Gender Trouble

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gender Trouble

Cover of the first edition

Author

Judith Butler

Country

United States

Language

English

Subject

Feminism, Queer theory

Published

1990 (Routledge)

Media type

Print (Hardcover andPaperback)

Pages

272 (UK paperback edition)

ISBN

0-415-38955-0

Preceded by

Subjects of Desire

Followed by

Bodies That Matter

Part of a series on

Feminist philosophy
Major works

A Vindication of the Rights ofWoman (1792)

The Subjection of Women (1869)

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the

State (1884)

The Second Sex (1949)

The Feminine Mystique (1963)

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist

Revolution (1970)

The Female Eunuch (1970)

The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)

Gender Trouble (1990)

Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993)

Major theorists

Mary Wollstonecraft

John Stuart Mill

Simone de Beauvoir

Betty Friedan
Shulamith Firestone

Germaine Greer

Gloria Steinem

Angela Davis

bell hooks

Gerda Lerner

Judith Butler

Val Plumwood
Key concepts

Feminism

Gender
Gender equality
Gender performativity

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; second edition 1999)[1] is a
book by philosopher Judith Butler, in which Butler argues that gender is a kind of improvised
performance. The work is influential in feminism, women's studies, lesbian and gay studies,
and queer theory. Butler's ideas about gender came to be seen as foundational to queer theory and
the advancing of dissident sexual practices during the 1990s.
Contents
[hide]

1Summary

2Reception

3See also

4References

5Further reading

Summary[edit]
Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions of feminist theory: the supposition that there exists
an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Butler, "women"
and "woman" are fraught categories, complicated by factors such as class,ethnicity, and sexuality.
Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of
the patriarchy, and erases the particularity of oppression in distinct times and places. Butler thus
eschews identity politics in favor of a new, coalitional feminismthat critiques the basis of identity
and gender. She challenges her readers' assumptions about the distinction often made

between sex and gender, according to which sex isbiological while gender is culturally constructed.
In the first place, Butler argues, this distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject
of feminism, and in the second place, the distinction proves false. Sexed bodies cannot signify
without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse and cultural imposition is merely
an effect of the functioning of gender. That is, both sex and gender are constructed.
Examining the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Butler explores the relationship
between power and categories of sex and gender. For Beauvoir, women constitute a lack against
which men establish their identity; for Irigaray, this dialectic belongs to a "signifying economy" that
excludes the representation of women altogether because it employs phallocentric language. Both
assume that there exists a female "self-identical being" in need of representation, and their
arguments hide the impossibility of "being" a gender at all. Butler argues instead that gender is
performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts
constitute, rather than express, the illusion of the stable gender identity. If the appearance of being
a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender:
constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man")
remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification." In this way, Butler provides an
opening for subversive action. She calls for people to trouble the categories of gender through
performance.
Discussing the patriarchy, Butler notes that feminists have frequently made recourse to the
supposed pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which to base a new, non-oppressive
society. For this reason, accounts of the original transformation of sex into gender by means of the
incest taboo have proven particularly useful to feminists. Butler revisits three of the most
popular: Claude Lvi-Strausss anthropological structuralism, in which the incest taboo necessitates
a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Rivieres psychoanalytic description
of womanliness as a masquerade that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a
desire for another woman; andSigmund Freuds psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and
melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one, in
which cathexis becomes identification.
Butler extends these accounts of gender identification in order to emphasize the productive or
performative aspects of gender. With Lvi-Strauss, she suggests that incest is a pervasive cultural
fantasy and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, she states that
mimicry and masquerade form the essence of gender; with Freud, she asserts that gender
identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a
prohibition (63) and therefore that same-sexed gender identification depends on an unresolved
(but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of the Oedipal
myth). For Butler, heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender
identities (70) and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality,
which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, she points again to the
productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates and regulates approved heterosexuality and
subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law.
In response to the work of Jacques Lacan that posited a paternal Symbolic order and a repression of
the "feminine" required for language and culture, Julia Kristeva added women back into the narrative
by claiming that poetic languagethe "semiotic" was a surfacing of the maternal body in writing,
uncontrolled by the paternal logos. For Kristeva, poetic writing and maternity are the sole culturally
permissible ways for women to return to the maternal body that bore them, and female
homosexuality is an impossibility, a near psychosis. Butler criticizes Kristeva, claiming that her
insistence on a "maternal" that precedes culture and on poetry as a return to the maternal body is
essentialist: "Kristeva conceptualizes this maternal instinct as having an ontological status prior to
the paternal law, but she fails to consider the way in which that very law might well be the cause of
the very desire it is said to repress" (90). Butler argues the notion of "maternity" as the long-lost
haven for females is a social construction, and invokes Foucault's arguments in The History of

