ABSTRACT
In her enormously inuential book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler (1990) observed that contemporary feminism had “gotten in trouble” by becoming a “woman’s” movement, that is, by assuming that women were a uniform group with shared identity, interests, and goals. The critique of patriarchal culture made on behalf of the presumed universality of “women,” she argued, produced an “unwitting regulation and reication of gender relations” (pp. 5-6). It would reinforce the binary view of gender relations (in which culture builds masculine and feminine genders on male and female bodies), the very template from which feminism was trying to break away. She argued that making political claims in the name of women, thus treated as a seamless category, was a self-defeating gesture. This argument partly overlapped with Lacan’s formula: “Woman does not exist,” which means that, unlike masculinity, which is a universal function founded on the phallic exception of castration, woman is a nonuniversal (Lacan, 1998b, p. 7; p. 72).
