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Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition

Judith Butler Publishes Gender Trouble

by Robert C. Evans

Key Figures

Judith Butler (1956- ), feminist, philosopher, theorist, and an influential voice in the rise of queer theory.

Summary of Event

In 1990, Judith Butler – still a relatively young academic – published a book titled Gender Trouble that would quickly win her wide recognition and influence both inside and outside academe. The book was soon seen not only as an important contribution to feminist thinking but also as a founding text in a field that would increasingly be known as queer theory. Butler, influenced especially but the writings of Michel Foucault, argued not only that gender is fluid, unstable, and culturally defined (an argument already widely accepted) but also that the same can even be said of sexuality and the sexed body itself. In other words, rather than seeing the categories of male and female as rooted in some unchanging biological nature, Butler suggested that practically everything having to do with sex and gender is socially constructed. Different cultures, in different historical periods, have defined male and female – and all the possible variations between those two simple categories – differently. Social definitions of gender and even supposedly neutral, biological definitions of sexuality result from, and help reinforce, the distinct power relations that exist in any given culture. In most cultures, those definitions have tended to be rooted in the assumption that both patriarchy and heterosexuality are natural, inevitable norms. Butler argued that this fundamental assumption could and should be “troubled” (that is, called into question and even undermined).

Feminist, cultural critic, gender studies pioneer, and professor Judith Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1956. As a teenager, she was exposed to works of philosophy by writers like Søren Kierkegaard and Baruch Spinoza; her later fascination with the structure of language and the practical, political applications of philosophy stem from this initial encounter. Butler attended Yale University, where she earned her B.A., M.A. and Ph. D. degrees in philosophy. Although she was not initially a follower of the poststructuralist teachings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his American counterpart, Paul DeMan (a Yale professor), she participated in the philosophical shifts in focus that took place in their wake.

While employed in a postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in the mid-1980’s, she revised her dissertation and eventually published it as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France in 1987; in this, her first book, Butler not only considers Hegel’s notions of desire but also grapples with the dense language of Hegel’s work itself. Butler’s later focus on gender is already apparent in the text as demonstrated by her consideration of works by two French thinkers who become prominent in the world of poststructuralist thought: psychologist and philosopher Jacques Lacan, and historian and philosopher Michael Foucault. Foucault’s work on human sexuality and gender theory particularly inform Butler’s subsequent writings.

After moving on to positions at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University, Butler published the book that would cement her reputation, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Building upon foundations laid in earlier works by Derrida and Foucault, among others, Gender Trouble argued that human sexual genders are not so much a function of biological sex, but are performed as a cultural function. That is, humans aren’t born acting “masculine” or “feminine,” but learn to act in ways that are culturally dictated as “masculine” or “feminine.” In arguing that gender is performative, Butler broke with earlier, essentialist feminist theory that argued for fundamental differences between women and men. From this vantage point, Butler goes on to consider “queer” theory, sexual politics, texts, and other subjects.

One of Butler’s strengths, as demonstrated by Gender Trouble and her later books (including Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, 1993, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 1997, and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 1997), is her ability to blur the boundaries that exist between various modes of discourse and philosophy. Her works examine a wide variety of concerns, ranging from political theory to deconstructionist and poststructuralist thought, queer theory, and various permutations of cultural studies.

Among Butler’s many awards are a Guggenheim fellowship, awarded in 1999, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, awarded for 2001 and 2002. She has been a ranking member of the Modern Language Association and has been the Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1993. She lives with her partner, Wendy Brown, and has a son, Isaac Daniel Butler-Brown.

Essay by: Scott D. Yarbrough

Butler developed the concept of the “heterosexual matrix,” where she argued that compulsory heterosexuality functions to authorize taken-for-granted, supposedly innate or natural sex and gender differences. Pointing to drag queens such as Divine, who had performed in films by John Waters, Butler suggested that gender roles should be seen as repeated, most often unacknowledged performances rather than as unchanging “natural facts.” There were, Butler argued, no easy, inevitable distinctions between the natural and the artificial. Commonly assumed differences between depth and surface, and commonly assumed differences between inner and outer, could and should be called into question and deconstructed. This process of deconstruction was already apparent (although on an ad hoc basis) in gay and lesbian cultures: socially constructed definitions of what was “natural” were often parodied by people who failed (or refused) to play their socially mandated roles. Drag queens were just especially obvious examples of persons who rejected the rules/roles dictated by the dominant culture, thus revealing the performative nature of those roles for everyone.

Achille Mbembe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and David Theo-Goldberg in 2016. (Courtesy of Politikundtheorie via Wikipedia Commons

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According to Butler, sex, gender, desire, and even assumptions about the physical bodies of males and females were all, in the case of each culture, socially constructed rather than determined by nature or natural fact. There is no point in searching for the stable origins of the categories of male and female, men and women, because no such stable origins, and no such unchanging categories, exist. Definitions of male and female, supposedly rooted in hard-wired, hard-and-fast biological distinctions, are as unstable as more obviously fluid definitions of gender roles. By abandoning the assumption that male and female are stable categories, feminists and other dissenters from patriarchy could begin to challenge, politically, the power relations that made such categories seem natural. Dominant power structures impose such categories on society (that is, on actual human beings who might find those categories constraining and confining). Fundamentally, Butler wanted to show that all rigid, culturally enforced definitions of sex, gender, and sexuality are open to challenge.

Significance

Butler’s book has sold over a hundred thousand copies – an astonishing figure, especially given its often difficult prose style. The book was obviously relevant to feminists, given the way it challenged rigid definitions of gender. But it has been, if anything, even more crucial to the development of queer theory, which undermines all hard-and-fast distinctions involving gender and sexuality. While Butler’s book sought to challenge heteronormativity, it also challenged taken for granted notions about queer identity, as it “troubled” the idea that there were categories of such persons with unchanging, biologically determined identities. If deconstructive thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s had destabilized many binaries taken for granted in philosophical thought and literary discourse, Butler did the same for many binaries taken for granted in thinking about sex, gender, and sexuality. Her book is routinely cited as a text that has influenced not only academic discussions but also the ways in which real persons now live their lives.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Evans, Robert C. "Judith Butler Publishes Gender Trouble." Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Evans, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=LGBTQ2E_0205.

APA 7th

Evans, R. C. (2017). Judith Butler Publishes Gender Trouble. In R. C. Evans (Ed.), Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Evans, Robert C. "Judith Butler Publishes Gender Trouble." Edited by Robert C. Evans. Great Events from History: LGBTQ, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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