Sexuality(1976) to posit that the notion that maternity precedes or defines women is itself a product
of discourse.
Butler dismantles part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published of Herculine
Barbin, an intersex person who lived in France during the 19th century and eventually committed
suicide when she was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In his introduction to the journals
Foucault writes of Herculine's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw
fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity" (94). Butler accuses Foucault of romanticism, claiming that his
proclamation of a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in The History of
Sexuality, in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an
illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that
system itself. Butler instead places Barbin's early day not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger
trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. She suggests finally that Foucault's
surprising deviation from his ideas on repression in the introduction might be a sort of "confessional
moment," or vindication of Foucault's own homosexuality of which he rarely spoke and on which he
permitted himself only once to be interviewed.
Butler traces Monique Wittig's thinking about lesbianism as the one recourse to the constructed
notion of sex. The notion of "sex" is always coded as female, according to Wittig, a way to designate
the non-male through an absence. Women, thus reduced to "sex," cannot escape carrying sex as a
burden. Wittig argues that even the naming of the body parts creates a fiction and constructs the
features themselves, fragmenting what was really once "whole." Language, repeated over time,
"produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as 'facts" (115).
Butler questions the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy," a
usual given without explanation: "How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-forgranted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of
value, prior to significance?" (129). Building on the thinking of Mary Douglas outlined in her Purity
and Danger (1966), Butler claims that the boundaries of the body have been drawn to instate certain
taboos about limits and possibilities of exchange. Thus the hegemonic and homophobic press has
read the pollution of the body that AIDS brings about as corresponding to the pollution of the
homosexual's sexual activity, in particular his crossing the forbidden bodily boundary of the
perineum. In other words, Butler's claim is that "the body is itself a consequence of taboos that
render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries" (133). Butler proposes the practice
of drag as a way to destabilize the exteriority/interiority binary, finally to poke fun at the notion that
there is an "original" gender, and to demonstrate playfully to the audience, through an exaggeration,
that all gender is in fact scripted, rehearsed, and performed.
Butler attempts to construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the
gendered pronoun has been removed or not presumed to be a reasonable category. She claims that
even the binary of subject/object, which forms the basic assumption for feminist practices - "we,
'women,' must become subjects and not objects" - is a hegemonic and artificial division. The notion
of a subject is for her formed through repetition, through a "practice of signification" (144). Butler
offers parody (for example, the practice of drag) as a way to destabilize and make apparent the
invisible assumptions about gender identity and the inhabitability of such "ontological locales" (146)
as gender. By redeploying those practices of identity and exposing as always failed the attempts to
"become" one's gender, she believes that a positive, transformative politics can emerge.
All page numbers are from the first edition: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990).

Reception[edit]
Gender Trouble has enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even
inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!.[2]Butler, in a preface to the second edition of the book, writes
that she was surprised by the size of the book's audience and its eventual status as a founding text

of queer theory.[3] Anthony Elliott writes that with the publication of Gender Trouble, Butler
established herself at the forefront of feminism, women's studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer
theory. According to Elliott, the core idea expounded inGender Trouble, that "gender is a kind of
improvised performance, a form of theatricality that constitutes a sense of identity", came to be seen
as "foundational to the project of queer theory and the advancing of dissident sexual practices during
the 1990s."[4]

See also[edit]

Feminist philosophy

Poststructuralism

Third-wave feminism

Undoing Gender

References[edit]
1.

Jump up^ Butler, Judith (2007). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
Routledge. p. v. ISBN 978-0-415-38955-6.

2.

Jump up^ Larissa MacFarquhar, "Putting the Camp Back into Campus," Lingua
Franca (September/October 1993); see also Judith Butler, "Decamping,"Lingua Franca (November
December 1993).

3.

Jump up^ Butler, Judith (2007). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
Routledge. p. vii. ISBN 978-0-415-38955-6.

4.

Jump up^ Elliott, Anthony (2002). Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. Palgrave.

p. 150. ISBN 0-333-91912-2.

Further reading[edit]

Judith Butler: Live Theory by Vicki Kirby