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Judith Butler adds to Gender Trouble, her most famous and important book, the following
subtitle: “feminism and the subversion of identity.” This paper will draw from Butler’s works to
argue for a politics of subversion, while it simultaneously claims that Butler’s subtitle proves
misplaced and ill-conceived. To come to grips with what a politics of subversion might mean, what
it might look like, or how it might function will depend, first, on seeing that identity cannot be
subverted—and in related fashion, neither can homophobia. I will argue here that to describe a
politics of subversion at work in Butler’s writing requires a concomitant redescription of
subversion’s critical target: namely, the power of heterosexuality when it operates as a norm.
Following the cues of a number of thinkers in queer theory, I choose to call this power
heteronormativity.
I will begin this argument, in section I, with a first effort to understand subversion as a
critical practice in general, and in the writings of Butler in particular. In section II I will make the
case for an analytical shift away from homophobia and toward heteronormativity as the object of
both critical analysis and political resistance. Then, in section III, I will turn back to Butler’s early
writings to show that we can find a politics of subversion there, but it must be more precisely
articulated as a politics subversive of heteronormativity. Butler never subverts identity; nor should
she. Her radical approach to sex and gender takes shape against the background of her description
of the heterosexual matrix; her radical politics emerges from that background.
I.
Subversive Acts, Subversive Readings
Although it appears in the subtitle of Gender Trouble, the word subversion is not to be found
in the index of any of Butler’s first three books.
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Butler provides no theory of subversion—indeed,
as I discuss below, she will later eschew such a project—nor does she do any conceptual or
1
To be fair, Bodies That Matter contains only an index of names.
Convention