What is woman? Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and the Questions it Presents

In the first 22 pages of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler questions whether or not the coalitions formed within the Feminist Movement, an infamous example of identity politics, are useful and beneficial today.  More specifically, she delves into what exactly constitutes the category of women, a designation which is often assumed or not thought of at all, and what role identity politics play in negatively shaping or limiting the conception of woman.  Questioning the expediency of identity politics is a difficult task, especially since the Feminist movement undoubtedly extended visibility of and won rights for individuals repressed by patriarchal systems of power, many of whom identified themselves as women.   Yet the question lingers, what exactly defines an individual as a woman and what are the boundaries of the category women? Butler argues that “the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation,” as “juridical power ultimately produces what it claims to merely represent.”(Butler 3). As one considers the assertion that woman has been defined by the Feminist movement, in effect creating inflexible or rigid boundaries of what it means to be woman, whether or not individuals within our society who identify with the designation of woman or struggle with their gender identity would have been better off if the Feminist movement had proceeded independent of a unified group identity and the power of identity politics becomes a troubling question.

What does it mean to be woman, the identity on which feminism is based?  The question is more complicated than it initially seems. The guttural response may be to turn to a biological explanation or resort to the assumption that women are united by men’s historic, and in some cases continual, subjugation.  Nevertheless, both of these avenues are quite messy and difficult to sort out upon further introspection. Is the status of woman merely attained by the gender markings of one’s person or the gender identity “constructed” in response to sex and other societal factors, or does “the distinction between sex and gender turn out to be no distinction at all”? (Butler 10, 11).  The question of whether there is truly a universal state of repression of women through patriarchal systems seems to have already been answered, as Butler remarks “the claim of universal patriarchy no longer enjoys the kind of credibility it once did”(5).  The fact that both of these explanations require man as a counterpoint in order to transmit any meaning, as binaries are created on the basis of opposite sex/gender and the status of repressor in relation to the repressed, is deeply troubling as well, forcing one to consider Butler’s question “To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?”(7). Women certainly must be more than man’s opposite, but it is hard to escape the binaries embedded in our collective consciousness that present the groups of man and woman in this simplistic manner.  Is the categorization of women as a group with shared characteristics apart from their collective placement intellectually as man’s opposite merely what Groz deems a knowledge which has “devoted so much conscious and unconscious effort to sweeping away all traces of the specificity, the corporeality, of their own processes of production and self-representation?(2).

                Butler offers a suggestion for the re-imagination of woman and a resulting formation of new methodology to garner representation within politics and society, suggesting the formation of coalitions of masses of fragmented and unique identities, believing “certain forms of acknowledged fragmentation might facilitate coalitional action precisely because the unity of the category of women is neither presupposed or desired(21).  Though this idea seems simple textually, its practicality remains suspect.  History certainly suggests that representation is garnered through the activism of causes whose members identify themselves as part of a group with some substantial unifying characteristic.  Would anyone have met in Seneca Falls if they did not feel connected to the individuals beside them by some common identity? How easy would it be for people to identify themselves as members of a coalition whose peers did not have some commonality, or at least claim to have some collective trait, on which to base feelings of kinsmanship? There are more questions than answers when evaluating Butler’s ideas and suggestions, but the weight and difficulty of the queries Gender Trouble inspires reveals the great importance and intellectual depth of its explorations.

- Tracy

Works Cited

Butler, Judith Butler. Gender Trouble, Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity. 
     Routledge Classics, 2006. Print    

     

Grosz, Elizabeth A. Grosz. Space, Time, And Perversion, Essays On The Politics
      Of Bodies. Burnes and Oates, 1995. Print.