Judith Butler

z
Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity
(1990)
 Judith Butlerz (b.1956) rose to prominence in 1990
with Gender Trouble, which caused an unexpected stir as
it unearthed foundational assumptions both in philosophy
and in feminist theory, namely the facticity of sex.

 Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Butler was raised in a Jewish

family and according to her own words, was initiated into
philosophical thinking at the age of fourteen by a rabbi
from her local synagogue.

 Attended Bennington College and then Yale University,

which included a Fulbright Scholarship to Heidelberg
University in 1979. In 1984, she received her PhD in
philosophy from Yale University. Her philosophical
training was primarily in German Idealism,
phenomenology, and the work of the Frankfurt School.
The turn towards post-structuralism, to which her work is
considered to make a significant contribution, followed
her PhD.
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 Butler’s most influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity can be read as an
intervention into feminism. Unmooring feminism at its
basis, the book questions the assumption that there is
such a thing as the unity of the experience of women.
Women of color, who could not accept the category of
women as their privileged one, articulated a critique of a
unified subject of feminism and the reductive scheme
operating within white feminism. Attuned to that polyphonic
discourse, Butler maintained that the construction of the
category of women involves a regulation of gender
relations, which reverses feminist aims. She demonstrated
that a feminism premised on the category of women is
complicit with compulsory heterosexuality, as
heterosexuality is the unreflected condition of a binary
coded system of gender and desire.
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 Gender Trouble tackles the problem of exclusion yet in another way. The text analyzes the
categorical violence that is exercised in the act of naming “men” and “women.” It’s a
violence that particularly affects those who cannot or don’t want to conform to a binary
system of gender. Butler troubled the seeming fixity of this system by making the major
point that the “naturalness” of the female and male sexed bodies is in fact the effect of
repeated performative acts and as such culturally constructed and open to contestation.

 Clearly, the achievement of Gender Trouble was that it launched a more nuanced

understanding of identity and its mechanisms of exclusion. However, the radical critique of
categories of identity can also be couched in positive terms, as in opening up new political
possibilities. In this sense, Gender Trouble also marks the advent of a new feminism.