Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Citation

Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. (First published 1990; this edition includes the prefaces of 1990 and 1999.)

Chapter Summary

The book is short, about 270 pages, and has three chapters, each divided into numbered sections, with a conclusion and two prefaces. The publisher describes its argument in two steps. Butler argues that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, "essential" notion of the female, or of sex or gender; she starts by questioning the category "woman" and goes on to examine "the masculine" and "the feminine". The idea for which the book is best known, and which the publisher says is also often misinterpreted, is that gender is a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.

Preface (1999); Preface (1990)

The edition opens with the later preface, written for the 1999 edition, followed by the original preface of 1990. The pair gives a reader a sense of how the author framed the book at its first appearance and a decade later.

Chapter 1: Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

The first chapter has six sections: "Women" as the Subject of Feminism; The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire; Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate; Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond; Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance; and Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement. Its sequence moves from the category of women as the subject of feminist politics, through the relation of sex, gender and desire, to the questions of identity, substance, language and power.

Chapter 2: Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix

This chapter engages structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts in five sections: Structuralism's Critical Exchange; Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade; Freud and the Melancholia of Gender; Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification; and Reformulating Prohibition as Power. The chapter title names the heterosexual matrix as something that is produced, and the last section recasts prohibition in terms of power.

Chapter 3: Subversive Bodily Acts

The third chapter turns to the body in four sections: The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva; Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity; Monique Wittig – Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex; and Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions. The last section brings the notion of performance into a discussion of how bodily acts can subvert identity.

Conclusion: From Parody to Politics

The conclusion links the book's argument about parody and performance to political action.

Key Concepts

Chapter 1

• The category "woman": the book's starting question is whether feminism can rest on a stable subject called women.
• Sex/gender/desire: the relations among these terms that the chapter calls a compulsory order.
• Identity and the metaphysics of substance: the idea of identity as a substantial thing, which Chapter 1 questions.

Chapter 2

• Heterosexual matrix: the chapter's name for the framework that produces gender and desire.
• Prohibition and power: Chapter 2 reformulates prohibition as an instance of power.
• Masquerade and melancholia: terms taken from Riviere and Freud in the psychoanalytic discussion.

Chapter 3 and Conclusion

• Performativity: the publisher's formulation is that gender is a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
• Bodily inscription: how the body carries and displays norms, discussed through the sections on Kristeva, Foucault and Wittig.
• Parody: the conclusion's route from parody to politics.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A tightly organized argument. Three chapters with four to six numbered sections each, plus a conclusion, give a reader clear markers; the section titles describe the move being made.
• A set of explicit interlocutors. The section headings name the thinkers Butler engages: Lacan, Riviere, Freud, Kristeva, Foucault and Wittig, together with structuralism. A reader can plan which background to read first.
• Reception. Donna Haraway's endorsement printed by the publisher says the book reshapes the categories through which we experience and perform our lives and bodies. The publisher calls it one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years.
• Prefaces. The 1999 and 1990 prefaces let a reader see how the author herself reframed the project.

Limitations

• Dense theoretical vocabulary. The section headings alone (the metaphysics of substance, the production of the heterosexual matrix, fictive sex) show that the book presupposes familiarity with philosophy, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theory.
• Frequently misread. The publisher itself remarks that the concept of performance is often misinterpreted, so a reader should check summaries against the text.
• Not an empirical study. The argument proceeds by readings of theoretical texts, so a reader seeking social-scientific evidence about gender practices will find none in the contents.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the course's gender books, Gender Trouble is the major work of theory. Connell and Bridges's Gender: In World Perspective and Wade and Ferree's Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions are textbooks that treat gender as a social structure or at several levels; Weeks's Sexuality is a short introduction to the social and historical study of sexuality, and Collins's Black Feminist Thought is a major work on race, gender and class. Reading one of these first gives the sociological context that Butler's argument challenges.

Connell's Masculinities is the closest partner: it studies masculinity as a configuration of practice within gender relations, offering a social-scientific counterpart to Butler's philosophical questioning of gender categories.

How to Use This Book

This book suits graduate students and advanced undergraduates in sociology, gender studies and theory with some prior exposure to feminist theory and to the thinkers named in the section titles.

A practical plan:

• Core: the two prefaces and Chapter 1, whose six sections set out the main argument about women as the subject of feminism and about sex, gender and desire.
• Theory background: Chapter 2, best read after a short introduction to Freud, Lacan and structuralism.
• Bodies and politics: Chapter 3 and the Conclusion, which carry the argument about performance and parody.
• Reading strategy: summarize each numbered section in a sentence before moving on; the section titles are a map.