F eminist and g ender t heories

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
women’s groups, in preempting a tendency for 
any one group to speak for others, and in defin-
ing a political role for men that has some dignity 
and might attract widespread support.
Given the spectrum of masculinity politics, 
we cannot expect worldwide consensus for 
gender equality. What is possible is that support 
for gender equality might become hegemonic 
among men. In that case it would be groups sup-
porting equality that provide the agenda for 
public discussion about men’s lives and patterns 
of masculinity. . . . 
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j
udith
B
utler
(1956– ): a B
ioGraphical
s
ketch
Judith Butler was born in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her B.A. in philosophy 
from Bennington College in 1978 and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 
1984. Butler has taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities, and is currently profes-
sor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. 
Butler’s books include Subjects of Desire (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the 
Subversion of Identity (1989), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” 
(1993), and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), which analyzes name-
calling as both a social injury and the way in which individuals are called into action for 
political purposes.
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B
utler
’
s
i
ntellectual
i
nFluences
and
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ore
i
deas
Whereas feminists committed to modern ideas about gender ask the question, “And what 
about women?,” postmodern feminists such as Judith Butler ask, “And what do you mean by 
‘women’?” Butler (1990:145–47) rejects the very idea that “women” can be understood as a 
concrete category at all, construing gender identity instead as an unstable “fiction.” She 
criticizes modern feminists for remaining within the confines of traditional binary categories 
that in her view necessarily perpetuate sexism. In keeping with Foucault (see Chapter 8), 
Butler provides a “critical genealogy of gender categories in very different discursive 
domains” (1990/2006:xxxii). In short, while modern feminists, in separating (biologically 
determined) “sex” from (socially constructed) “gender,” had helped rupture the idea of a 
stable or essential self, Butler takes this rupture to an extreme by upending the alleged “bio-
logical” dimensions of sexuality. Far from seeing “desire” as a biological given, Butler 
(ibid.:70) maintains, “which pleasures shall live and which shall die is often a matter of 
which serve the legitimating practices of identity formation that take place within the matrix 
of gender norms.”
Specifically, Butler conceptualizes gendered subjectivity as a fluid identity and contends 
that the individual subject is never exclusively “male” or “female,” but rather is always in 
a state of contextually dependent flux. That is, gendered subjectivity is not something 
“fixed” or “essential” but a sustained set of acts, “a repetition and a ritual” (ibid.:xv). 
Consequently, Butler (1993) seeks to explain “the practice by which gendering occurs” 
(ibid.:231).
Indeed, it is the sustained, continual nature of gender performance that compels Butler to 
use the term performativity rather than “performance.” Performativity contests the very 
notion of a subject. Whereas the noun “performance” implies distinct, concrete, finished 
events, the term “performativity” reflects “culturally sustained temporal duration.” As 
Butler (ibid.:xv) states,
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