Introduction

In her account of performativity, Judith Butler provides an influential analysis of sex, gender, sexuality and the body. It represents a major contribution to feminist gender theory and is often regarded as providing a founding contribution to ‘queer theory’, which was newly emerging in the 1990s when Gender Trouble was first published. Butler’s work combines aspects of feminist theory and philosophy, lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory, as well as increasingly drawing on aspects of psychoanalysis. At the same time, it builds on a broadly poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity, rooted in the work of Michel Foucault and, to some extent, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Lacan.1 It involves a radical critique of identity categories in which not only gender, but also sex, sexuality and the body are conceived as cultural products. Butler thus draws on the work of an eclectic range of theorists and theoretical traditions in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter to challenge the naturalization of sex, gender, the body and (hetero)sexuality; and to highlight the role of what she terms ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and, following Irigaray, ‘phallogocentrism’ in the production of these categories.