Chambers - 2017

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Clare Chambers
The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory
Edited by Jacob T. Levy
Subject: Political Science, Political Theory Online Publication Date: Jun 2017
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.013.59
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter discusses Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (GT) and its legacy in political theo
ry. It sets out five themes of GT: the claim that identity is always the result of power; the
interplay between sex, gender, and desire; the critique of “identity politics,” including any
feminism that posits a stable category of “women”; the concept of performativity; and the
possibility of change via subversive performance. The chapter then goes on to discuss the
major impact that GT has had on feminist theory, queer theory, trans theory, and intersec
tionality, along with the surprising lack of impact on theories of multiculturalism and
identity theory more broadly. Finally the chapter discusses some main criticisms of the
book.
Keywords: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, feminism, performativity, identity politics, queer theory, intersectionali
ty, gender, trans
Judith Butler understood her argument in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (GT) to be both feminist and deeply unsettling for feminism. As she writes in
the original Preface:
Contemporary feminist debates over the meaning of gender lead time and again to
a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually cul
minate in the failure of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative
valence (xxvii).
The indeterminacy is the question of how to understand gender difference. Feminism pur
ports to be a theory by and for women, thus premised on the notion of female identity and
women’s interests. At the same time, the drive to understand gender inequality leads fem
inists to reject claims that women are naturally or essentially different from men. A domi
nant strategy within feminism has been to distinguish sex and gender, with sex referring
to biological difference and gender referring to cultural difference. The distinction allows
feminists to say that any essential sex differences do not explain or justify gender differ
ences, which are non-essential. But Butler wishes to attack the sex/gender distinction
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from a feminist angle, arguing that both gender and sex are the result of politics, of dis
course, and of power.1
Butler’s annihilation of the gender binary and attendant sexual inequality is radical and
liberating. If even sex difference has no truth other than that ascribed to it by social
norms and cultural construction, then there is no form of sex inequality immune to cri
tique and, ultimately, to change. But GT also disrupts feminism, for if there is no pre-polit
ical or stable category of “women” then it is not clear who feminism properly represents,
in whose interests it ought to work, or who has the right to attempt to answer these ques
tions. That is to say, feminism as a movement by and for women becomes, on Butler’s ac
count, not merely normatively problematic but internally contradictory. Feminism fights
gender oppression, but for Butler any insistence that feminism is “for women” is an insis
tence on the very gender binary that is the source of that oppression.
The focus of GT, then, is feminism and gender, and within political theory it is feminists
and queer theorists who have engaged with it. But the book has implications for all forms
of identity politics. Its general claim is that identity is always the result of politics. We are
constructed by our context, and the idea that some features of our selves are more signifi
cant than others, more coherent than others, and appropriately the subject of categoriza
tion and representation, is inherently an act of politics rather than taxonomy. Butler’s
ideas are complex and nuanced but the basic insight is that there is nothing essential to
the body that marks out our genitals, or our chromosomes, or our reproductive organs
(rather than, say, our eye color, or the length of our femur, or the size of our heart) as the
appropriate markers by which to construct an entire system of social division. Similarly,
there is nothing natural or pre-political about the idea that our religious beliefs, our an
cestral background, or our nationality should be the basis for representation and justice
claims (rather than, say, our aesthetic preferences, our moral judgments, or our emotion
al responses). An identity politics grounded on, as opposed to engaging with, the notion
of cultural, religious, or national identity is thus just as problematic as a feminism
grounded on rather than engaging with, the notion of gender identity.
In what follows I first outline the main themes of the book and draw attention to their rel
evance to mainstream political theory. I then briefly note the legacy of the book within po
litical theory, particularly feminist and queer theory. I end by considering some criticisms
that have been made of the work.
The Argument of GT
In what follows I outline five central themes of GT:
1. The claim that identity, including sex/gender identity, is always the result and not
the cause of power, discourse, and politics.
2. The account of the interplay between sex, gender, and desire.
3. The critique of “identity politics,” including any feminism that rests on the idea of
a stable and pre-political category of “women.”
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4. The concept of performativity.

