Esma Biroğlu

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Judith Butler, born in 1956 in Ohio in USA, is an American philosopher and famous gender

theorist. She attended a Jewish school until she was 18. She took extra lessons in ethics and

philosophy after getting fascinated by the origin and nature of notions that she received at school.

And at age of 16 she became out a lesbian. She attended Bennington College in the state of

Vermont and studied for PhD at Yale University where she became a significant figure of lesbian

community and an activist in the field of politics. Now she teaches in the Department of

Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California,

Berkeley. She is the writer of many books like Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in

Twentieth-Century France (1987), Bodies that matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993),

and many others which have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Butler is considered by the majority as the “superstar” of the nineties alternative

academics and a leading political voice who played an influential role in modeling modern

feminism. Known for her book Gender Trouble: Feminisim and the Subversion of Identity,

published in 1990, in which she calls for a new way of looking at sex and gender. The book has

sold 100,000 copies and been published in 13 languages. The works has been regarded as the

most important text in the history of gender studies and it has influenced many various

disciplines. Being regarded the founding text of queer theory, a key text for feminism as well as

a pivotal and referenced book in philosophy and literary criticism, Gender Trouble has sparked a

series of arguments which continue till the current day.

Butler’s theories on gender, sex, sexuality, identity, desire and power have influenced

both society and politics. In her work, she questions why the heterosexuality is viewed as
“normal” and why it forces people to behave, move, talk according to what is expected from

their gender. And when women behave in a masculine way or men behave in feminine way, they

are always subjected to prejudice or even violence. According to Butler, only by deconstructing

the concepts about the gender, we can change the society.

Butler starts her work by investigating the problems of defining woman. In the light of

feminism, a woman has been regarded as subjects of its political representation. She states that

women cannot be seen as a unified homogenous group because every woman is a peerless

individual. Due to great many distinctive differences between women like, those of race, rank,

position and ethnic backgrounds, they are not regarded a united group. Therefore, feminism

should not attempt to accomplish its aim by behaving as a political movement or party. Butler

illustrates that the feminist movement which calls for real equality in daily, social and political

life cannot achieve its purpose if it considers women and men substantially different and sustains

in classifying them into separate groups.

Butler goes further by criticizing some radical feminists who adopted a hostile attitudes

toward men considering them enemies or as individuals who like death, murder or rape because

by doing this they contributed in enlarging the gulf between women and men. According to her,

“the effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically

mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms” (Butler 13). In

addition to that, she advocates that if a change is needed in the society, it should be done from

within that culture and not outside of it expressing that “of what use is such a notion for

negotiation the contemporary struggles of sexuality within terms of its construction” (Butler 30).

Butler also points out that “the very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or

abiding terms” (Butler 1). As a result a revolutionary way of looking at the gender is needed:
 The consequence of such sharp disagreement about the meaning of gender . . .

establishes the need for a radical re-thinking of categories of identity within the context of

relations of radical gender asymmetry. (Butler 11)

Next Butler addresses the problem she notices in the sex-gender-desire link. In light of

conventional theory, sex generates gender which causes desire towards the opposite sex.

According to Freud, an individual identifies with one sex and desires the other. Butler totally

disagrees with the clarification of Freud’s because it leaves no space for differentiation. To her,

women do not have to feel feminine and men not necessarily feel masculine all the time.

Actualy, she interprets Simon de Simone de Beauvoir's statement that "one is not born a woman,

but rather becomes one" (de Beauvoir 125). De Beauvoir differentiates between gender and sex,

whereby gender can be seen as a social creation centred on or natural differences of the sexes.

Butler argues that:

there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural

meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a pre discursive anatomical facticity. Indeed,

sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along. (Butler 8).

Following from the idea that gender is not a core aspect of our identity, Butler deduces that

gender is a performance or an achievement rather than a biological factor. She further asks us for

considering gender as free-floating and fluid rather than fixed:

When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex,

gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequences that man and

masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and

feminine a male body as easily as female one. (Butler 6)

Butler also uses Foucault's ideas on how the self-identity is constructed in order to develop the

performative theories of gender, on how the body functions as a jail of the sex and sexuality and

as a personal 'prison' for individual identity in reference to Foucault's chapter on “Docile Bodies”

whereby the body was “in the grip of very strict powers” which enforced on it restrictions,

prohibitions or obligations" (Foucault 136), and on how society inscribes on our external

physical bodies our internal gender and sexuality. This idea may also be a reference to Foucault's

work in Discipline and Punish, “Panopticism” which imposes that prisoners are watched all the

time. Butler's theories of gender performativity signifies that our gender identities are acted out

for observation by society.

To illustrate, Butler emphasizes that there is no natural ground to gender, and no innate

connection between someone’s gender and sex just like Foucault who rejects that the sex is the

expression of human biology and puts forward the idea that the sexuality is socially constructed.

In fact, the repeated social conventions like dressing, walking, eating manners and talking give

the appearance of natural basis. When women and men behave in accordance with the

expectations of the society, they make the gender real. Butler names this process “performative”.

She argues that:

Sex is not an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a

simple fact or static condition of the body, but a process whereby regulatory norms

materialize "sex" and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those

norms. (Butler 1-2)

Hence, by knowing the reality of gender, it is up to us to change the script of our performance

and shift our roles at any time.

 As a matter of fact, Butler fortifies “gender trouble” as a way for subverting traditional

concepts of gender identities. Depicting drag as a prime metaphor in her work, she declares that

drag artists are challenging the notions of gender norm and destroying“the constitutive categories

that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity” (Butler

148). Thus, deconstructing the view of society toward gender roles can cause changes in political

culture:

If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no

longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a

set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the

ruins of the old. (Butler 149)

Butler rejects the idea that drag is a copy or imitation of the true gender by stating that:

There is no proper gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in

some sense that sex's cultural property there is no original or primary gender that drag

imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is nor original. ((Butler 127).

Throughout the work, Butler highlights that the inner identity is an illusion and the rules that

control it work via repetition. The repeated signification of this fact can help destabilizing and

demolishing this identity.

To sum up, Butler’s work is profound in casting light at crucial issues of gender

performance and identity. As a matter of fact, she deconstructs the binary oppositions

between male female gender roles, masculinity and femininity heterosexuality and

homosexuality, normality and abnormality, centralism and marginalism as well as

naturalness and unnaturalness. She criticizes the discourse in society which tries to fix

gender and sexuality. Instead, she calls for deregulation and multiplication of sexualities.
Work cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversive of Identity,

London: Routledge, 1990.