ABSTRACT
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble appeared in its first French translation in
spring 2005. It comes as something of a ‘delayed broadcast’, as Eric Fassin
puts it in his preface to the volume (2005c: 5). Not only did the French-
language edition take fifteen years to appear, it was preceded by translations
of four of Butler’s later works.1 From the perspective of an American fem-
inist scholar the delay is puzzling. Gender Trouble, of all Butler’s work, is
the one that we think of as the most French. Teresa de Lauretis attributes
this impression to a clever marketing strategy that sold Butler’s text to a nearly worldwide audience as a ‘feminist intervention in the field of French
philosophy’ (2005: 57). French intellectuals regard the book as typically
American. Gender Trouble stands as an exemplary work of what they have
taken to calling ‘French Theory’, a moniker they leave in English, capitalise
and put in quotes to signal that it is ‘a creation ex nihilo of the American
university’ (Cusset 2003: 36).