5. The account of the possibility of change via subversive performance.
No Pre-political Identity
GT’s central claim is its critique of the idea of a pre-political identity, as in the “sex” half
of the sex/gender distinction. Butler starts by noting that the sex/gender distinction has
radical implications that are not always fully understood. If “sex” and “gender” are dis
tinct, such that gender cannot be fully explained by reference to sex, then there is no rea
son why the feminine gender should always accompany the female sex, or the masculine
gender the male sex. Moreover, if gender is not explained or caused by sex, there is no
reason to think that there should be only two genders. If a female can be feminine or mas
culine, why could she not in principle be both, or neither (10)? We are limited here by lan
guage, for we have few satisfactory words for genders that are neither or both masculine
or feminine. “Androgyny” is one term, but others like “butch” and “femme” remain
strongly within the gender binary.
The limitations of language to describe persons, actions, or experiences outside of the

gender binary connects to another theme: the idea that the dominant system of gender
oppression renders those persons, actions, and experiences unintelligible and unliveable.
At stake, Butler argues, is not merely whether certain ways of being are respected or val
ued, but rather their very possibility. What sort of gender are we able to conceive our
selves as having? Is it even conceptually possible to exist outside of the dominant norma
tive categories of male and female, masculine and feminine? As social norms shift, identi
ties such as “gay” and “lesbian” become more recognized and possible, but other gen
dered attributes remain unnamed and unimagined. Butler frequently refers to this exclu
sion of non-traditional genders as violent (viii; cf. Chambers and Carver 2008, 78 ff).
The sex/gender distinction leads us, then, to the radical position that there can be more
than two genders and that these genders do not need to map on to sex in any regulated
way. But the argument goes further. Butler uses the work of feminist biologists such as
Anne Fausto-Sterling, and radical theorists such as Michel Foucault and Monique Wittig,
to argue that even sex is the result of politics and of power.2 There are several strands to
this argument. One is the denial that there are, biologically, two discrete sexes. We define
sex using at least three different biological features: visible genitals, internal reproduc
tive organs, and chromosomes. In “normal” men and women these three features cohere,
but there are many people,3 commonly referred to as “intersex,” for whom these three
features of sex are not aligned, or who have ambiguities in one or more feature (such as
genitals that could be described as either a large clitoris or a small penis). It follows that
the idea that there are two distinct and discrete sexes is a cultural act of naming, not a bi
ological fact.
Butler uses the work of Foucault and Wittig to explain how the categories of sex are pro
duced through power and discourse. If there is no biological truth to the idea that there
are two distinct sexes, then the act of identifying people as female or male is inherently
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social, and enforcing specific norms of behavior for each sex becomes an inherently politi
cal act of power. Thus Butler follows Wittig in concluding “Because ‘sex’ is a political and
cultural interpretation of the body, there is no sex/gender distinction along conventional
lines; gender is built into sex, and sex proves to have been gender from the start” (144).
Interplay between Sex, Gender, and Desire
How, then, are sex and gender established? For Butler, the answer must include an ac
count of the normative role of heterosexuality. Under what other feminists might call pa
triarchy but Butler terms “the heterosexual matrix,”4 heterosexuality is normatively re
quired. Homosexuality is marked out as not merely unusual but also deviant, as a viola
tion of some rule that is supposedly and paradoxically both biological and cultural (168).
Butler argues that gender roles are established through, and at the same time as, the
norms of heterosexuality.
According to the patriarchal gender binary, there are two distinct sexes, and these cause
and explain two distinct genders. It is because a person is of the male sex that he will
have the masculine gender, and one marker of maleness and masculinity is sexual attrac
tion to persons of the female sex, who therefore have the feminine gender and therefore
are sexually attracted to men. Sex, gender, and desire become mutually supporting and
causally linked. It follows, and this is an essential part of Butler’s critique, that the gen
der binary is not merely sexist, it is also fundamentally homophobic.
Butler emphasizes, however, that it is not a result of her argument that heterosexuality is
essentially reactionary or oppressive, or homosexuality essentially subversive or liberat
ing. She rejects political lesbianism, insofar as it is adapted as a strategy for escaping
“heterosexual constructs.” Instead, she argues, “power relations continue to construct
sexuality for women even within the terms of a ‘liberated’ heterosexuality or lesbian
ism” (39). The goal is not to escape power relations, for that would be impossible. The aim
rather is to subvert those power relations that are oppressive.
Critique of Identity Politics
The arguments of GT lead to a general skepticism of the idea of womanhood as fundamen

