Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

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. Butler frequently deconstructs binaries to show that the supposed difference between the terms in a binary pair are designed to shore up exclusionary practices.

A prime example of power concealing itself with a binary is the assumption that heterosexuality is within the range of accepted gendering but homosexuality is not, thus making the two polar opposites. In this case, painting homosexuality as abnormal reinforces compulsory heterosexuality and allows for the shoring up of heterosexual identity by banishing anything that might disturb its monopoly on what is the norm. Power conceals itself by making this binary look natural, thus foreclosing the reality that this split is the effect of specific historical or psychological processes.

Because of her engagement with psychoanalysis, Butler includes substantial discussion of psychoanalysis's account of how identity and gender identity formation proceed. In many psychoanalytical accounts of identity, the moment when a child's relationship with the mother is ruptured is crucial to identity formation. In Freud, the child's internalization of the prohibition against incest and homosexuality is the child's entrance into the world of femininity or masculinity. For Lacan, this rupture occurs once the child is forced to give up the completely-fulfilling merging with the mother and become a wielder of language.

The focus on repudiation of the mother as the moment of rupture has made this idea a crucial site of intervention by feminists. During her reading of Julia Kristeva, however, Butler points out that attempts to recapture some identity before this moment in order to subvert the prevailing gender reality is doomed to fail, since that moment can never be adequately expressed except in discourse.

Butler deconstructs the notion of women as the object of feminist politics in the first chapter of Gender Trouble. While many feminists and even some activists contend that political organizing around women's liberation is dependent upon a stable identity we call women, Butler contends that that this term covers over wide divergences in class, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and so on. While feminists who believe in women as an umbrella term may be sufficiently flexible to encompass the many ways that people can be said to be women, Butler contends that defining the term ultimately devolves into exclusionary practices. For practical reasons as much as for philosophical reasons, Butler rejects the idea of a stable identity for women.

One key move in attempts to subvert the identity and gender status quo frequently used by feminists is to advocate for the possibility of recovering an identity that existed before the prohibition of incest, the prohibition of homosexuality, or the repudiation of the mother. Other feminists advocate for re-instating the primary relationship with the mother or femininity in order to create a utopia in which gender oppression no longer exists. Butler rejects such attempts at subversion as doomed to fail because identities are always already handled by discourse, language, and power.