The performativity of gender
Gender is not what we are but what we repeatedly do. There is no doer behind the deed; identity is the effect of repeatedly citing norms.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1956 –
Judith Butler
朱迪斯·巴特勒 · Judith Pamela Butler
Gender is performative: there is no identity behind the performance, only norms repeatedly cited. Gender Trouble transformed feminism and queer theory, and she then turned to vulnerability, mourning and non-violence.
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.
Source: Gender Trouble, ch. 1
Butler was born in Cleveland to a Jewish family of Hungarian and Russian descent, first met philosophy in synagogue classes and read Spinoza, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer at fourteen. She studied philosophy at Bennington and Yale, spent a year at Heidelberg, and took her Yale doctorate in 1984 on the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century France. After Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins she went in 1993 to the University of California at Berkeley, where she has been professor of rhetoric and comparative literature since.
Gender Trouble (1990) became one of the most influential books in the academy. Its argument: feminism presupposes 'woman' as its subject, but that subject is manufactured by the very power feminism seeks to resist; gender is not the expression of an inner essence but a series of repeated acts, gestures and utterances whose repetition creates the illusion of an inner gender, just as drag exposes all gender as imitation without an original. 'Sex' likewise is not a natural given but produced in discourse. The possibility of subversion, she proposed, lies in the failures and deviations of repetition.
Criticised for denying the materiality of the body, she replied in Bodies That Matter (1993) that materiality itself is formed through the repeated 'materialisation' of norms. The Psychic Life of Power (1997) joined Foucault with Freud to ask how subjects become attached to the power that subordinates them, and Excitable Speech addressed hate speech and censorship. Her prose is famously difficult; in 1998 she won first prize in a 'Bad Writing Contest' and replied in the New York Times that making common sense strange is precisely the task of critical thought.
After 2001 her work turned to ethics and politics: Precarious Life and Frames of War asked which lives are counted as grievable and which are not, Giving an Account of Oneself argued that the subject is always opaque to itself when it tries to account for itself, and The Force of Nonviolence held that non-violence is not passivity but the affirmation of interdependence. She supports Palestinian rights and criticises Israel while opposing antisemitism, drawing controversy from every side, and in 2024 was widely criticised for remarks about the Hamas attack. A founder of queer theory, she has used both she and they pronouns since 2020.
Key Ideas
Sex too is constructed
The distinction between 'natural' sex and 'cultural' gender does not hold: dividing bodies into two sexes is itself a normative discursive act.
Subversive repetition
Norms survive only through repetition, and every repetition may deviate. Drag, parody and failed imitation expose the contingency of norms.
Grievable lives
Whose deaths are publicly mourned and whose are not counted as loss reveals which lives are counted as lives. Ethics begins with recognising the precariousness of all life.
The opacity of the subject
We cannot fully account for ourselves, since we were formed in norms and relations we did not choose. That opacity is not a defect but the condition of ethical relation to others.
Influenced by
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Her dissertation traced Hegel's reception in France; desire and recognition in the master–slave dialectic underlie all her theory of the subject.
- Michel Foucault
From Foucault she took the thesis that power produces subjects: gender norms do not repress an existing identity but manufacture it through repeated disciplining.
- Simone de Beauvoir
'One becomes a woman' is the starting point of Gender Trouble, but she goes further: not only gender but 'sex' too is a product of discourse; there is no body prior to culture.
- Jacques Derrida
The performativity of gender borrows Derrida's reading of Austin: a speech act works because it cites and repeats a prior convention.
- Emmanuel Levinas
After 2000 she turned to an ethics of vulnerability and mourning, and Levinas's 'face' became a resource for asking whose lives are grievable.
- Hannah Arendt
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Baruch Spinoza