In her most influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler argued that feminism had made a mistake by trying to assert that 'women' were a group with common characteristics and interests. That approach, Judith Butler said, performed 'an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations', reinforcing a binary view of gender in which human beings are divided into two clear-cut groups, women and men. Judith Butler notes that feminists rejected the idea that biology is destiny, but then developed an account of patriarchal culture which assumed that masculine and feminine genders would inevitably be built, by culture, upon 'male' and 'female' bodies, making the same destiny just as inescapable. That argument allows no room for choice, difference or resistance.
Judith Butler argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which, in turn, is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is commonly regarded as a kind of continuum. Judith Butler's approach – inspired in part by Michel Foucault – is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors. Judith Butler suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold, and calls for subversive action in the present: 'gender trouble' – the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders, and therefore identities. This idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an 'essence', but instead to a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory.
In Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performance (1997), Judith Butler analyzes name-calling as both a social injury and the way in which individuals are called into action for political purposes. She cannot see a way to refuse the interpellating call, or chain of calls, outright, for it is through interpellation that the subject is constituted, and therefore, the 'I' who would oppose its construction is always in some sense drawing from that construction to articulate its opposition. Further, the 'I' draws what is called its 'agency' in part through being implicated in the very relations of power that it seeks to oppose
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/biography/
In Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performance (1997), Judith Butler analyzes name-calling as both a social injury and the way in which individuals are called into action for political purposes. She cannot see a way to refuse the interpellating call, or chain of calls, outright, for it is through interpellation that the subject is constituted, and therefore, the 'I' who would oppose its construction is always in some sense drawing from that construction to articulate its opposition. Further, the 'I' draws what is called its 'agency' in part through being implicated in the very relations of power that it seeks to oppose
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/biography/
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