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In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler examines constructed narratives surrounding gender. She uses cultural narratives against themselves in order to expose failed underlying structures: theoretical understandings of gender looked at by Butler rely upon the construction of a stable, prediscursive subject. Butler embraces a radical social constructionism: she begins her text by refusing the notion of a subject outside or prior to language. The subject is not before or outside the Law and yet Butler locates a sort of agency in the ability to create ‘noise’ or ‘trouble’ from within. Difference constantly (re)asserts and defends legitimacy through narratives of naturalization (the concept of gender relies upon the ‘natural’ discourse of sex to legitimize its origin). However, despite the illusion of stability, these ‘naturalizing narratives’ reveal the system’s weakness through their very functioning: they suggest that constant acts of (re)scripting are required to protect the territory of the ‘natural.’ By exposing the recursive necessity of these seemingly stable narratives, Butler denaturalizes the natural by infusing these narratives with ‘noise’ or ‘trouble.’ The ‘trouble’ Butler’s title calls for reveals the illusion of stability (a masquerade) by reading the ‘natural’ as a series of acts/performances which can be restaged in ways that open gaps from within. Gender is performance ‘naturalized’ in different ways across temporal/cultural boundaries and is always being (re)performed imperfectly against ‘naturalized’ ideals. Taking both the concept of performativity and the implied failures to attain the natural ideal as the key for perpetual chance, the ‘agent’ can repeat cultural performances and introduce reconfigurations of cultural narratives. The Symbolic is an open system in which the very structures of prohibition are creative: in reifying the ‘natural’ through prohibition, the cultural ideal is made distinct by calling the prohibited ‘unspeakable.’ As soon as the ideal and prohibited are made intelligible, the naturalizing narratives erase the prohibited to affirm the distinctiveness of the ideal. Thus, Butler exposes naturalized narratives (of gender, desire, and sexuality) to the unraveling force of (re)reading the process of prohibition: there is no ideal state to ‘return’ to if all states are created by the law and its prohibition, by the ideal and its always, already existent failures. Thus, the Symbolic fuels the ‘eternal return of difference;’ failure is inscribed along with the law because there is no ‘real’ or ‘natural’ substructure. By rejecting ontological reality, Butler reveals the illusion of language as a limited system: the subject is always, already constructed by language with no start (ontological reality) and no end (limit). Repetition and mobility suggest a sort of endless, recursive construction that can be used to expand rather than limit (44). All cultural constructs (sex, gender, sexuality) and material forms (the body) are constantly (re)created within ‘the matrix of power’ through language. Agency can be chanced upon (reception and context are important variables) through play and parody of these forms and constructions in ways that extend the unbounded sphere of language itself. Butler upholds the critical act of repetition or play with(in) the matrix that calls attention to action, to doing: in ‘hyperbolically’ enacting the scripts, naturalized foundations often crumble to reveal possibilities in the gaps between the pieces.1 |