tal to feminism. There is no such thing as a “woman” outside of the socially constructed
gender binary, so to situate feminism as always-already by and for women is to fail to en
gage with one of the main causes of gender oppression. Butler understands this claim to
be one also found in Foucault (122). Butler critiques some aspects of Foucault’s account,
but she endorses the fundamental idea that a feminism that is based on identity is lacking
(xxix).
This idea that identity is always the result of power and of social norms is even more
clearly applicable to identities such as culture, religion, and nationality. These identities
are seldom thought to rest on anything so immutable as biology, so their location within
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politics and discourse is well-established. The general conclusions of GT thus apply just as
well to these forms of identity politics:
The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity

must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subse
quently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a “do
er behind the deed,” but that the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the
deed (181).
Relatedly, Butler sees claims of unity as conceptually flawed and normatively problemat
ic. The problem with attempting to base feminism on some supposedly stable category of
women is that it can be done only at the expense of imposing an artificial unity on that
category of women, a unity which inevitably excludes certain people and renders certain
deeply political matters beyond the purview of political debate.
Performativity
GT is perhaps best known for its use of the concept of performativity.5 For Butler, perfor
mativity is the way that gender is produced and maintained. If gender is not caused by bi
ology, and if it is tied to heterosexuality only by social norms and social construction, we
need an account of how an individual develops and sustains a gender identity. Butler’s
claim is that gender is not a final resting place, but something that must be constantly re
plenished. For Butler, “If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is
a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can
be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of pri
mary and stable identity” (174).
Although gender is not the result of biological sex or some inner true identity, according
to the norms of the gender binary it must appear to be so. What this means is that people
must display a stable gender identity: they must engage in a sustained gendered perfor
mance. The concept of performance captures both that gender is something that is acted
rather than a revelation of an internal core, and that gender is maintained by repeated
actions rather than by internal thoughts. Thus gendered enactments “are performative in
the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrica
tions” (173). And gender must be performed in order to maintain and display it: “As in
other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated.
This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already
socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitima
tion” (178).
These sustained and repeated gendered performances give the impression that gender is
internally caused. We expect that gender “operates as an interior essence that might be
disclosed, an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it
anticipates” (xiv). We expect, and are supposed, to “naturally” identify with the gender to
which we are assigned by society and by our visible bodily features. We thereby embrace,
accept, and amplify any interests, or activities, or rules of deportment or appearance that
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cohere with that gender, and repress or ignore those that do not. As a result, we present
a coherent gender performance, and that very performance reinforces the idea that we
really are members of the performed gender. “We” is, of course, a term that replicates the
normative requirements of the gender binary; there are many people who are unable or
unwilling to maintain the gender performance required of them, and the “violence” done
to them is one of the concerns of GT.
Change and Subversion
How, then, to disrupt the gender binary? GT has been so influential not just because it of
fers an account of how sex difference and heterosexuality are normatively maintained,
but also because it offers the potential for change and subversion. Butler famously argues
that drag is one way of making explicit, and therefore undermining, the idea that gender
identity is natural and stably caused by biological sex. In a drag performance, one be
lieves that one is watching a “real” man “pretending” to be a woman. The performance is
understood as a fake, a copy of a real woman performed, for laughs, by a real man. How
ever, Butler argues that our belief that the performer is “really” a man is deeply problem
atic. In order for the performer to be a “real” man the performer would have to have male
genitals and enact a male gender. But as he is clothed, we cannot see his genitals, and as
he is performing drag, we cannot see the gender he enacts when offstage. The result is
that the drag performance forces us to confront the separateness of biological sex and
performed gender: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of
gender itself—as well as its contingency” (175).
GT thus presents drag as a form of subversion of the gender binary. The sense in which it
is subversive has often been misunderstood, though, so that in the tenth Anniversary
Preface Butler felt the need to clarify. Her claim is not that there is something shocking,
transgressive, or inherently liberating about cross-dressing that makes drag subversive.6
Her claim is rather that drag is subversive simply because it makes explicit the essential
performativity of gender, and there is subversion inherent to making explicit that which is
usually concealed.
Butler often uses the idea of parody when talking about the subversion of drag. Again,
though, the point is not that parody undermines any particular gender identity. It is not
that drag parodies femininity and thus shows femininity to be a sham. Instead, drag paro
dies the very idea of a “true” gender identity, and it is that idea of a true identity, not any
particular version of gender identity, that should be disrupted (175). As Butler puts it,
“Drag is an example that is meant to establish that ‘reality’ is not as fixed as we generally
assume it to be” (xxiv).
Legacy
Within feminism it no longer makes sense to start from a position of assuming an essen
tial womanhood. Butler writes “What worried me most [when writing GT] were the ways
that panic in the face of [minority gender] practices rendered them unthinkable. Is the
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breakdown of gender binaries, for instance, so monstrous, so frightening, that it must be

