Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Butler prefaces this section with quotes from several theorists on the meaning of the concepts “women” and “sex.” The chapter opens with Butler’s observation that much of feminist theory assumes there is some pre-existing identity called “women” that must be represented for the sake of securing greater political visibility for women.

Recent feminist theorists, however, have begun to question this assumed relationship between “feminist theory and politics” because the concept of women is “no longer understood in stable or abiding terms” (2). Any act of defining a concept takes place only in the domains of language, law, and politics, which themselves already have very limiting, exclusionary ground rules for who and what counts as an identity. “In such cases,” Butler concludes, “an uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of ‘women’ will be clearly self-defeating” (3). It becomes almost impossible to see these practices for what they are, once we accept the power of that system to define identities.

The other problem with basing feminist politics on a presupposed identity is that every time we attempt to articulate the concept of women as a “common identity” (4), differences among women related to race, class, gender, culture, ethnicity, orientation, and geography pop up to undercut that definition of women.