ABSTRACT
Aside from Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, the single most influential book to unsettle thinking about sexuality in the liberal arts academy in the U.S. was Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, published in 1990. Butler was an American social theorist who drew heavily on Foucault, but also on a diverse group of other theorists to articulate a performance theory of gender. Over the past two decades this single book has produced a steady stream of scholarship, and a distinctive approach to pedagogy, that has profound implications in sexuality education. Foucault had argued that the “normal”–“abnormal” binary created or constructed the homosexual as the abnormal Other, identifiable and knowable in terms of disorders, diseases, developmental immaturity, and so on. The category “homosexual” thus serves to affirm the normality and dominance of the exclusive heterosexual. Butler, consistent with a long line of feminists from Beauvoir on, argued that much the same thing has applied to the category “woman.” Gender categories, both masculine and feminine, have been produced by a patriarchal power that constructs the feminine as lacking in agency, as nurturing, as submissive, and as a sexual object under a masculine gaze. Gender had also been constructed or produced in a way that tied it back to sexuality, and more specifically to exclusive heterosexuality. A woman was a woman because she assumed a certain role in sexual relations with a man, and vice versa. The homosexual was the abnormal Other within this gendered truth game and only intelligible as either a feminized male or a masculinized female. The whole system worked and seemed “natural” so long as everyone agreed to play these expected roles. But homosexuals and women began to question the roles they were expected to play in the patriarchal truth game, and gender began to be decoupled from “sex.” When gender was no longer defined in terms of a normative role in sexual relations (with masculinity and femininity expressed in their pure authentic forms in heterosexual intercourse, in “active” and “passive” roles),
then the stability of the category “gender” was called into question. Butler does, in fact, suggest that gender is little if anything more than a regulative category, designed to establish relations of domination and submission; which implies that the emancipation of women (and homosexuals) will require “troubling” gender. In this regard, she saw transgendered and intersexual people as the new sexual revolutionaries, even more than the homosexual. How a culture responds to transgender and intersexual bodies and ambiguous and changing gender identities speaks volumes about both how it understands gender, and how much force it exerts to police gender norms and oppositions. Transgender identities and “gender bending” are thus not just of peripheral interest in sexuality education, Butler would say, but close to its very core. Butler, along with Foucault, would become known as “queer theorists,” in that they queered or questioned all stable gender and sexual identities, particularly when these identities set up binary oppositions in which some were defined as normal and others defined as abnormal. But it is not necessary to do away with gender completely in order to see that Butler’s analysis offers a new way of thinking of gender, as a performance, a stylization of the body, a presentation of self-which opens the possibility of gender being reperformed in ways that are more equitable and less exclusionary. Butler presented the possibility of a new pedagogy of reading the gendered body that was quickly taken up by cultural-studies scholars and educators. In the 1990 preface to Gender Trouble, Butler explains that many feminists viewed
debates over the meaning of gender as troublesome in that they “might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism.” What would feminism be without some stable sense of what it is to be a woman? But Butler wonders whether the word “trouble” might take on a positive meaning. When she was a child she quickly learned, she wrote, that “to make trouble was … something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble.” If you made trouble, you would get in trouble. That is, one might conclude, the golden rule of schooling and sexuality education. For Butler, this “critical insight” led her to conclude that “trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.” Butler got into trouble with both liberal feminists and with male critical theorists. For the latter group, “trouble” occurred with the sudden “intrusion, the unanticipated agency, of a female ‘object’ who inexplicably returns the glance, reverses the gaze, and contests the place and authority of the masculine position.”1 But gender trouble, as Butler means it, is also “serious play,” the kind represented in the John Waters movie Female Trouble (1974). In that movie, according to Butler, the character Divine (who appears in drag) “implicitly suggests that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real.” The popularity of drag suggests a parodying of gender that brings into relief “the performative construction of an original and true sex.”2 In sketching out this nuanced meaning of “gender trouble” in a few paragraphs, Butler offers the framework for a complex performance theory of gender. Of course, what Butler had to say was “in the wind” already. The postmodern is a time in which popular culture has redefined reality, so that
the image, the performance, is the new reality that real human bodies seek to imitate. Butler saw this as potentially quite insightful, and even useful from a democratic perspective. We are who we perform, she argued, so we had best be aware of whom we are performing, and how we might perform self differently. She wrote that “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts,” but acts reiterated within a “regulatory frame.” Over time, these reiterated performances of the gendered body “produce the appearance of substance.”3 But this substance has no reality apart from the performance, so that gender becomes something you do rather than something you are. It is a verb more than a noun, a “doing” instead of a “being,” even if this doing is sometimes regulated by highly restrictive gender norms and sanctions.4
