Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

In this unnamed introductory section, Butler discusses the use of the myth of a time before patriarchy and the concept of transcultural patriarchy, which almost always plays a role in these imaginary pasts. Feminists' use of an imaginary time before patriarchy is dangerous because it takes the focus away from contemporary struggles over gender and because it reinforces the culture/nature and mind/body binaries that have so subordinated women. Transcultural patriarchy has some of the same issues but has the added danger of reinforcing the Othering of other cultures.

Appeals to an imaginary pre-patriarchal historical moment are generally motivated by a desire to show that gender construction is arbitrary, rather than given, but one need not appeal to an imaginary past in which sex was transformed into gender to argue this point. Butler examines the role of “gender-instituting prohibitions” (52) (also referred to as “the Law”) in structuralist and psychoanalytic theory to offer just such an alternate approach.

Structuralism is a theory that views language and culture as systems in which each part of the system can only be understood in relation to the whole of the system, and vice versa. Important structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss focuses on the system of kinship in his examination of culture.