Gender Trouble

A work of feminist theory, subtitled Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Butler questions whether feminism needs a stable category of women as its subject, arguing that such a category excludes many and repeats the norms it opposes. She challenges the usual distinction between biological sex and cultural gender, suggesting that the idea of a natural sex is itself produced by gender norms. Her central claim is that gender is performative: it is not an inner essence that acts express, but an identity built up through the repeated stylisation of the body, so there is no doer behind the deed. The book reads Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan to show how a heterosexual matrix shapes identity, and engages Beauvoir, Kristeva, Wittig and Foucault. Drag, in Butler's account, can expose the imitative structure of all gender. Critics, such as Martha Nussbaum, have faulted its difficult style and its politics, and Butler clarified performativity in later work.

It launched the idea of gender performativity and is a founding text of queer theory, so it is needed to follow current debates about sex, gender and identity.