Judith Butler begins her piece in Gender Trouble by discussing what it means to be, be in, and make ‘trouble.’ Reflecting on her childhood, Butler notes that ‘trouble’ presented itself to her as an inevitable condition since “the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep out of trouble” (2540). She states that the ambiguities around what it meant to cause or be ‘trouble,’ gave her early insight into the subtleties of certain structures of power, particularly because ‘trouble’ was a problem that was typically coded with, or attached to, femininity. Butler notes that for Beauvoir and Sartre, for example, trouble is found, and defined, through the shifting subjectivities of masculine and feminine positions and the power dynamics within this exchange. However, Butler goes further to argue that power is not solely operating in the relationship between masculine and feminine subjects, but within the larger construction of any ‘true’ gender binary (2540).

Butler wants to complicate, or, rather, to destabilize, the distinctions of sex and gender which serve as a point of reference for feminist theory and politics. Whereas some feminist scholars (many of them, it seems, at the time that Butler is writing) would represent the sex/gender distinction as being something that has a point of departure from the body, Butler rejects the idea that there is any kind of ‘true’ body from which those distinctions can emerge: “Any theory of the culturally constructed body…ought to question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse” (2542). She extends this argument by building on and expanding other writers’ understandings of the body, most significantly that of Foucault’s. Though I’m a little less confident with Foucault’s exact argument, through Butler’s explanation I understanding his description of the body as being like a blank page on which things are inscribed; our everyday actions and interactions with different structures of power ‘write’ our identity onto our body. However, Butler tries to expand this, saying that the body is not so clear in its boundaries, it exists in relationship to other things and therefore it must be reinforced through repetitive performances. For Butler, the body isn’t so much a blank page upon which identity is written, but is created through the ‘writing’ itself, and that this is seen significantly through gender. Gender is therefore not an expression of an internal identity, but a performance that, through its action, constitutes an identity.

It’s with this inner/outer identity distinction that Butler situates her discussion of drag. Butler finds drag interesting and subversive because it shows “the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency,” as well as revealing “that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin” (2550). With drag, the question of whether a queen is someone with a masculine ‘inside’ performing femininity on the ‘outside’ or someone with a ‘true’ feminine ‘inside’ that resides in a ‘masculine body,’ makes it clear that there is no simple or ‘true’ original distinction of gender and sex. Ultimately, what we understand as gender non-conformity or deviation from gender, is more accurately a practice of “gender transformation…that exposes the phantasmic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (2552).