Giving an Account of Butler

This book contributes to a fast growing critical literature assessing Judith Butler’s writings as a whole. Butler’s wide renown owes most to her oft-cited and often misunderstood account of gender performativity. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) has been a hugely influential text, seminal in the development of queer theory and of critiques from within feminism of identity politics. It is also significant—more broadly—for its central emphasis on identity as something that is ‘done’ rather than being something that ‘is’. Misunderstandings and radical simplifications of that central thesis concerning the performativity of gender have prevailed, however, in much of the reception of this early work. A key claim of Gender Trouble is that it is necessary to deconstruct the nature/culture opposition that has been foundational for accounts of gender (by showing that ‘nature’—or ‘sex’—is itself discursively constituted and cannot provide an unproblematic point of reference). Despite this, Butler’s thesis is often read as some version of radical constructivism. Hence multiple objections to her thesis have assumed that she is denying the existence of nature or of sexed bodies rather than interrogating the discursive and normative work that assumptions about their originary or self-evident character have been made to do. Butler’s focus on ‘doing’ rather than ‘being a gender’, meanwhile, has very frequently been taken to entail possibilities of freedom no more demanding than the choice of attire or behaviour, despite Butler’s explicit and forceful rejection of such an interpretation.