ABSTRACT
Butler owes her notoriety as the doyenne of post-structuralist feminism to
the concepts at the head of this chapter. However, Chapter 1 has taken
some pains to redescribe her work as a much more general project in poli-
tics and political theory. It has shown that Butler sets out to trouble one of
the most ubiquitous phenomena in human social history: the production of
power through naturalising discourses that tell us what we are and therefore
who. Such a project aligns her with Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault, and
perforce places her somewhat self-consciously at odds with the general feminist framework of enquiry and debate. She pointedly criticised most
feminisms in Gender Trouble for seeking a secure concept of ‘natural’ sex
through which to stabilise the ‘social’ concept gender, and thus to ground
and to represent an ‘identity’ in terms of ‘woman’. Feminist politics before
Butler was generally presumed to take place within this ‘gendered’ under-
standing of the human subject as ‘woman’, through which ‘biological
females’ could reinterpret and therefore change what it is to be one. As with
her general argument against the ‘naturalness’ of sex – dramatised in an over-the-top way by her invocation of the transvestite ‘personality’ and film
character Divine – Butler took radical exception to this argument and the
attendant political strategy. She declares gender a free-floating signifier, so
she exposes as unconvincing those familiar attempts to bring it back into
alignment with ‘biological sex’. If women, as Beauvoir said, were not born
but made, there was nothing in Butler’s view that said that a woman (by
gender) had to be female (by sex). So much, then, for feminism and its
political appeal to women as self-evidently female and variously ‘different’, supposedly backed up by careful theorisations based on the ‘findings’ of
natural and social science.
