Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

A historian of ideas and an important figure in his own right because of his influence on queer theory, Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, The History of Sexuality) appears in Gender Trouble via his critique of the repressive hypothesis, his focus on the inescapable presence of power and domination within relationships and within society, and his use of genealogy to uncover instances in which power's workings are concealed. 

A 20th-century French feminist whose work, including The Second Sex (1949), is the dividing line between first-wave and second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir serves as a point of departure for Butler's gender theory. De Beauvoir's statement that “‘one is not born a woman but becomes one’” (11) appears multiple times in Gender Trouble, as Butler grapples with what becoming means. While Butler ultimately rejects de Beauvoir's use of essentialist gender binaries, her re-reading of what becoming a woman is eventually leads Butler to her own theory of gender performativity.

Jacques Lacan was a 20th-century psychoanalyst who revised and upended Sigmund Freud's work. One of Lacan's key ideas is that in order to enter language (the Symbolic order), one must repudiate the mother. Butler is critical of Lacan's account of what precedes the Symbolic, but she also ultimately rejects Julia Kristeva's attempt to recover the mother after the institution of the Symbolic through the semiotic as well.

Monique Wittig is a 20th-century French feminist whose work in Gender Trouble serves as an example of the foreclosing of subversive possibilities when one insists on enforcing specific configurations of gender. Butler nevertheless finds Wittig's account of the heterosexual contract, the idea that language is a key point of intervention in negotiating gender, and her focus on disintegration of the body to be suggestive.

A Bulgarian-French feminist, Julia Kristeva ("Powers of Horror") appears in Gender Trouble in terms of her concept of the semiotic as a feminine language. Kristeva posits that the semiotic is an order that emphasizes lack of stable meanings and that erupts within the Symbolic order (associated with language in Lacan) as poetic language and in childbirth. Butler rejects Kristeva's argument that the semiotic has the potential to subvert the gender order because Kristeva's account of lesbianism reflects an underlying heterosexism and because it reinserts a binary in which the semiotic is subordinated to the Symbolic.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a 20th-century anthropologist whose work on kinship as a universal structure heavily influenced the field of structuralism. A key element of kinship structure is the exchange of women to secure relations between men and kinship groups; this exchange is in turn a pivotal aspect of the development of symbolic language. Butler uses Lévi-Strauss as an example of how seemingly stable male-female binaries, especially those that subordinate women, frequently conceal the displacement of aspects of experience that would threaten that binary, including homosexuality.

Sigmund Freud is a late-19th-century and early-20th-century Austrian doctor who founded the discourse of psychoanalysis. His theories, particularly the Oedipus complex, melancholia, and mourning, are significant because they offer accounts of identity formation that are rooted in the gendering of the child as it is taken up by the prohibition against incest. Butler re-reads Freud (and his intellectual descendent, Lacan) to highlight the futility of appealing to an identity before discourse as a means to subverting the gender order and to suggest that repression of homosexuality might also be an essential part of typical identity formation.