held to be definitionally impossible and heuristically precluded from any effort to think
gender?” (viii). A twenty-first-century feminist is likely to answer “of course not!” and GT
is at least part of the reason. Herta Nagl-Docekal states that “In the context of today’s de
bate in feminist theory, the conventional wisdom no longer differentiates between nature
and culture or sex and gender” (2004, 15), and while Butler is by no means the only theo
rist who motivates this statement she is an important part of the picture.
Within political theory, several feminists directly engage with Butler’s work to develop ac
counts of agency. A key text in feminist political theory is Feminist Contentions (Benhabib
et al. 2005), in which Butler, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Drucilla Cornell debate
each other’s work. The book is a genuine interaction, rather than a set of responses to
Butler, but it demonstrates how issues raised by Butler—issues of agency, identity, deter
minism, and change—became a central part of feminist debate. It also demonstrates the
dilemmas that many feminists, including Butler, felt as to whether post-modern and post-
structural theory are useful to the feminist cause. For Chambers and Carver, “It seems
highly unlikely that at any level [Butler] was writing the book as an introduction to post-
structuralist philosophy for feminists, although arguably that is what the book be
came” (2008, 47).
Another area of feminist theory influenced by GT is intersectionality. Intersectionality is

the observation that women’s experiences are shaped not just by their gender but also by
their race and class, that ethnic minority and working class women suffer oppression that
is distinct from that suffered by ethnic majority or middle class women. Part of the theory
of intersectionality is the idea that the category of “woman” is problematic, since it con
ceals other differences of race and class. This idea does not originate in GT (hooks 1983;
Spelman 1988; Crenshaw 1991) but many later discussions of intersectionality and the
idea of an essential or universal womanhood have had to take account of Butler (Zack
2005; Chambers and Carver 2008, 4). For Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin, while “It
would be too much to claim that Butler was solely responsible for mainstreaming inter
sectionality … the popular reception of [her] books in the feminist theoretical canon has
made the subject of intersectionality more accepted” (2013, 174).
Butler’s work has had a profound influence on queer theory—an impact which, according
to Moya Lloyd, “cannot be overestimated” (2007, 2). Cheshire Calhoun (2007) cites Butler
as one of the field’s founders, along with Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and
Gayle Rubin, thanks to her insistence that sex, gender, and sexuality are all culturally
constructed. Although GT barely mentions trans issues, discussing transgender only in
the few pages given to the example of drag, its argument has placed trans politics at the
heart of queer theory (Prosser 1998, 24; Sedgwick 1993, 1).
But Butler’s work has not had a similar legacy in other areas of identity politics. GT was
published in 1990, amidst intense focus on identity politics within political theory.7 It was
contemporaneous or nearly so with Okin (1989), Kymlicka (1989), and Young (1990), and
preceded Taylor (1992), Benhabib (1992), Rawls (1993), Tully (1995), and Kymlicka
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(1995). GT’s main thesis, that identity is always the result of power, politics, and dis
course, and that identity is therefore a deeply problematic thing on which to ground poli
tics, is of fundamental relevance to the debates on multiculturalism that dominated politi
cal theory for much of the decade after its publication. It has been cited vastly more times
than any of the works just listed, including Political Liberalism. And yet the only one of
those works to cite GT at all is Benhabib 1992.8
GT has had far greater influence than the vast majority of contemporaneous works in po
litical theory. Its subject matter is central to the concerns of political theory. And yet its
impact on some of the major works in the discipline is minimal. This puzzling state of af
fairs is perhaps best explained by two things: First, while GT’s implications are significant
and general, it focuses on gender, an area typically ignored by political theorists who are
not explicitly feminist.9 Second is GT’s style, to which I next turn.
Critique
In this final section I discuss seven criticisms of GT:
1. Its language is wilfully obscure and difficult.

