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Thinker · 1956–present

Judith Butler

Butler argued in "Gender Trouble" (1990) that gender is not an essential inner fact expressed through behavior but is "performative" - constituted through the repeated, stylized citation of bodily acts and norms that produce the appearance of a natural, stable gender identity. This challenged feminist theory's reliance on a pre-discursive, unified category of "woman" as its political subject, drawing on Foucault and psychoanalytic theory to treat gender categories as effects of power and discourse rather than pre-given foundations.

Intellectual setting

Butler wrote "Gender Trouble" amid intense 1980s-90s feminist debate over essentialism, drawing on Foucault's account of power and discourse, structuralist and psychoanalytic theories of the subject, and earlier feminist critiques of a unified category of "woman."

Key ideas

Gender performativity

Butler argued that gender is not an expression of a prior, essential identity but is produced through the repeated, ritualized performance of gendered acts and norms, so that the appearance of a stable inner gender is itself an effect of that repetition rather than its cause.

Critique of the unified subject "woman"

Butler argued that feminist theory's assumption of a single, pre-discursive category of "women" as its political subject obscures how identity categories are themselves produced by discourse and power, and that this assumption excludes those whose identities do not fit its implicit norms.

Legacy

Butler's "Gender Trouble" is a founding text of queer theory and poststructuralist feminism, and their account of performativity has been foundational to gender studies, LGBTQ theory, and philosophy of social identity since the early 1990s.