Gender Trouble:

Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

By Judith Butler

1990, Routledge

149 Pages



From the Cover

"Judith Butler has provided the most authoritative attack to date on the 'naturalness' of gender. This is a brilliant and innovative book." - Sandra Lee Bartky / University of Illinois, Chicago

"Butler's startling analysis shows that much progressive thought, as well as the dominant ideologies it opposes, wrongly assumes that there are true gender identities and natural sexes. . . Gender Trouble sets a new high standard for contemporary cultural analysis." - Sandra Harding / University of Delaware

"Butler's lucid, witty arguments provoke a very promising kind of trouble in which the key regulatory fictions supporting gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality become literally incredible . . . Butler makes the category of 'female' as problematic as recent feminist theory has made the category of 'woman'". - Donna Haraway / University of California, Santa Cruz

"Gender Trouble is a lucid critique of the notion of fixed gender 'identities' said to be rooted in nature, bodies, or a necessary heterosexuality. Judith Butler critically engages the work of Lacan, Freud, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, Foucault and others to develop an original 'performative theory of gender.' . . . Gender Trouble is a provocative, engaging, and subversive book." - Joan W. Scott / Institute for Advanced Study

"We will all use this book in our feminist theory classes. With agile control of the intertextuality of philosophy, anthropology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, Judith Butler looks at the problems of essentialism and/in gendering. She uses the dimension of gendered homosexuaity as a critical instrument to examine the negotiation of woman's body. This powerful and constructive political autocritique of gender theory performs, on its way, a critique of the ethical philosophy of gender in general." - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak / University of Pittsburgh


Table of Contents

1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire
"Women" as the Subject of Feminism
The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate
Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond
Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance
Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement

2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix
Structuralism's Critical Exchange
Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade
Freud and the Melancholia of Gender
Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification
Reformulating Prohibition as Power

3. Subversive Bodily Acts
The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva
Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity
Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex
Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions


Readers' Comments