Gender Trouble

Overview

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published by Routledge in 1990, is the book that made Judith Butler one of the most influential philosophers of her generation. Written while Butler was completing her early teaching career and published in the midst of the feminist theory wars of the 1980s, the book is at once a work of academic philosophy and an intervention in a live political debate. Its argument, in the briefest possible form, is that gender is not the cultural expression of a natural sex but a performative effect: a repeated set of acts and signifying practices that produce the very identities they are taken to describe. The book's subtitle — Feminism and the Subversion of Identity — announces its double task: to show that feminist politics has rested on a fragile and exclusionary assumption about who "women" are, and to ask what a politics would look like if identity were understood as an effect rather than a foundation.

The book is notoriously difficult to read, and its style has been the subject of endless commentary — praised for its precision by some, criticized for its density by many. But its central claims have entered the vocabulary of contemporary thought: "gender is performative," "sex is as constructed as gender," and "the subject is constituted by the very norms it is said to express." Whatever one thinks of the style, the ideas have proven extraordinarily generative, shaping the development of queer theory, the philosophy of gender, and critical social theory over the following decades.

Author

Judith Butler (born 1956) wrote Gender Trouble at the age of thirty-four, having already published Subjects of Desire (1987), a study of the Hegelian concept of desire in twentieth-century French thought. The book grew out of Butler's conviction that the two dominant traditions she had inherited — French post-structuralism and Anglo-American feminist theory — needed each other. Post-structuralism had developed a powerful critique of the subject, but it had paid little attention to sexual difference; feminism had made sexual difference central, but it had often relied on a naïve account of the subject. Gender Trouble attempts to think these two traditions together: to use the post-structuralist critique of identity against the essentialism latent in feminist politics, and to use the feminist insistence on sexual difference against the gender-blindness of the philosophical tradition. Butler's later work — Bodies That Matter (1993), Undoing Gender (2004), and the political writings on precarity — develops, refines, and sometimes revises the positions first sketched here.

Historical Background

Gender Trouble appeared at a particular moment in the history of feminism. The second wave of the 1960s and 1970s had built its politics on the category of women, but by the 1980s that category had come under attack from several directions. Women of color, led by thinkers such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde, argued that the universal "woman" of feminist theory was in fact a white, middle-class woman, and that race and class divided women in ways the category could not capture. Lesbian feminists argued that the heterosexual assumptions of mainstream feminism made lesbians invisible or deviant. And a new generation of theorists, influenced by post-structuralism, began to ask whether the very idea of a shared female identity was not itself a construct. Butler entered this debate at its most intense moment and pushed it to its logical conclusion: not just the identity of "women" but the category of gender itself must be interrogated.

The book also stands in a complex relation to the psychoanalytic tradition. Butler engages the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva, using their accounts of the formation of gendered subjectivity against the naturalizing assumptions of the psychoanalytic establishment. Her central move is to read the Oedipus complex and the incest taboo not as the discovery of a universal psychic structure but as a narrative that produces the very desires it claims to regulate — a reading that links the theory of gender to the critique of power developed by Michel Foucault, for whom the taboo is less a prohibition than a productive mechanism.

Key Ideas

The Performativity of Gender

The book's central concept is performativity. Butler draws on the speech act theory of J.L. Austin, filtered through Jacques Derrida's account of iterability, to argue that gender is a kind of act: not a single act, but a repeated, ritualized practice that constitutes the subject who appears to be its author. Gender "acts" are performative in the strict sense that they bring into being what they name — there is no inner essence of which the acts are the expression, because the acts are what produce the appearance of the essence. This is the claim condensed in Butler's famous formulation: gender is "the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being."

The Critique of the Sex-Gender Distinction

Butler's critique of the sex-gender distinction follows directly. The distinction, central to second-wave feminism, held that sex is biological and gender is cultural. Butler argues that this division cannot be sustained: "sex" is not a natural given on which culture then writes, because the very categories of male and female are themselves produced and maintained by the same regimes that produce gender. Sex, she writes, "is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled" — a norm that works by repetition, not a fact that precedes culture. This claim — that sex is "as constructed as gender" — became the most controversial thesis of the book, and it remains the focus of intense debate.

The Heterosexual Matrix

The heterosexual matrix is Butler's name for the grid of intelligibility through which persons become culturally recognizable. The matrix assumes a causal or expressive relation among sex, gender, and desire: a female body (sex) should produce a feminine gender, which should in turn be oriented toward men. This alignment is not a description of how people are but a norm that regulates how they can be recognized. Those who do not fit — masculine women, feminine men, trans and gender-nonconforming people — are rendered unintelligible within the dominant frame, which is one reason the book insists that the political task is not merely to expand the category of women but to contest the frame itself.

Important Passages

The most quoted passage of the book is its summary of the theory of performativity: "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results." Equally influential is the passage in which Butler defines gender as "the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalized," and her claim that "the body is not a 'being,' but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated." The book closes with a reading of gender parody — drag in particular — which Butler presents not as an expression of an authentic or inauthentic identity but as an example of how the repetition of norms can expose their contingency: "In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself — as well as its contingency."

Influence

The influence of Gender Trouble is difficult to measure because it has been so extensive. Within the academy, it helped found the field of queer theory, reframed the philosophy of gender, and reshaped the way feminist theory understands identity. Its account of performativity has been taken up across the humanities and social sciences — in sociology, literary studies, media studies, and beyond. Outside the academy, the book's vocabulary ("gender is performative," "gender trouble") has entered public discourse, and Butler's insistence that gender categories are historical and contestable has informed the politics of gender diversity. The book has also attracted sustained criticism: from philosophers who find the argument circular or the prose needlessly opaque, from feminists who worry that the deconstruction of the category of women undermines the political agency of women, and from scholars who argue that the theory overstates the plasticity of the body. Three decades on, the book is best understood not as a settled doctrine but as an open field of argument — which is precisely the kind of work Butler intended it to be.

Sources

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Judith Butler" (iep.utm.edu/butler)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender)