Perspective

The perspective of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is that of its author, Judith Butler, a late-20th century feminist. Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher whose contributions to many fields of thought have been widely renowned within the humanities. She is a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In Gender Trouble (her 1990 book that sold over 100,000 copies) she argues that the categories of sex and gender are incoherent, despite their seeming coherence within the culture. Their seeming coherence is only made apparent because of masculine genders and the heterosexual wants of those who are male sexed. These categories are all socially constructed and are 'performative' in nature because they are constructed through action, which gives them all the reality they have.

Butler not only believes that gender identity is socially constructed - a view common among feminists -...