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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
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Summary: Preface (1999)
In the first preface, Butler contextualizes her work. She originally envisioned her work as an intervention in feminist theory and did not anticipate that it would be received as a founding text for queer theory. Her worry in 1989 was about exclusionary practices she saw at work in essentialist formulations of feminism, and writing Gender Trouble was an effort to counter the panic in the face of an increasing diversity of genders.
Butler engaged with French feminist theory and poststructuralism, making the work one of “cultural translation” (ix) of a disparate set of texts and authors who were lumped together in most Anglo-American work, for some reason. Although her engagement with poststructuralism in particular opened her work up to criticism that it was aloof from social and political concerns, the inroads poststructuralism has since made in cultural studies would seem to argue that this characterization is a false one. Her engagement with Anglo-American feminists has since caused her to recognize that gender hierarchy functions to reinforce heterosexual norms.
Butler writes that her work also emerges out of an autobiographical context. She grew up watching an uncle who was persecuted because of his gender, and she herself was scarred by the homophobia she had to navigate as a young lesbian living on the East Coast. Writing Gender Trouble was an effort to articulate the more diverse gender reality she saw around her.
Butler recognizes that this preface cannot respond to all the questions and criticisms of her work, but she does choose to respond to a few. She makes no apologies for her style, arguing that the complexity of her diction is in keeping with the complexity of gender. She has, since the publication of Gender Trouble, come to recognize the important of strategic universality in political organizing and the need to reconceptualize her perspectives on psychoanalysis and the materiality of the body. She has also continued to reconsider the meaning of gender performativity as a theory, and she admits that if she had it to do all over again, she would talk more about transgenderism and intersexuality as well as the intersection of gender and race. She closes with a wish that sexual minorities will mobilize to intervene in a world that continues to marginalize them.
Summary: Preface (1990)
Butler opens with an autobiographical "gender fable" (xxxiv) about trouble. As a young person, she recognized the "subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it" (xxix).
Once Butler began making critical trouble, she found herself drawn to the way that gender binaries seemed always to cast anything having to do with women as trouble (particularly for men, if women happened to counter the assumption of masculine authority). Butler's critical examination of the masculine/feminine binary eventually led her to question the supposed fact of presumably heterosexual sex, gender, desire, and the body as natural, foundational grounds for identity.
Using Michel Foucault's notion of genealogy, Butler eventually came to see that these supposed natural concepts were "effects of a specific form of power" (xxxi). Her aim in Gender Trouble is "to center on—and decenter—such defining institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality"(xxxi) and "to trace the way in which gender fables establish and circulate the misnomer of natural facts"(xxxiv). Butler offers a preview of the chapters of the book and closes by noting that the eclecticism of her sources places her work at the intersection of several disciplines in order to carve out critical space needed for her project and her critique of those same disciplines. She thanks the people and institutions that have supported her.
Prefaces Analysis
The nine years between the prefaces give the reader insight into the evolution of Butler's perspective on the meaning of making trouble with her project. In the 1990 Preface, Butler introduces the theme of making trouble to explain the genesis of her critical project. From a young age and through her early intellectual history, she came to understand that certain assumptions about gender, especially the masculine/feminine binary, were examples of effects of discourse and compulsory heterosexuality masquerading as natural facts, as power concealing itself.
Butler's discussion of genealogy previews for the reader one of her primary means of exposing the workings of power and anticipates her use of poststructuralist critique in her work to deconstruct these accepted facts of gender, identity, and the body. Butler's 1990 Preface also reveals her understanding that her work was calculated to make trouble for feminism by bringing the insights of other disciplines to bear on it and intervene in feminism's reliance on a stable feminine subject as its foundation.
The 1999 Preface felicitously offers Butler's perspective on what trouble she ultimately managed to make, and the difference between the writer's voice in the 1990 Preface and the writer's voice in the 1999 Preface is a measure of Butler's arrival as a theorist. While the voice in the 1990 Preface is more playful and speculative, the voice in the 1999 Preface is more serious. The anecdote at the start of the 1990 Preface reaches all the way back to childhood and is almost lighthearted, while the autobiographical elements in the 1999 Preface document the pain and difficulty of Butler and her uncle as they confronted a gender reality of compulsory heterosexuality.
Butler also assumes a defensive posture in the 1999 Preface. She explains that she had no intention of undermining feminism, only to engage in the necessary work of "self-criticism" (vii). She defends poststructuralism as being attentive to social and political concerns. She expresses regret at not more thoroughly theorizing gender performativity, transgender identity, and intersexuality. She doesn't think drag is a paradigm for subversion. She indicates that she will do more work in psychoanalysis and has done more work to refine her ideas about gender. These explanations and offers of additional context are likely the result of the many criticisms inside and outside of the field of feminism that came Butler's way after the publication of Gender Trouble.
Ultimately, however, the 1999 Preface is a recognition of Butler's stature and her awareness of the influence of her work. Her (factual) statement at the start of the 1999 Preface that her work is foundational to queer theory also indicates that Butler is not the cheeky upstart of the 1990 Preface, one intent on disrupting feminism to make space for her concerns. Her closing in the 1999 Preface—"Judith Butler, Berkeley, California, June 1999" (xxviii) is an acknowledgement that making trouble for feminism ultimately created a space that moved concerns about gay, lesbian, and transgender identity from the margins to the center of institutions devoted to the study of gender.
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