2. It is voluntaristic and gives insufficient weight to embodiment.
3. It is deterministic and offers no possibility for change.
4. Its critique of universalism cannot theorize cross-cultural, hegemonic patriarchy.
5. It contains insufficient normative resources to criticize oppression.
6. It is insufficiently, or anti-, feminist.
7. Its rejection of embodiment and its treatment of drag undermine actual transgen
dered people and experiences.
Language
As just noted, one criticism that is often made by philosophers in the analytical tradition
is that GT is too difficult to read. Nussbaum (1999), for example, scathingly writes “It is
difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they
are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak
clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponder
ous and obscure.”
GT is difficult to read in places, but it is perfectly comprehensible if given some attention,

and it is certainly no more difficult than the work of many philosophers firmly within the
analytical tradition.10 One critic who takes care not to dismiss GT for being hard to read is
Susan Bordo: “I am a professional philosopher and I had to read sections over and over
before I was able to figure out what Butler was saying in them. This difficulty is not at all
unusual among works written for specialized, philosophically trained audiences; it’s in
the grand philosophical tradition to reduce ordinary readers to tears. … The problem
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comes from the limitations that this places on the appropriate audience for this
book” (1992, 173).
In the tenth Anniversary Preface to GT Butler addresses these complaints: “we underesti
mate the reading public, its capacity and desire for reading complicated and challenging
texts, when the complication is not gratuitous, when the challenge is in the service of call
ing taken-for-granted truths into question, when the taken for grantedness of those truths
is, indeed, oppressive” (xvii).
Voluntarism
Unsurprisingly, Butler’s attack on the idea of pre-political sex, or commonality among

women, proved controversial. Lynne Segal notes that many feminists “respond only with
bewilderment or exasperation to Butler’s claim that both sex and gender, including any
notion of the ‘female’ or of ‘women’, are but regulatory fictions. Disconcertingly she ad
mits no limit or constraint emerging from anatomical bodies (such as a capacity for im
pregnation and child-bearing) on the fictions, or inscriptions, which discourse have been
able to produce or implant in their construction of ‘women’ and ‘female embodi
ment’” (1994, 192).
Butler (1993, x–xi) engages with this critique:
To claim that the materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition

of norms is hardly a self-evident claim. … For surely bodies live and die; eat and
sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these “facts,” one
might sceptically proclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere construction. Surely
there must be some kind of necessity that accompanies these primary and ir
refutable experiences. And surely there is. But their irrefutability in no way im
plies what it might mean to affirm them and through what discursive means.
Which is to say: the materiality of the body certainly matters, and is a fundamental part of
human experience, but it is not the end of the matter: it still needs constructing, theoriz
ing, problematizing.
Bordo similarly finds the account of drag as subversion in GT overly voluntaristic. She
notes that Butler does not engage with any evidence as to whether people do in fact react
to drag in the way that she proposes, with a new-found awareness of the contingencies of
gender, and suggests instead that many drag performers and artists understand their per
formance as occurring firmly within, and possibly even as reinforcing, the gender binary
(1992). Butler herself admits this possibility in the tenth Anniversary Preface (xiv).
Determinism
In contrast, Benhabib criticizes GT for being overly deterministic, since it seems to allow
no way to escape the social construction of gender and identity:
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How can one be constituted by discourse without being determined by it? A

