ABSTRACT
Her most influential work to date, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), makes the powerful argument that neither gender nor sex is natural, nor are they categories of human identity. At the time of its publication, this was a major challenge to the then common position among feminists that gender (masculinity and femininity) is culturally constructed, whereas sex (male and female) is natural and pregiven. Butler counters that “gender must … designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a
result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced and established as … prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (p. 7). In other words, there is no male and female prior to the cultural engendering of these two categories of identity. “Male” and “female” identities are as culturally determined as “masculinity” and “femininity.” That sexual identity is natural, that there are two sexes in nature, is a cultural construct.
