GENDER

TROUBLE
Judith Butler

A report by
Cai Antonio

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WHO IS
Butler?
•born on February 24, 1956

•BA, MA, and PhD in Philosophy fromYale

University

•currently teaches Rhetoric and Comparative

Literature at University of California, Berkeley

•best known for cultural theory, queer theory,

and some schools of philosophical
feminism from the late 20th century.
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WHO IS
Butler?
•The core idea of all Butlerian texts is the
formation of identity and subjectivity

•The central question underlying her texts

asks what are the underlying processes by
which we become subjects within the
sexed/gendered identities which are
constructed for us within the confines of
existing power structures?
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WHO IS
Butler?
•The Hegelian dialectic is an integral aspect
of the ideas of Butler

•Butler is known as ‘the’ queer theorist

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WHO IS
Butler?
•Main influences include the following:

•Hegel — dialectic

•Foucault — unfixed and constructed

identities

•Derrida — meaning occurs on a chain with

no origin/end
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GENDER
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

TROUBLE 6
 1
Subjects of Sex /
Gender /Desire

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THE SUBJECT
• ‘Woman’ as a subject-in-process

•Extends Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that

“One is not born, but rather, becomes a
woman”

•‘The subject’ is performative

•However, there is no pre-existing performer

who does those acts

•We ‘do’ our identity, it is a performative

construct
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 •No origin/end; we constantly ‘do’ gender, we ‘are’ not gender
GENDER
•Gender congeals into a form that makes it appear to have been
there all along.

•Unnatural; no necessary relationship between body and gender

•A predetermined and limited choice = renew cultural history in

our own terms

•An effect of institutions, practices, and discourses with various

and diffused points of origin

•sex = gender

• Constrained by power structures → possibilities of subversion

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 2
Prohibition,
Psychoanalysis, and
the Production of the
Heterosexual Matrix
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MODELS OF IDENTITY •Structuralist, Psychoanalytic accounts of gender,
identity, and the law through a Foucaultian lens

•2 main points

•gender is constructed; produced

•the law is multiple, proliferating and

potentially self-subverting

•“production” and “matrix”

•gender is characterised as a mould within

which the subject is cast
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MOURNING / MELANCHOLIA •Butlerian reading of Freudian theory

IMPORTANT FREUDIAN TERMS

• mourning — a reaction to a real loss

• melancholia — unsure of what was lost; reaction to imagined
loss

• identification — process and effects of identifying with others as

a response to loss

• introjection — objects from the outside world are taken into and
preserved in the ego

• incorporation — objects are preserved on the surface of the body

• dispositions — whether one desires members of the same or
opposite sex from birth onwards
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MOURNING / MELANCHOLIA •Butler asserts that dispositions are the effects of
identifications with parents of the same/opposite
sex.

•Desire does not come first

•Butler asserts that the taboo against

homosexuality comes before the incest taboo

•the child’s primary desire is always for the

parent of the same sex

•gender and sex identities are formed in

response to prohibition
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MOURNING / MELANCHOLIA
•Melancholic Heterosexuality

•All gender identity is founded on a

primary forbidden homosexual desire

•Heterosexuality is founded on primary

homosexual desire

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INCORPORATION
•Sex is likewise a result of the taboo against homosexuality

•identifications are incorporated or preserved on the

surface of the body

•incorporation literalises the loss on or in the body —>

bears sex as its literal truth

•the body is a ‘tomb’ where the lost desires are

preserved on the surface of the body
—> constitute sex and gender identities

•the body is an effect of desire; not its cause

•the body is constructed and shaped by discourse and the

law
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DISCOURSE AND THE LAW •The law…

•produces inadmissible identities and

desires which it represses

•establishes and maintains stability and

sanctioned sex and gender identities

•the repressive hypothesis (Foucault)

•heterosexuality requires homosexuality

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 3
Subversive Bodily
Acts

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DESCRIPTIONS OF THE BODY •Butler does not agree with Kristeva and
Foucault in asserting that there is a body
before discourse

•Butler agrees with Wittig in stating that the

form of the body is the product of the
heterosexual matrix that shapes it.

•Science as an example of the exclusionary;

science and naturalness as discursive
constructs
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PERFORMATIVITY
•All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social
existence; no ‘natural body’ that pre-exists its cultural
inscription

•Gender is not something one is, it is something one does;

it is a sequence of acts; a doing rather than a being.

•Gender is performative in that it becomes the identity you

appear to be

•Gender is an act that brings into being what it names

•Language and discourse ‘do’ gender

•“That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has

no natural being apart from the various acts which constitute
its reality.”
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PARODY AND DRAG
•possible to act out gender in a way that will draw
attention to its constructed ness —> drag

•“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the

imitative structure of gender itself .”

•Gender congeals.

•Gender does not happen once and for all when

we are born

•It is a sequence of repeated acts that harden

into appearance of something that has been
there all along.
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YOURcreates
BEHAVIOR
your gender

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