Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Butler's primary theoretical engagement is with feminism—the social, historical, cultural, academic, and political movement to claim equality for women.

In the United States, feminism went through several periods during which the movement emphasized different aims: the first wave (19th-to-early-20th-century), which focused on securing basic rights such at the right to vote or own property; the second wave (1960s and 1970s), which focused on extending rights such an ending workplace discrimination and sought to establish frameworks for talking about an essential women's experience; and the third wave (1990s), which challenged the idea that there was any such thing as an essential women's experience.

There is substantial debate about this particular way of describing feminism's history and subsequent shifts in feminism since the 1990s, but such an account can be helpful in understanding Butler's sense of urgency in rejecting the idea of a stable identity called women. Gender Trouble, published in 1990, can be read as a young, lesbian feminist's rejection of second-wave feminism, particularly of some of its exclusionary practices that devalued the experiences and perspectives of women of color and queer people. Butler's call for making space for the voices of all kinds of genders outside of the binary of masculine/feminine played an important role in consolidating queer theory, which goes beyond focusing on women to focus on theorizing gender with relation to gay, lesbian, and transgender identities (and beyond).

Several other aspects of feminism as represented by Butler are reflected in more recent controversies and challenges to North American feminism. Attempts to form coalitions of North American feminists, including the Women's March Movement, have struggled mightily to create an intersectional feminism that decenters the experience of white, affluent women. In addition, the exclusionary practices of feminists who reject transwomen's right to function in spaces and platforms designated for women seem to bear out Butler's concern that holding on to a stable body gendered and sexed as feminine would eventually lead to inequality thriving in feminism's midst.

Finally, Butler's engagement with French feminism and her warning that relying on nonwestern cultures as fodder for making arguments about woman as a universal category gestures towards the more nuanced understanding of feminism in an international context.

Butler closes Chapter 1 with this statement: “This text continues, then, as an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble” (46). Although queer studies, gender studies, feminist studies, and French theory are now seen as essential parts of various academic disciplines, at the time Butler wrote Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, some of these fields did not exist as recognized disciplines. Others had not gained enough currency in academia to even be assured of funding and professorships for people doing academic work in these areas. Butler makes trouble in any number of ways, but most particularly in her attack on feminist politics based on a shared identity, her voice as a writer, and her focus on formulating what eventually became queer studies.

The opening gambit in Butler’s discussion is to critique the most basic assumptions of the prevailing model of feminism at that time. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the work of organizing women had largely been based on consolidating around an identity called “women” that somehow managed to transcend differences in race, ethnicity, culture, history, class, and geography. The idea that solidarity around this idea was necessary to advance a pro-woman political agenda was very prevalent, and one can still see this idea at work in contemporary efforts to organize women politically or advance the political ambitions of female candidates.

When Butler argues that there is no such thing as women, that bodies are culturally constructed (not just gender), that there is no need for identity-based solidarity, and that attempts at subversion based on these myths are doomed to failure, her target is feminism itself, not just “masculinist power” (46). As influential as her text is on feminism and gender studies, it reads in retrospect as an audacious proclamation that important North American feminists had been doing feminism all wrong. The commitment to liberating all women and emancipatory rhetoric are foundational to how feminism identifies itself; some of the acrid responses to Gender Trouble make it clear that the criticism was particularly painful.

Another way Butler makes trouble is with her diction. Her writing is notoriously difficult to comprehend at times, and it is so dense with references to other theories that unpacking a sentence or a paragraph can be quite daunting unless one knows or looks up the names and ideas included. Butler has even been used as a negative example of the inaccessibility of academic writing. Butler’s justified response to these criticisms was to point out that there was nothing virtuous about accessible text. Why shouldn’t people work hard to understand something that is as complex and important as gender? One can argue that Butler’s work is recognized as brilliant based on the awards she received for this work in particular. Her kind of writing earned her prestigious academic positions and ushered in a moment in academia in which using theory in this way was lauded. Her troublemaking paid off.

Finally, one of the enduring ways that Butler makes trouble is in by pointing out that feminism perpetuates inequality, despite its supposed goal of advancing equality. One of the most damning critiques Butler lodges against feminism is that its formulations of gender at the time were riddled with heterosexism (and still are in some quarters). Butler’s critique of Julia Kristeva, a highly-respected figure for feminists, is supported with direct quotes that prove the heterosexism and her inability to see lesbian gender identity as legitimate, for example. Her critique is ultimately in the service of carving out a speaking position for queer identity, though, and indeed, her work is now regularly included as an important text for feminist, queer, and gender studies.