Judith Butler (b. 1956)

• Trained in Philosophy at Yale
• Her Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is arguably the most influential texts of the 1990s
• Founding document on queer theory and performance
• Distills forty years of French theory and explores how gendered identity is socially produced through repetition of ordinary daily activities
• She aims for a feminism that has no exclusionary gender norms, opening up the field of possibility for gender
• Nothing is natural, not even sexual identity.
• The difference between sex and gender sometimes posited by feminists is contested by Butler, as even anatomical differences can be experienced only through cultural expectations and categories
• bodies that do not follow the strict binary division between male and female cannot be properly recognized by our society
• Following Foucault she states that modern society sees sexuality as a basic component of identity
  • however, what seems natural is socially constructed and thus contingent. Other cultures and historical eras have had different models for sexual identities
  • this means that the categories by which we live our daily existences can be changed
  • This is not easy however, as the processes of subject formation that [[Michel Foucault]] and [[Jacques Lacan]] account in their theories, show. For Foucault, discourse produces subjects open to power's control, for Lacan, individuals achieve identity by passing into the law at the costo of establishing a permanent split between self and desire.
  • To this, Butler adds Derrida's concept of performative speech acts, which offer room for resistance within those theories.
    • Derrida develops this concept from Austin's idea of the performative:
      • the meaning of language is grounded in that words refer to already existing objects
      • however some utterances are creative and they make something come into existence (for example, a prison sentence). These are performative speech acts.
      • as Austin develops this idea he finds it more and more difficult to distinguish between performative and referential speech acts.
    • According to Derrida, what makes language effective is that its speakers have a prior knowledge of its terms and prevailing usages
      • each new speech act is a repetition of old words and structures, thus innovation is quite limited
      • if an utterance is too far from received understanding, it will be incomprehensible
      • however, absolute repetition is not very usual either: we are using old words and structures in new contexts
      • each speech act is thus performative, in the sense that we are not repeating the meaning of a word from previous uses, but we are altering, within limits, its meaning
      • language is reproduced and kept alive through each use, but each use also entails change
        • some changes are made inadvertently, others consciously
  • Thus Butler suggests that we see the categories of sex and gender as citational repetitions:
    • Cultural discourses converge into prevailing understanding of these categories
    • individual acts cite these meanings, and respond to them in various ways
    • as we grow up, we slowly establish how we will occupy these roles (under the supervision of powerful social forces)
    • we experience this process as discovering our identity. Butler argues that identity is a trap because it hardens all the heterogeneous possibilities into rigid binarized categories
    • she instead calls for actions that will resignify our received meanings
    • For Butler, discursive power is never fully effective (there are always other discourses as well):
      • "deviants" must pay a high price for their desires and acts
      • those who conform to normalcy must affirm their identity at all times and through homophobia and other discourses which express the disavowal of that that is different
    • Butler is against identity politics, the idea that political groups are grounded in a shared identity because they lead to aggression and rigidity
    • how do we loosen the hold of identity?
      • make evident that identity is a construction, it is not inevitable even when we are restricted by social power in terms of how we can be
      • parody can be an effective way to destabilized the naturalized categories of identity and desire
      • queer theory is interested in the acts that trouble these given categories
      • the goal is both to create a space for other actions which are not contemplated by society, and to trouble the links between acts, categories, representations, desires and identities

Starting points

• Pioneer feminist authors such as [[Simone de Beauvoir]] and [[Julia Kristeva]]

• Also authors such as [[Jacques Derrida]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Louis Althusser]] and [[Michel Foucault]]

• Objections

  • Similar to those made to other poststructuralist works
  • difficult style guarantees a small audience for a work that is meant to have political consequence
  • is individual conscious action effective when confronting a power that shapes us at the unconscious level?
  • categories?

Preface to Gender Trouble

• Trouble should not be avoided, but used to destabilize power
• Trouble has also been used in regards to sexuality
  • The male subject depended on the female "other" to maintain his position and authority, and when the other acted as she was not supposed to, this meant trouble
• Butler is interested not in the reversal of power, but in the way power operates in the production of the gender binary frame
• how can this ontological regime be questioned?
  • thematization of "the natural" in gay and lesbian cultures in parodic contexts brings into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex
• A genealogical critique is needed
  • it investigates the political stakes in presenting the identity categories as origin and cause, when they are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses, with multiple and diffuse points of origin.
  • center on and decentering of phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality
  • what are the political possibilities of a radical critique of the categories of identity within feminism?

Chapter 3: "Subversive Bodily Acts"

• Gendered bodies are performative, the essence they are designed to express is a fabrication
  • this suggests it has no ontological status other than the acts which constitute its reality
  • Genders can thus neither be true nor false, but a product of the truth effects of a discourse of a stable identity
  • Drag imitates gender and in doing so reveals the imitative structure of gender, as well as its contingency, instead of being causal unities that are assumed to be natural and necessary
  • this imitation that mocks the notion of an original is more characteristic of pastiche rather than parody
  • gender is an identity constituted in time and in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts
  • the arbitrary relations between such acts, the possibility of a failure to repeat , a deformity or a parodic repetition that exposes identity as a politically tenuous construction, all give way to the possibilities of gender transformation