Judith Butler

1990 'Gender Trouble'

• Well known as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity
• Butler argued that feminism had made a mistake by trying to assert that 'women' were a group with common characteristics and interests.
• That approach Butler said, performed 'an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations' - reinforcing a binary view of gender relations in which human beings are divided into two clear-cut groups, women and men
• Rather than opening up possibilities for a person to form and choose their own individual identity, feminism had closed the options down.
• Feminists rejected idea that biology is destiny but developed an account of patriarchal culture which assumed masculine and feminine genders would inevitably be built, by culture upon 'male' and 'female' bodies, making the same destiny just as inescapable.
• Rather than being a fixed attribute in a person, gender should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times.
• 'The experience of a gendered, cultural identity is considered an achievement.'
• Sex is seen to cause gender which is seen to cause desire. This is seen as a kind of continuum
• Butler 'Smash the supposed links between these, so gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors'
• Butler - 'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.'
• Certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold e.g. they have come to seem natural in our culture as it presently is but, she suggests it doesn't have to be that way
• Rather than proposing some utopian vision, with no idea of how we might get to such a state, Butler calls for subversive action in the present
• We all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take.
• By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity.