- Length
- 272 pagesRoutledge, tenth anniversary edition 1999
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Gender Trouble
A dense academic book that escaped into the world and changed how a generation talks about identity. Butler argued that gender is produced by repetition rather than expressed by a self, and spent the following decades correcting what people took that to mean.
- Date
- 1990
- Author
- Judith Butler
- Region
- United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 41 years
Written for a specialist audience, sold over a hundred thousand copies within a decade, and became the most contested philosophy book of its generation.
What the book says
A book asking what feminism assumes when it speaks of women, and arguing that the assumption is doing more damage than anyone had noticed. Feminist theory had generally accepted a division of labour between sex, taken as biological and given, and gender, taken as the cultural meaning built on it. Butler's question is what work the given is doing. If gender is constructed, and if the body only becomes intelligible to us through categories that are already gendered, then sex is not the neutral ground on which gender is built but is itself produced by the same apparatus and then presented as prior. From this comes the argument the book is known for. Gender is not something one is but something one does - a repeated stylisation of the body, a set of acts sustained over time which produce the appearance of an inner essence they seem to express. There is no doer behind the deed. Butler calls this performativity and is careful that it does not mean choosing a gender each morning like a costume; the repetition is compelled, and its failures and parodies are where the compulsion becomes visible.
What it argues
That identity categories are the effects of the practices that seem to describe them, and that feminism weakens itself by treating women as a stable subject it represents. The argument is genealogical in Foucault's sense: ask what a category was formed to do rather than whether it is accurate. Butler's target is what she calls the heterosexual matrix, the arrangement by which a body is assigned a sex, a gender is expected to follow from it, and a direction of desire from that - a chain presented as natural and enforced as a norm. Performativity names how it is sustained: not by anyone deciding, but by acts repeated so consistently that they appear to express something underneath. Because the repetition can fail, and because parody and drag make the imitative structure visible, the arrangement is contingent - which is where the book locates the possibility of change.
What it answered
Beauvoir on becoming, and the feminist theory of the 1970s and 80s that had built political claims on the category of women. Butler is answering a specific problem inside that theory: every attempt to say what women have in common had excluded some of them, and the exclusions fell along lines of race, class and sexuality - a criticism made forcefully by Black and lesbian feminists through the 1980s, which the book takes as its starting point rather than as an objection to be met.
How it argues
By reading other theorists - Beauvoir, Wittig, Irigaray, Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault - and finding in each the assumption the book is after. This makes it hard going for anyone not already inside those debates, and the prose has been criticised for opacity more than any other philosophical writing of its period; Butler won a bad-writing competition in 1998 and replied that difficult ideas sometimes require difficult language and that the demand for transparency can itself be a demand to say nothing new. The argument proceeds by exposing assumptions rather than by stating theses, which is why so much of the reception has been about what the book claims.
The moment
American academic feminism in 1990, in the aftermath of the sex wars and amid the AIDS crisis, with poststructuralist theory established in literature departments and contested everywhere else. Butler had trained in philosophy on Hegel and the French reception of him, and wrote as an outsider to the feminist theory she was intervening in. The book arrived at the moment queer theory was forming and became its founding text almost immediately, which was not the intention.
How it travelled
Out of the academy faster and further than anyone expected. Gender Trouble founded queer theory as a field, entered gender studies, literary criticism, sociology and law, and its vocabulary - performativity above all - is now used by people who have never read a page of it, frequently to mean the opposite of what the book says. Butler has also become the subject of organised political attack in several countries, with an effigy burned in Brazil in 2017, which is an unusual afterlife for a work of poststructuralist theory.
The strongest objection
Nussbaum's, made in 1999 and still the most substantial: that the book gestures at politics while withdrawing from it. If resistance consists in parodic repetition and the destabilising of categories, then it is a politics of gesture that leaves the material conditions of women's lives - law, wages, violence, access to healthcare - untouched, and it can be practised entirely within a seminar. The related philosophical objection is that a thoroughgoing anti-foundationalism leaves nothing for a political claim to rest on: if there is no subject prior to the practices, it is unclear who is being harmed or in whose name a demand is made. Butler's answer, developed in later work on precarity and grievability, is that vulnerability rather than identity can ground a politics, which is a serious reply and arrives after this book rather than in it.
Why read it
With help, and after Beauvoir and some Foucault. The preface to the 1999 edition is the best entry point and states plainly what the book was trying to do; the chapter on Beauvoir and Wittig is where the central argument is clearest. It is genuinely difficult and the difficulty is not all necessary.
- First printed
- 1990
- First in English
- 1990
- Digitised
- No
Bodies That Matter (1993) was written partly to correct the reading of performativity as voluntary self-fashioning, and Butler has said since that the misunderstanding was the book's fault as much as its readers'.
Written in English and translated into more than twenty languages. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live and among the most contested books in this section, inside philosophy as much as outside. Performativity is standard equipment in several disciplines; the philosophical arguments for it are less widely examined than the conclusions drawn from them.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
What performativity claims is disputed to this day, and Butler has spent thirty years denying the voluntarist reading. Whether the position leaves room for feminist politics is the standing objection from Nussbaum onward. Whether the treatment of the body concedes enough to biology divides readers, and Bodies That Matter was written in response. And the book's reception in public argument bears so little relation to its contents that the gap between them has become a subject in itself.