Gender trouble : feminism and the subversion of identity / Judith Butler ; with an introduction by the author.

Originally published: 1999. 2nd edition.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [205]-228) and index.

Subjects of sex/gender/desire. Women as the subject of feminism -- The compulsory order of sex/gender/desire -- Gender : the circular ruins of contemporary debate -- Theorizing the binary, the unitary, and beyond -- Identity, sex, and the metaphysics of substance -- Language, power, and the strategies of displacement -- Prohibition, psychoanalysis, and the production of the heterosexual matrix. Structuralism's critical exchange -- Lacan, Riviere, and the strategies of masquerade -- Freud and the melancholia of gender -- Gender complexity and the limits of identification -- Reformulating prohibition as power -- Subversive bodily acts. The body politics of Julia Kristeva -- Foucault, Herculine, and the politics of sexual discontinuity -- Monique Wittig : bodily disintegration and fictive sex -- Bodily inscriptions, performative subversions -- From parody to politics.

Since its initial publication in 1990, this book has become a key work of contemporary feminist theory, and an essential work for anyone interested in the study of gender, queer theory, or the politics of sexuality in culture. This is the text where the author began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices. Overall, this book offers a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.