Judith Butler

pronouns she/they

An academic & activist

Butler achieved high notability after the publication of her influential work Gender Trouble, dubbing her THE queer gender theorist. Still, Butler has written many other works on feminist and literary theory, and on a variety of topics such as hate speech, censorship, the precarity of (some) lives, and the possiblilities of protest.  

While Butler’s activist spirit is visible in her philosophical works, she has also taken much action to aid feminist, queer and anti-war movements and has shown support for BLM-movement.

Notable fact: Although she’s one of the most influential philosophers of our age, she unfortunately also came first in the Bad Writing Competition due to the “unreadability” of her works. It makes us wonder if the folks over at the Bad Writing Competition ever read anything by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Gender Trouble

explained in five Butler quotes

The oppression of it all

“I think we won’t be able to understand the operations of transphobia, homophobia, if we don’t understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely seperate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely seperate from homosexuality”

The seemingly obvious relationship between sex, gender and sexuality that Butler has called the heterosexual matrix™ has consequences for most gender identities/expressions and sexualities. Because our culture decides which behaviours are appropriate for ‘women’ or ‘men’, the expression of our self is subject to rules. If we don’t act in accordance with gender ‘scripts’, we risk being punished - from small sanctions of being called a ‘tomboy’ to the severe discrimination trans* people experience to this day. Normative ideas of gender also reinforce a heterosexist society that assures the inequality of women and the othering of an entire spectrum of sexualities and genders. 

Gender performativity

“Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’”

Gender performativity rejects the idea that gender is something that exists in and of itself. Instead, gender is created by repeatedly performed behaviours which our culture considers ‘male’ or ‘female’. Rather than ‘being’ a certain gender, we become ‘male’ or ‘female’ by acting in the ways we were taught to. This repeated performance makes gender seem natural, like a fact of life, when it is actually constructed by our behaviour.

What about sex?

“If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender”

The idea that gender is constructed wasn’t new at the time: Simone de Beauvoir had already presented it decades earlier. What is revolutionary about Butler’s approach is that she poses that ‘sex’, as in the biological male or female body, is constructed too. Most of the time, sex is thought of as a pure biological fact, as natural ‘male’ or ‘female’ bodies, and a reality untainted by culture. Butler, however, points out that ‘sex’ only comes into being after a performative act: it is after a doctor declares a foetus to be a ‘girl’ or ‘boy’, that the body becomes sexed, and from that moment on is repeatedly sexed through social interactions. The conviction that the world is made out of ‘male’ and ‘female’ bodies is thus not a biological fact, but a cultural narrative.

The heterosexual matrix, inc.

“The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it”

As we saw, according to Butler, the way we think of sex has important consequences. Because we think of sex as an either ‘male’ or ‘female’ body, and because we see this distinction as a fact of nature, sex becomes a strong foundation on which ideas of gender are naturalised. “If there are naturally two different kinds of bodies, why wouldn’t it be natural for those bodies to each have a set of core behaviours and characteristics?” This is another way in which gender is made to seem ‘natural’ - as a mere consequence of our different biology. Sexuality is also roped up in this scheme: the different sexes and genders are attracted to each other, so in this way heterosexuality is constructed as the ‘correct’ sexuality. Butler named this set of connections between sex, gender and sexuality the heterosexual matrix, in which, shortly put, the idea of binary sex allows for the idea of binary gender and a corresponding sexuality.

The possibility of rebellion

As an activist, Butler suggested ways to combat the idea of a ‘natural and coherent gender identity’ and the undesired consequences it brings. By behaving deliberately differently than the normative understandings of gender, we can show how ideas of ‘female’ and ‘male’ are arbitrary inventions that have no connection to reality at large. Butler mentions drag kings and queens, who subversively unmask gender as an act. Still, the question for us remains - how can we resist the obligation of gender? Or, you know, in Butler’s words:

“If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?”