Chapter 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire
Butler begins Gender Trouble with an attack on one of the central assumptions of feminist theory: the supposition that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Butler, "women" and "woman" are fraught categories, complicated by class, ethnicity, sexuality, and other facets of identity. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy, and erases the particularity of oppression in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschews identity politics in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender.
She begins her critique of identity and gender by challenging her readers' assumptions about the distinction often made between sex and gender. (In this distinction, sex is biological while gender is culturally constructed.) In the first place, Butler argues, this distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism, and in the second place, the distinction proves false. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse and cultural imposition is merely an effect of the functioning of gender. That is, both sex and gender are constructed.
Butler next examines the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray in order to explore the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender. For Beauvoir, women constitute a lack against which men establish their identity; for Irigaray, this dialectic belongs to a "signifying economy" that excludes the representation of women altogether because it employs phallocentric language. However, as Butler notes, both Beauvoir and Irigaray assume that there exists a female "self-identical being" in need of representation, and their arguments hide the impossibility of "being" a gender at all.
Instead, in her introduction of the central idea of Gender Trouble, Butler argues that gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute—rather than express—the illusion of the stable gender identity. Furthermore, if the appearance of “being” a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man") remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification." In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. She calls for gender trouble, for people to trouble the categories of gender through performance.
Read more about this topic: Gender Trouble
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