speech-act theory of performative gender constitution cannot give us a sufficiently
thick and rich account of gender formation that would also explain the capacities
of human agents for self-determination
(Benhabib et al. 2005, 110).
Benhabib thus worries that GT does not provide the resources to explain the “capacities
for agency and resignification it wants to attribute to individuals” (Benhabib et al. 2005,
111), leaving the possibility of subversion mysterious. Benahbib endorses Butler’s cri
tique of a unified, essentialist identity, but argues that Butler goes too far into determin
ism and seems to preclude all agency (1992, 215). She thus identifies Butler’s project as
deeply problematic not merely for traditional identity politics, but for any transformative
politics at all.
This critique of determinism is also made by Lois McNay, who argues that the all-encom
passing nature of Butlerian social construction makes it difficult “to distinguish whether
an act is politically effective or not” (2000, 46). Indeed, McNay argues that Butler’s at
tempt to avoid “crudely voluntaristic interpretations of performativity” go too far: “the in
dividual is conceived as the passive effect of discourse” (2008, 167).
Readers will note that criticisms of GT as too determinist and too voluntarist are, at least,
in tension with each other. For Lloyd this suggests a conflict between two aspects of
Butler’s account: “performativity understood as constitutive of the subject and a more
theatrical sense of performance where an actor volitionally plays a part” (2007, 58). Cer
tainly the account of performativity has been both evocative and controversial. Are we
trapped within our performances, mere puppets reciting patriarchal scripts? Or are we
creative artists, playfully donning high heels or cowboy hats, fetish wear or aprons?
Chambers and Carver consider the criticism of determinism misplaced (2008, 45). It is
the very commitment to a pre-political substance or identity that is a commitment to con
straint. Butler’s account, in contrast, leaves everything undetermined and open to
change. They maintain that Butler needs to answer the foundational challenge posed by
critics, “how can you understand sex as a product of the discourse of gender without
simply ignoring the body?” but that an answer can be given (2008, 66).
Universalism
For Fraser (in Benhabib et al. 2005, 162), Butler’s work “has much to offer feminists.”
She particularly lauds Butler’s account of performativity, since it highlights how gender
identity is historically constructed and therefore malleable. However, Fraser argues that
GT’s account of subversion and the overthrow of oppression is deficient: GT’s “internal
normative resources—reification of performativity is bad, dereification is good—are far
too meagre for feminist purposes.” Fraser also argues that GT’s critique of the universal
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is limiting. Without theorizing across cultural contexts, how can we make sense of a hege
monic, dominant, cross-cultural patriarchal order? (Benhabib et al. 2005, 163).
Nagl-Docekal also criticizes Butler’s rejection of the universal: “Butler is not right when
she assumes that feminist politics which claims a we necessarily is founded on essentialist
assumptions. The common ground of women assumed here is that they experience a cer
tain oppression, not that they share certain feminine characteristics” (2004, 203 n. 83).
Perhaps it makes sense to talk of a group that has a constructed identity that can never
theless be mobilized politically. An example might be the working class in Marxist analy
sis: though clearly the result and not the cause of capitalism, working-class identity and
consciousness can be the cause of revolutionary action.
There is an important difference, however. Pointing to the existence of the working class
is not in itself a violent act of capitalism. While the working class would not exist without
capitalism, once capitalism exists the working class exists too, as a real category with ob
jective membership criteria. For Butler one cannot even point to the existence of male
ness or femaleness, or place a person within the category of male or female, without
wielding “the violence of gender norms” (xix). That there is no non-violent definition of
gender is the basis of Butler’s critique.
Nonetheless, for Nagl-Docekal, conceptions of the universal can serve as the emancipato
ry aim of discourse ethics: as a conclusion on which participants must agree, rather than
as a prior act of exclusion. Butler declares herself open to this possibility (xviii).
Normative Resources
Butler frequently offers caveats as to the subversive potential of drag and other minority
practices, caveats that deflect some of the criticisms of her work as overly voluntaristic:
the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sex
ual practice. Gender can be rendered ambiguous without disturbing or reorienting
normative sexuality at all. Sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to
contain or deflect non-normative sexual practice and thereby work to keep norma
tive sexuality intact. (xiv)
Butler’s point, then, is not to deny the claims of queer theorists that oppression of sexual
minorities is an important part of gender oppression, but rather to remind us that being
in a sexual minority is neither a necessary nor a sufficient part of subverting that oppres
sion. She refuses to go further: “I am not interested,” she insists, “in delivering judg
ments on what distinguishes the subversive from the unsubversive” (xxi). Her insistence
that all gender identities and sexual practices are necessarily the result of power and of
discourse, and her refusal to distinguish subversive from reactionary gender practices,
may render her account somewhat lacking in the normative resources that are necessary
in order to engage in political action (Chambers 2008, 85–86; see also Fraser in Benhabib
et al. 2005, 162–163).
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Post-structuralist theorists such as Butler pay more attention to, and offer more sophisti
cated analyses of, power than theorists in the analytic or Anglo-American tradition. They
understand the importance of social norms and have the conceptual resources to criticize
the analytic theory’s more voluntarist, individualist, and asocial conceptions of choice.
Post-structuralists can, however, find themselves lacking normative resources with which
to distinguish oppressive social norms from unproblematic ones, or to identify when mere
subversion becomes emancipation. Analytical political theory can be of use here, offering
normative resources with which to assess the multifaceted, concealed power behind so
cial norms.
Anti-feminist
Butler has been criticized by various feminists. Some argue that her focus on identity and
performance misses the key injustices faced by women: violence, unequal pay, discrimina
tion (Nussbaum 1999). Others argue that Butler’s work makes it difficult to mount femi
nist critiques of inequality (Jeffreys 2005, 18; Langton 2009).
In assessing these critiques it is useful to distinguish the claim that Butler distracts from
the claim that she distorts. Feminism is often dismissed as a distraction by anti-feminists
who retort that there are much more important political concerns than purportedly harm
less or irrelevant “women’s issues,” such as critiques of beauty or pornography. It would
be similarly unhelpful and even anti-feminist to say that if Butler’s work does not address
all, or even the most prominent, facets of gender inequality then it cannot be legitimately
feminist. After all, a fundamental trait of feminism is the assertion that the domain of the
political is wide for women, and thus in general.
The claim of distortion is much more serious, though, and this is the charge levelled by
Nussbaum, Langton, and others. If Butler’s account makes it impossible to understand
and oppose concrete oppression, disguising constraint and abuse as mere failures or al
ternative understandings of performativity, that would be a serious charge against it. It is
here that the normative resources available to Butler must become explicit, along with
her account of subversion. Chambers and Carver see great scope in Butler’s account of
subversion, for if Butler is right that gender inequality is inextricably bound up with the
heterosexual matrix, then acts that subvert that matrix also take a toll on inequality
(2008).
Transphobic
Butler’s work has been influential in queer theory, but its impact has been mixed. Some
queer and trans theorists criticize GT for undermining transgendered and transsexual ex
perience. Prosser argues that Butler’s account seems to undermine transgender identi
ties by failing to account for the strong sense of cross-gender identity that is felt by many
trans people; crucially, it ignores or even questions the possibility of “the embodied trans
gendered subject” (1998, 26). The role of transgender in GT is to illustrate the performa
tivity of gender, that “gender is drag” (Prosser 1998, 28), that transgender is subversive,
Page 12 of 16

and that transgender is queer, claims that conflict with the self-understandings of many
trans people. Butler (1993, 2004) has engaged with and responded to these claims. How
ever, accusations that Butler’s work is problematic for transgender persist (Bourcier
2012).
Conclusion
GT remains Butler’s most influential work, but since its publication she has returned to its
themes many times, clarifying and extending its concepts and claims. Some of her later
work specifically responds to criticisms of GT, weakening their force; in other cases, her
later writings make earlier criticisms still more apt. Nonetheless, GT continues to make
an impact all of its own, and political theorists will find significant rewards if they allow
themselves to be troubled by it.
Acknowledgments
I should like to thank participants in the University of Cambridge Women’s Lunches in Po
litical Thought and Intellectual History for their comments.
References
Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Con
temporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. 2005. Feminist Con
tentions: A Philosophical Exchange. London: Routledge.
Bordo, Susan. 1992. “Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies.” Feminist Studies 18

(Spring): 159.
Bourcier, Marie-Hélène. 2012. “F*** the Politics of Disempowerment in the Second But
ler.” Paragraph 35 (July): 233.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Rout
ledge.
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. Abingdon: Routledge.
Calhoun, Cheshire. 2007. “Lesbian Philosophy.” In The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Phi
losophy, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay, 177–192. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chambers, Clare. 2008. Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice. Philadelphia:
Penn State Press.
Page 13 of 16

