Gender Trouble
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Judith Butler |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Feminism, Queer theory |
| Published | 1990 (Routledge) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 272 (UK paperback edition) |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | Subjects of Desire |
| Followed by | Bodies That Matter |
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; second edition 1999) is a book by philosopher Judith Butler, in which Butler argues that gender is a kind of improvised performance. The work is influential in feminism, women's studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory. Butler's ideas about gender came to be seen as foundational to queer theory and the advancing of dissident sexual practices during the 1990s.
Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions of feminist theory: the supposition that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Butler, "women" and "woman" are fraught categories, complicated by factors such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy, and erases the particularity of oppression in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschews identity politics in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender. She challenges her readers' assumptions about the distinction often made between sex and gender, according to which sex is biological while gender is culturally constructed. In the first place, Butler argues, this distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism, and in the second place, the distinction proves false. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse and cultural imposition is merely an effect of the functioning of gender. That is, both sex and gender are constructed.
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