This article defines what Butler in her book Judith Butler introduction gender trouble chapter one: “subjects of sex/gender/desire” wants to convey to the reader.
Butler presumes that there is an already existing feminist identity known as "women.'
Many feminists believe that developing a female identity is essential to creating awareness on women's political issues. Butler challenges this. She doesn't think that the idea of "woman" is a well-defined category.
Society constructs subjects and then individuals come to represent them. Requirements preceded identity.
When it comes to Michel Foucault, the "idea" of a woman may make women alienated from their own society, there may be a deeper identity that defines the category of a "woman."
As long as feminism considers women a well-defined category that's universally identifiable... it undermines its ability to represent women.
Then reader approaches the theory of Sex versus Gender
Feminism often splits the unity of women when it splits the idea of sex and gender.
This distinction was first used to undermine the idea of "biology-as-destiny."
But, if this distinction is pushed too far, then the idea of gender becomes disconnected from the body - and one never will understand the process of how sex and gender are socially assigned.
Maybe sex is a gendered
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Butler points out that Irigaray's assumption that all discourse and logic is a phallocentric construct does not account for cultural and historical differences in gender relations. Consequently, to claim that all ontological structures are masculinist risks appropriating all cultures under one global thought structure in the same way that her concept of phallocentric does. Butler further posits that appropriating and suppressing another, while utilized in a masculinist domain, is not--as Irigaray believes--exclusive to a masculinist