Response: Gender Trouble

Judith Butler

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) was an iconoclastic distillation of feminist theory that questions the very notions of natural gendered behaviors. Butler laid the foundation for the queer studies and broadened the concept of feminism. The theoretical formulations of Butler has influenced political philosophy, ethics and literary theory.

Gender Trouble was first published in 1990. The book critically scrutinized and criticized the preceding feminist critics like Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, and famous post poststructuralist critics Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, and finally Micheal Foucault. In Gender Trouble, Butler questions the naturality of the male/female binariness stating the cultural construction of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. “Butler argues that even anatomical differences can be experienced only through the categories and expectations set out by the culture’s signifying order. Moreover, anatomical differences are mapped to expectations about sexual desire, specifically to society’s ‘compulsory heterosexuality’” (Judith Butler 2485). Butler is against the ill-equipped binary division between male and female, “or desires that cross, combine, or otherwise fail to conform to a fairly narrow understanding of sex as genital intercourse between two people, one ‘naturally’ female, the other ‘naturally’ male” (2485).

Judith Butler’s initial argument is that a language that is fully developed to foster the political visibility of women is necessary for the development of feminist theory. Butler reminds the cultural condition, where women are always misrepresented or not represented at all.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Oxon: Routledge, 2008. Print.

“Judith Butler.” Norton Anthology of Theroy and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B Leith. New York: Norton & Company, 2001. 2485-2501. Print.