Performativity of Gender

Troubling Gender

Butler made the case in Gender Trouble that feminism had erred by suggesting, both implicitly and explicitly, that “women” were a homogenous group with shared, universally common attributes and concerns. Drawing from a range of theoretical approaches throughoutincluding Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Monique WittigButler argued that this stance led to what she described as a reification of gender relations: an unquestioning assumption that we know what we mean when we say “woman” and “man,” and the inference that there are only these two genders. Such an attitude, she claimed, closes down possibilities, narrowing the range of identities from which people can choose.

Although feminism had rejected the account that gender is the result of biological destiny, instead, according to Butler, it had erected a constructivist account that masculine and feminine genders are shaped, through the influence of culture, onto the biological givens of the male and female bodies. This in a sense therefore reinstates the same determinism that feminism had sought to surmount: that one is born with a “male” or “female” body and consequently becomes, as a matter of course and with no scope for altering the inevitable, a “man” or “woman,” respectively.

Butler instead took the view in Gender Trouble (developed in later work such as Bodies That Matter ) that sex, sexuality, gender, and identity are all located within a matrix of power and discourse that produces and regulates how we understand the terms, among others, man, woman, masculinity, and femininity. She saw there being a multitude of options through which it is possible to disturb the received understandings of such terms. Gender is variable and fluid, changing for each of us at different times and within different contexts. Being a woman is, for Butler, a term that is always in process and becoming. We say “I feel more/less like a man” or “I feel more/less like a woman,” which, Butler suggested, implies that we see our experience of a gendered identity as something that we achieve, rather than as a given attribute.

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