Power Trouble: Performativity as Critical Theory

Although Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender has been highly influential in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, and some areas of philosophy, it has yet to receive its due from critical social theorists. This oversight is especially problematic given the crucial insights into the study of power – a central concept for critical social theory – that can be gleaned from Butler’s work. Her analysis is somewhat unique among discussions of power in its attempt to theorize simultaneously both the features of cultural domination in contemporary societies and the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of such domination. Although I will maintain here that this attempt is not entirely successful, I nevertheless argue that Butler’s account makes crucial contributions to a feminist critical theory of power; as a result, it merits much more serious attention from critical theorists. I begin by claiming that feminist accounts of power have reached a critical impasse, the result of which is a demand for an analysis of power that can simultaneously theorize both the domination relations that create and sustain certain groups as subordinant and the possibilities for resistance to and subversion of those relations. In order to demonstrate that Butler’s account of power attempts to meet this demand, I go on to lay out the conception of power implicit in Gender Trouble, Butler’s early formulation of the theory of performativity. In that work, Butler adopts a Foucauldian framework and, hence, her account of power inherits a Foucauldian problem (all-to-familiar by now to this audience): the problem of agency. As a result of this inheritance, Gender Trouble founders on the traditional philosophical cleavage between determinism and voluntarism. After laying out this troubling implication of the early version of performativity, I examine Butler’s recent reformulations – in her books Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, and in her contributions to Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange – which attempt to overcome this problem by appealing to the Derridean notion of citationality or iterability. I maintain that this notion allows Butler to make the crucial link between sexed individuals and the culturally hegemonic norms that govern their production that was missing in her early formulation. Citationality thus solves one of the problems plaguing the theory of performativity and allows Butler to begin to move feminist discussions of power beyond their current impasse. Despite its solution of the Foucauldian problem of agency, however,