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within the terms of heteronormativity. And this argument proves utterly consistent with Butler’s own
point, against MacKinnon (xii), that if we work within the tautology that “gender produces gender”
then there is no way to escape it. The brilliance of Butler’s work lies in her capacity to show us how
the sex/gender system only coheres within and through heteronormativity. In other words, without
the heterosexual matrix we could not sustain gender identity in its current form. Gender gets transformed
(though not necessarily subverted) all on its own if political and cultural practices serve to
undermine the heterosexual matrix. A politics of subversion must insist, with Butler, on the internality
(within culture, history, the political) of subversion, and therefore it must, in general, target a norm
or system of norms. This means, in particular, that Butler’s radical politics of gender and her
transformative queer politics, all emerge more clearly when one reads her work as a subversion of
heteronormativity.
explain and unravel that trouble by moving into the terrain of the matrix. This likely explains much
of the structure of the book: it begins with an internal debate in feminist theory and politics focusing
on the “subject of woman,” and it then moves into the questions of heteronormativity through the
middle of the book, before returning to “subversions of gender” (which, I have been arguing turn
out to be subversions of heteronormativity) toward the end.
Convention