ABSTRACT
Judith Butler's work demonstrates that coherent gender identity is organised by dominant discourses. In this chapter I focus on three issues: the relationship between performance and performativity; the shift in argument from Gender Trouble (1990) to Bodies That Matter (1993b); and the form of politics entailed by understanding gender in performative terms. I argue that far from entailing the ludic politics argued for by some adherents of her theory - where the playful disruption of the signifiers (especially sartorial signifiers) of sex and gender suggests a politics where queer is good, queerer is better, but queerest is best of all-performativity/performance entails a politics that is ambivalent. This is not to say either that her work is apolitical or that it advocates a hyper-voluntarist politics, but that politics is reconstituted as a realm of uncertainty, making it impossible to prefigure its effects. In rethinking gender, Butler also rethinks the political.
