ABSTRACT
These opening lines preface Butler’s most famous text, Gender Trouble,
and so it comes as somewhat of a surprise to discover that there has been
little or no commentary on them. In the first move of her most important
work, Butler images herself as a disobedient and disruptive child who has
got into trouble; she places herself in the position of the idle teenager plotting how best to make trouble. In short, she casts herself in the role of
troublemaker. It seems deeply ironic, then, that Butler prefaced her next
book, Bodies that Matter, by appearing to complain about responses to
Gender Trouble that describe her in precisely the way she first characterised
herself, that is, as a troublemaker. Butler writes of ‘a certain exasperation’
that she hears in responses to the arguments of Gender Trouble, and she
finds in critiques of Gender Trouble ‘a certain patronizing quality which (re)
constituted me as an unruly child, one who needed to be brought to task’ (Butler 1993: ix). Many readers of Bodies that Matter found themselves a
bit troubled by Butler’s comments: why did she take it so personally, they
asked?
