GENDER TROUBLE by Judith Butler
“One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” —Simone de Beauvoir
“Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body? I dunno – The Smiths (‘Still Ill’)
I have written this post – my first of 2024 – to help me to clarify some the mind (and body) blowing ideas contained in Judith Butler’s influential but still controversial book ‘Gender Trouble’ which was first published by Routledge in 1990.
At the heart of Butler’s treatise are two fundamental questions: What is a woman? What is a man?
In her 1999 preface to the 3rd edition, Judith Butler clarifies her intentions stating that one of her primary motivations was to challenge the restrictive definition of gender in feminist theory. She affirms that woman does not only exhibit her womanness through heterosexual coitus “in which her subordination becomes her pleasure.”
We are conditioned to accept the principle that power, reason and rationality should always be associated with masculinity while femininity is confined to a passive role of being in thrall to these qualities. Under the rigid terms of paternal law “the female body [is] characterized primarily in terms of its reproductive function.”
One of the main criticisms of ‘Gender Trouble’ is that it is written in a heightened academic style which many have found both incomprehensible and pretentious. Butler insists “I am not trying to be difficult” yet acknowledges that the book is not written in a populist style. Her defence is that complex subjects do not lend themselves to simplification : “If I treat that grammar as pellucid, then I fail to call attention precisely to that sphere of language that establishes and disestablishes intelligibility.”
The lack of immediacy and jargon-rich content is only a drawback if the reader is looking for the literary equivalent of soundbites. Butler wants the reader to do some work and not look for easy answers to difficult questions. This does not mean that her style is not sometimes exasperating. Here, for example, is one sentence I read and reread without being any the wiser as to what she wanted to communicate: “[Simone De] Beauvoir turns to the failed reciprocity of an asymmetrical dialectic, while [Luc] Irigaray suggests that the dialectic itself is the monologic elaboration of a masculinist signifying economy.” Erm….what?
For the most part though, patience and application is rewarded by some genuinely radical and subversive alternatives to conventional attitudes towards biological sex and gender differences.
Butler does not specifically cover transgender and intersexuality , topics that have only entered the forefront of the gender identity debate in recent years. Instead she outlines the central aim as follows: “The task of this inquiry is to center on—and decenter—such defining institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality.”
Unsurprisingly, as a lesbian, she argues against universal patriarchy but, less predictably, also counters the notion that feminism should denote a common identity. The false “unity” of gender presupposes what Butler refers to as “a compulsory heterosexuality” and ignores queer lives. A central premise of ‘Gender Trouble’ comes when she writes: “When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”
The mind versus body dilemma mockingly addressed by Morrissey and The Smiths is not overlooked: “The mind not only subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment altogether. The cultural associations of mind with masculinity and body with femininity are well documented within the field of philosophy and feminism.”
Butler rejects being bound by social or legalistic constraints by asserting that gender is always acquired, not something one is born with. For this reason, binary distinctions of ‘men’ and ‘women’ are not natural facts of ‘sex’ but political categories which are socially constructed. She writes “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”
To view gender identity as a performative act is a liberating idea because it allows us to break free of narrow rule-bound concepts of what it means to be a ‘real man’ or a ‘natural born woman’. Destiny derives from culture not biology.
For an illuminating discussion of where Judith Butler’s ideas (and more) fit into current debates on sexual politics , I’d highly recommend watching her You Tube interview with Owen Jones.
