Preface (1999)." Judith Butler. Gender Trouble.
New York: Routledge Press, 1999.

show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a
sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body. In this way, it
showed that what we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate
and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of
naturalized gestures. Does this mean that every-thing that is understood as ‘‘internal”
about the psyche is therefore evacuated, and that internality is a false metaphor?
Although Gender Trouble clearly drew upon the metaphor of an internal psyche in its
early discussion of gender melancholy, that emphasis was not brought forward into the
thinking of performativity itself.
9
Both The Psychic Life of Power and several of my
recent articles on psychoanalytic topics have sought to come to terms with this problem,
what many have seen as a problematic break between the early and later chapters of this
book. Although I would deny that all of the internal world of the psyche is but an effect
of a stylized set of acts, I continue to think that it is a significant theoretical mistake to
take the “internality” of the psychic world for granted. Certain features of the world,
including people we know and lose, do become “internal” features of the self, but they
are transformed through that interiorization, and that inner world, as the Kleinians call it,
is constituted precisely as a consequence of the interiorizations that a psyche performs.
This suggests that there may well be a psychic theory of performativity at work that calls
for greater exploration.

Although this text does not answer the question of whether the materiality of the body
is fully constructed, that has been the focus of much of my subsequent work, which I
hope will prove clarifying for the reader.
10
The question of whether or not the theory of
performativity can be transposed onto matters of race has been explored by several
scholars.
11
I would note here not only that racial presumptions invariably underwrite the
discourse on gender in ways that need to be made explicit, but that race and gender ought
not to be treated as simple analogies. I would therefore suggest that the question to ask is
not whether the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to
the theory when it tries to come to grips with race. Many of these debates have centered
on the status of “construction,” whether race is constructed in the same way as gender.
My view is that no single account of construction will do, and that these categories
always work as background for one another, and they often find their most powerful
articulation through one another. Thus, the sexualization of racial gender norms calls to
be read through multiple lenses at once, and the analysis surely illuminates the limits of
gender as an exclusive category of analysis.
12


Although I’ve enumerated some of the academic traditions and debates that have
animated this book, it is not my purpose to offer a full apologia in these brief pages.
There is one aspect of the conditions of its production that is not always understood about
the text: it was produced not merely from the academy, but from convergent social
movements of which I have been a part, and within the context of a lesbian and gay
community on the east coast of the United States in which I lived for fourteen years prior
to the writing of this book. Despite the dislocation of the subject that the text performs,
there is a person here: I went to many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds
of genders, understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of them, and encountered
sexuality at several of its cultural edges. I knew many people who were trying to find
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Preface (1999)." Judith Butler. Gender Trouble.
New York: Routledge Press, 1999.

that does not get named as “living,” the one whose incarceration implies a suspension of
life, or a sustained death sentence. The dogged effort to “denaturalize” gender in this text
emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by
ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or
presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on
sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play
with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of “real” politics, as some critics
have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire
to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. What would the world
have to be like for my uncle to live in the company of family, friends, or extended
kinship of some other kind? How must we rethink the ideal morphological constraints
upon the human such that those who fail to approximate the norm are not condemned to a
death within life?
14


Some readers have asked whether Gender Trouble seeks to expand the realm of
gender possibilities for a reason. They ask, for what purpose are such new configurations
of gender devised, and how ought we to judge among them? The question often involves
a prior premise, namely, that the text does not address the normative or prescriptive
dimension of feminist thought. “Normative” clearly has at least two meanings in this
critical encounter, since the word is one I use often, mainly to describe the mundane
violence performed by certain kinds of gender ideals. I usually use ‘‘normative” in a way
that is synonymous with “pertaining to the norms that govern gender.” But the term
“normative” also pertains to ethical justification, how it is established, and what concrete
consequences proceed therefrom. One critical question posed of Gender Trouble has
been: how do we proceed to make judgments on how gender is to be lived on the basis of
the theoretical descriptions offered here? It is not possible to oppose the “normative”
forms of gender without at the same time subscribing to a certain normative view of how
the gendered world ought to be. I want to suggest, however, that the positive normative
vision of this text, such as it is, does not and cannot take the form of a prescription:
“subvert gender in the way that I say, and life will be good.”

Those who make such prescriptions or who are willing to decide between subversive
and unsubversive expressions of gender, base their judgments on a description. Gender
appears in this or that form, and then a normative judgment is made about those
appearances and on the basis of what appears. But what conditions the domain of
appearance for gender itself? We may be tempted to make the following distinction: a
descriptive account of gender includes considerations of what makes gender intelligible,
an inquiry into its conditions of possibility, whereas a normative account seeks to answer
the question of which expressions of gender are acceptable, and which are not, supplying
persuasive reasons to distinguish between such expressions in this way. The question,
however, of what qualifies as “gender” is itself already a question that attests to a
pervasively normative operation of power, a fugitive operation of “what will be the case”
under the rubric of “what is the case.” Thus, the very description of the field of gender is
no sense prior to, or separable from, the question of its normative operation.

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