Chambers, Samuel A. and Terrell Carver. 2008. Judith Butler and Political Theory: Trou
bling Politics. Abingdon: Routledge.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of
Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.
Geerts, Evelien and Iris van der Tuin. 2013. “From Intersectionality to Interference: Femi
nist Onto-epistemological Reflections on the Politics of Representation.” Women’s Studies
International Forum 41: 171.
hooks, bell. 1983. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
Jeffreys, Sheila. 2003. Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective. Cam
bridge: Polity Press.
Jeffreys, Sheila. 2005. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Lon
don: Routledge.
Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kymlicka, Will, 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Ox
ford: Oxford University Press.
Langton, Rae. 2009. Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectifi
cation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lloyd, Moya. 2007. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
McNay, Lois. 2000. Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social
Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
McNay, Lois. 2008. Against Recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nagl-Docekal, Herta. 2004. Feminist Philosophy. Oxford: Westview Press.
Nussbaum, Martha. 1999. “The Professor of Parody.” The New Republic Online.
Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.
Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Co
lumbia University Press.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the
Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1: 1.
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Segal, Lynne. 1994. Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure. London: Virago Press.
Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist

Thought. London: The Women’s Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1992. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism and “The Politics
of Recognition”, edited by Amy Gutmann, 25–74. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cam

bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press.
Zack, Naomi, 2005. Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality.
Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Notes:
(1) The sex/gender distinction has frequently been denied by non-feminists, including evo
lutionary social theorists and some orthodox or traditional religions, who argue that cul
tural gender inequality can be explained and justified by biological, natural, or otherwise
essential sex difference.
(2) This focus on power is what makes Butler’s work political theory, according to Cham
bers and Carver (2008, 17).
(3) According to Fausto-Sterling 1.7% of live births are affected by some form of nondi
morphic sexual development (2000, 53).
(4) Butler herself worries that “The very notion of ‘patriarchy’ has threatened to become a
universalizing concept that overrides or reduces distinct articulations of gender asymme
try in different cultural contexts” (45–46).
(5) As Moya Lloyd notes, the concept of performativity had been used, prior to GT, by
Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin—influences that Butler cites only in subsequent works
(2007, location 1163).
(6) For criticisms of Butler based on this (mis)interpretation of the role of drag in her ac
count see Jeffreys 2003.
(7) All references in this chapter are taken from the tenth anniversary edition and thus
appear as Butler 1999.
(8) Some theorists do engage with both Butler’s work and the work of analytical liberal
ism and multiculturalism. Examples include Benhabib 1992, Chambers 2008, and McNay
2008.
Page 15 of 16

(9) Most works on social justice do not engage with gender inequality, despite gender be
ing significantly correlated with economic inequality as well as with violence, demeaned
status, lack of equality of opportunity, and other central aspects of justice.
(10) For some analytical philosophers, any difficulty in understanding non-analytical phi
losophy is interpreted as a criticism of the writer, whereas any difficulty in understanding
analytical philosophy is interpreted as a criticism of the reader. Feminists seem particu
larly vulnerable to the problem of not being taken seriously by readers who are simply
not willing to put the careful attention and effort into their reading that they would give
to non-feminist work.
Clare Chambers
Dr Clare Chambers, Jesus College, Cambridge
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Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

4. The concept of performativity.

The limitations of language to describe persons, actions, or experiences outside of the

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Interplay between Sex, Gender, and Desire

Critique of Identity Politics

The arguments of GT lead to a general skepticism of the idea of womanhood as fundamen­

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Change and Subversion

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

breakdown of gender binaries, for instance, so monstrous, so frightening, that it must be

Another area of feminist theory influenced by GT is intersectionality. Intersectionality is

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

1. Its language is wilfully obscure and difficult.

GT is difficult to read in places, but it is perfectly comprehensible if given some attention,

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Unsurprisingly, Butler’s attack on the idea of pre-political sex, or commonality among

Butler (1993, x–xi) engages with this critique:

To claim that the materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

How can one be constituted by discourse without being determined by it? A

(Benhabib et al. 2005, 110).

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Bordo, Susan. 1992. “Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies.” Feminist Studies 18

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. Abingdon: Routledge.

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

McNay, Lois. 2008. Against Recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nagl-Docekal, Herta. 2004. Feminist Philosophy. Oxford: Westview Press.

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist

Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cam­

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

Dr Clare Chambers, Jesus College, Cambridge

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 05 March 2020

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The arguments of GT lead to a general skepticism of the idea of womanhood as fundamen

Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cam