ABSTRACT
Butler’s account of performativity and critique of identity categories has had significant implications for feminist and queer politics, as we have seen. It involves a shift from identity politics, based on sameness and the policing of boundaries, to a politics of identification which involves the continual examination of the (political) construction of identities, and careful attention to the exclusions on which any identities are based. This move to a politics of identity in Butler’s work involves a shift in the understanding of resistance and change that is similar to that which characterizes Foucault’s work. This could be described as a shift from a concern with freedom and liberation, in an Enlightenment or modernist sense, to an emphasis on resistance and struggle. Just as this shift in Foucault’s work has been found to be liberating to some, and politically debilitating to others, so it is with Butler’s work. Foucault’s account has been criticized as politically debilitating if freedom and liberation, rooted in universal truth, are no longer to be perceived as the goals of political action. Similarly, Butler’s account of performativity is criticized as politically debilitating if there is no independently existing body on which to base our feminist and queer projects and no independent truths of sex, gender and sexuality on which we can build our identity, including trans identity, not even the duality of sexual difference.
