivity is only on paper: trans, non-binary and intersex people are often forgotten in the larger movement of biological rights. The primary reason behind this predicament is the convoluted ways in which sex, gender and desires are conceptualised in our society. Several questions regarding such conceptualisations remain unanswered, forcing us to think and re-think our basic understanding of these concepts in our individual lives.
Scholars belonging to the feminist and queer theory traditions have been at the forefront of posing the same questions regarding sex, gender, and desires. No mention of such scholars would be complete without talking about Judith Butler, the twentieth century American philosopher that gave the world much to think about through their seminal work ‘Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.’ Published in 1990, the book was a ground-breaking manuscript due to its ideas concerning gender identities, relationships between gender and sex as well as the larger queer-feminist politics. The following paper review the paper through a multi-dimensional lens, with a view to explore its ability to connect with the varied gendered issues taking place in today’s politics.
