Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

While the commonsensical approach to describing the body is to assume that it is a natural thing dotted and riddled with secondary sex traits that lead to sex differentiation, the body in Butler is just as much in the grasp of discourse, power, social relations, prohibitions, and preconceptions as every other thing. Our apprehension of the body, in other words, is in no way natural.

In Gender Trouble, one of Butler's first tasks is to show that the sexed body in feminist theory can never serve as a basis for organizing political liberation because the body, just like gender, is constructed in a system built upon the suppression of women. Butler's subsequent discussion of the body also troubles the idea that there are female bodies and male bodies by including numerous examples of bodies that blur the distinction. Butler's insistence on showing that the body is culturally constructed is in the service of freeing up space for the proliferation of genders that are not tied to a body.

The goal of many of Butler's critiques is to point out that things we take for granted or as natural are the effects of processes that are hidden from view because they allow for the perpetuation of business as usual for the repressive status quo.