Butler revisits three of the most popular: the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, in which the incest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women Joan Riviere's psychoanalytic description of "womanliness as a masquerade" that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one, in which cathexis becomes identification.īutler extends these accounts of gender identification in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. For this reason, accounts of the original transformation of sex into gender by means of the incest taboo have proven particularly useful to feminists. They call for people to trouble the categories of gender through performance.ĭiscussing the patriarchy, Butler notes that feminists have frequently made recourse to the supposed pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which to base a new, non-oppressive society. In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. 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". Butler argues instead 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. Both 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. For de 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. Sex and gender are both constructed.Įxamining the work of the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Butler explores the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse and cultural imposition is only an effect of the functioning of gender. Butler argues that this false distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism. They challenge assumptions about the distinction often made between sex and gender, according to which sex is biological while gender is culturally constructed. Butler thus eschews identity politics in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender. 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. For Butler, "women" and " woman" are categories complicated by factors such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990 second edition 1999) is a book by the philosopher Judith Butler in which the author argues that gender is performative, meaning that it is maintained, created or perpetuated by iterative repetitions when speaking and interacting with each other.īutler criticizes one of the central assumptions of feminist theory, that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. ( December 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic.
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