ABSTRACT
As seen in Chapter 5, feminist theorists were critical of The History of Sexuality for failing to attend to gender. In 1990, in what could be seen as an unexpected response to this criticism, Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, which took up The History of Sexuality to do for gender what Foucault had done for sexuality. Butler thus provided the Foucauldian analysis of gender that Foucault’s own volume lacked and that feminists had demanded, but she dismantled a widely accepted feminist understanding of gender in the process. While Butler aimed to intervene in feminist theory in writing Gender Trouble, and intended to challenge the heteronormativity of feminist theory in particular, she did not anticipate that she would simultaneously be authoring a foundational work in what was to become queer theory. This is what happened, however, and today, as Tamsin Spargo writes, Gender Trouble ‘is arguably the most influential text in queer theory’ (Spargo, 1999, p. 52).
