Judith Butler

This chapter summarizes the position of Judith Butler on the relationship of gender, sex, and the human subject as expounded principally in her works Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. It explores Butler’s inversion of both Aristotle’s order of substance, in which characteristics such as sexuality are seen as grounded in the substances in which they inhere, and Beauvoir’s order of sex and gender that sees the cultural role of “woman” as arising from the biological facticity of sex. Thus, a voice is given to Butler’s alternative proposal that the human female and male are compelled performances of an imposed ideal.