ABSTRACT
Gender is not the obvious place for a political theorist to start, even a
feminist one. It is also not obvious that Butler set out in the first place to be
a political theorist or even a feminist in some easily recognisable way. Nor
did she start with gender as her main category. As Butler says in her preface
(1999) to the anniversary edition of Gender Trouble (originally published in
1990), she ‘understood herself to be in an embattled and oppositional rela-
tion to certain forms of feminism’, although she also understood her text to
have been ‘part of feminism itself’ (Butler 1999: vii). Understandably and informatively, Butler imbues the anniversary preface (1999) with her con-
cerns, concepts and categories at that time, and she looks back at her 1990
text in that light. For our purposes here it is really more useful to take the
1990 text without this later framing, and to examine quite carefully what
Butler says there, and in reverse order of expectations – thus Power/Sex/
Gender. From our perspective what makes Butler a political theorist (per-
haps malgre´ lui – intentionality is not an issue here) is precisely her philo-
sophical focus on power, to which sex and gender are adjuncts theoretically and of which they are results in practice.
