ABSTRACT
Butler’s account of gender as a kind of performance that is performative in Gender Trouble has proved highly influential in its critique of identity categories as a matter of social and political construction, rather than the expression of some kind of essential nature. However, it has also proved highly controversial as this critique extends beyond the category of gender to sex, sexuality and the body. Indeed, the stated aim of Gender Trouble is to establish a critical genealogy of the construction of the categories of sex, gender, sexuality, desire and the body as identity categories and reveal them, and the binary framework that structures them, to be products of ‘compulsory’ heterosexuality and ‘phallogocentrism’. Butler wants to show that identity categories are ‘fictional’ products of these ‘regimes of power/ knowledge’ or ‘power/discourse’ (Butler 1990a: xi) rather than natural effects of the body. They are fictional in the sense that they do not pre-exist the regimes of power/knowledge but are performative products of them. They are performative in the sense that the categories themselves produce the identity they are deemed to be simply representing. Hence:
A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin.
