 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Judith Butler |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Feminism,philosophy,queer theory |
| Publisher | Routledge |
Publication date | 1990 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 272 (UK paperback edition) |
| ISBN | 0-415-38955-0 |
| Preceded by | Subjects of Desire |
| Followed by | Bodies That Matter |
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity[1][2] is a 1990 book by thepost-structuralist gender theorist and philosopherJudith Butler in which the author argues thatgender is performative, meaning that it is maintained, created or perpetuated by iterative repetitions when speaking and interacting with each other. Butler draws upon many authors in their[c] work, includingJacques Lacan,Sigmund Freud,Michel Foucault,Julia Kristeva,Jacques Derrida,Simone de Beauvoir,Luce Irigaray,Monique Wittig, among others.
Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions offeminist theory, that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Butler, "men" and "women" are categories complicated by factors such asclass,ethnicity, andsexuality. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of thepatriarchy and erases the particularity ofoppression in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschewsidentity politics in favor of a new, coalitionalfeminism that critiques the basis of identity andgender. They challenge assumptions about the distinction often made betweensex and gender, according to which sex isbiological while gender is culturally constructed. Butler argues that this false distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior todiscourse and cultural imposition is only an effect of the functioning of gender. Sex and gender are bothconstructed.
Examining the work of the philosophersSimone de Beauvoir andLuce Irigaray, Butler explores the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender. For de Beauvoir, women constitute a lack against which men establish their identity; for Irigaray, thisdialectic belongs to a "signifying economy" that excludes the representation of women altogether because it employsphallocentric 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:[d] 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. They call 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: the anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss's anthropologicalstructuralism, in which theincest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women;Joan Riviere's psychoanalytic description of "womanliness as a masquerade" that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; andSigmund Freud's psychoanalytic explanation ofmourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one, in whichcathexis becomes identification.
Butler extends these accounts of gender identification in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. With Lévi-Strauss, they suggest that incest is "a pervasive cultural fantasy" and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, they state thatmimicry and masquerade form the "essence" of gender; with Freud, they assert that "gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition",[6] and therefore that "same-sexed gender identification" depends on an unresolved (but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of theOedipal myth). For Butler, "heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities",[7] and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, they point 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 the psychoanalystJacques Lacan that posited a paternalSymbolic order and a repression of the "feminine" required for language and culture,Julia Kristeva added women back into the narrative by claiming that poetic language—the "semiotic"—was a surfacing of the maternal body in writing, uncontrolled by the paternallogos. For Kristeva, poetic writing andmaternity are the sole culturally permissible ways for women to return to the maternal body that bore them, and female homosexuality is an impossibility, a nearpsychosis. 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 anontological 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.".[8] Butler argues the notion of "maternity" as the long-lost haven for females is a social construction, and invokesMichel Foucault's arguments inThe 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 ofHerculine Barbin, anintersex 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 Barbin's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity."[9] Butler accuses Foucault ofromanticism, claiming that his proclamation of a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work inThe 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 days not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. They suggest 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 the feminist theoristMonique Wittig's thinking aboutlesbianism 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 naming body parts as sexual creates a fictitious limitation of what body parts can be considered erogenous, socially constructing the features themselves and fragmenting what was really once "whole". Language, repeated over time, "produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as 'facts'.[10]
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-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?."[11] Building on the thinking of the anthropologistMary Douglas, outlined in herPurity 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 thatAIDS brings about as corresponding to the pollution of the homosexual's sexual activity, in particular his crossing the forbidden bodily boundary of theperineum. 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."[12] Butler proposes the practice ofdrag 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. They claim 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 them formed through repetition, through a "practice of signification."[13] 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" as gender.[14] By redeploying those practices of identity and exposing as always failed the attempts to "become" one's gender, they believe that a positive, transformative politics can emerge.
Routledge first publishedGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990; other Routledge publications occurred in 1999, 2006 (Routledge Classics) and 2007.[2]
Gender Trouble was reviewed by Shane Phelan inWomen & Politics.[15] The work has enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring a fanzine,Judy![16][17] In a preface to the second edition of the book, Butler writes that they were surprised by the size of the book's audience and its eventual status as a founding text of queer theory.[18]
Anthony Elliott writes that with the publication ofGender Trouble, Butler established themself 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."[19]
On November 23, 2018, the playwrightJordan Tannahill read the entirety ofGender Trouble outside theHungarian Parliament Building in protest of Hungarian Prime MinisterViktor Orbán's decision to revoke accreditation and funding for gender studies programs in the country.[20][21]
