Contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence. To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it. As time went by, further ambiguities arrived on the critical scene. I noted that trouble sometimes euphemized some fundamentally mysterious problem usually related to the alleged mystery of all things feminine. I read Beauvoir who explained that to be a woman within the terms of a masculinist culture is to be a source of mystery and unknowability for men, and this seemed confirmed somehow when I read Sartre for whom all desire, problematically presumed as heterosexual and masculine, was defined as trouble. For that masculine subject of desire, trouble became a scandal with the sudden intrusion, the unanticipated agency, of a female “object” who inexplicably returns the glance, reverses the gaze, and contests the place and authority of the the female “Other” suddenly exposes his autonomy as illusory.That particular dialectical reversal of power, however, couldn’t quite hold my attention—although others surely did. Power seemed to be more than an exchange between subjects or a relation of constant inversion between and subject and an Other; indeed, power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender. I asked, what configuration of power constructs the subject and the Other, that binary relation between “men” and “women,” and the internal stability of those terms? What restriction is here at work? Are those terms untroubling only to the extent that they conform to a heterosexual matrix for conceptualizing gender and desire? What happens to the subject and to the stability of gender categories when the epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality is unmasked as that which produces and reifies these ostensible categories of ontology?

But how can an epistemic/ontological regime be brought into question? What best way to trouble the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality? Consider the fate of “female trouble,” that historical configuration of a nameless female indisposition, which thinly veiled the notion that being female is a natural indisposition. Serious as the medicalization of women’s bodies is, the term is also laughable, and laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable for feminism. Without a doubt, feminism continues to require its own forms of serious play. Female Trouble is also the title of the John Waters film that features Divine, the hero/heroine of Hairspray as well, whose impersonation of women implicitly suggests that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real. Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates. Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a “natural fact” or a cultural performance, or is “naturalness” constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematize “the natural” in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex. What other foundational categories of identity—the binary of sex, gender, and the body—can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?

To expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formation of power requires a form of critical inquiry that Foucault, reformulating Nietzsche, designates as “genealogy.” A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. The task of this inquiry is to center on—and decenter—such defining institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality.

Precisely because “female” no longer appears to be a stable notion, its meaning is as troubled and unfixed as “woman,” and because both terms gain their troubled significations only as relational terms, this inquiry takes as its focus gender and the relational analysis it suggests. Further, it is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the questions of primary identity in order to get on with the task of politics. Instead, we ought to ask, what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity. What new shape of politics emerges when identity as a common ground no longer constrains the discourse on feminist politics? And to what extent does the effort to locate a common identity as the foundation for a feminist politics preclude a radical inquiry into the political construction and regulation of identity itself?

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This text is divided into three chapters that effect a critical genealogy of gender categories in very different discursive domains. Chapter 1, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” reconsiders the status of “women” as the subject of feminism and the sex/gender distinction. Compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism are understood as regimes of power/discourse with often divergent ways of answering central question of gender discourse: how does language construct the categories of sex? Does “the feminine” resist representation within language? Is language understood as phallogocentric (Luce Irigaray’s question)? Is “the feminine” the only sex represented within a language that conflates the female and the sexual (Monique Wittig’s contention)? Where and how do compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism converge? Where are the points of breakage between? How does language itself produce the fiction construction of “sex” that supports these various regimes of power? Within a language of presumptive heterosexuality, what sorts of continuities are assumed to exist among sex, gender, and desire? Are these terms discrete? What kinds of cultural practices produce subversive discontinuity and dissonance among sex, gender, and desire and call into question their alleged relations?

Chapter 2, “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix,” offers a selective reading of structuralism, psychoanalytic and feminist accounts of the incest taboo as the mechanism that tries to enforce discrete and internally coherent gender identities within a heterosexual frame. The question of homosexuality is, within some psychoanalytic discourse, invariably associated with forms of cultural unintelligibility and, in the case of lesbianism, with the desexualization of the female body. On the other hand, the uses of psychoanalytic theory for an account of complex gender “identities” is pursued through an analysis of identity, identification, and masquerade in Joan Riviere and other psychoanalytic literature. Once the incest taboo is subjected to Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis in The History of Sexuality, that prohibitive or juridical structure is shown both to instate compulsory heterosexuality within a masculinist sexual economy and to enable a critical challenge to that economy. Is psychoanalysis an antifoundationalist inquiry that affirms the kind of sexual complexity that effectively deregulates rigid and hierarchical sexual codes, or does it maintain an unacknowledged set of assumptions about the foundations of identity that work in favor of those very hierarchies?

The last chapter, “Subversive Bodily Acts,” begins with a critical consideration of the construction of the maternal body in Julia Kristeva in order to show the implicit norms that govern the cultural intelligibility of sex and sexuality in her work. Although Foucault is engaged to provide a critique of Kristeva, a close examination of some of Foucault’s own work reveals a problematic indifference to sexual difference. His critique of the category of sex, however, provides an insight into the regulatory practices of some contemporary medical fictions designed to designate univocal sex. Monique Wittig’s theory and fiction propose a “disintegration” of culturally constituted bodies, suggesting that morphology itself is a consequence of a hegemonic conceptual scheme. The final section of this chapter, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” considers the boundary and surface of bodies as politically constructed, drawing on the work of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva. As a strategy to denaturalize and resignify bodily categories, I describe and propose a set of parodic practices based in a performative theory of gender acts that disrupt the categories of the body, sex, gender, and sexuality and occasion their subversive resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame.

It seems that every text has more sources than it can reconstruct within its own terms. These are sources that define and inform the very language of the text in ways that would require a thorough unraveling of the text itself to be understood, and of course there would be no guarantee that that unraveling would ever stop. Although I have offered a childhood story to begin this preface, it is a fable irreducible to fact. Indeed, the purpose here more generally is to trace the way in which gender fables establish and circulate the misnomer of natural facts. It is clearly impossible to recover the origins of these essays, to locate the various moments that have enabled this text. The texts are assembled to facilitate a political convergence of feminism, gay and lesbian perspectives on gender, and poststructuralist theory. Philosophy is the predominant disciplinary mechanism that currently mobilizes this author-subject, although it rarely if ever appears separated from other discourses. This inquiry seeks to affirm those positions on the critical boundaries of disciplinary life. The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network or marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and that, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities. The complexity of gender requires an interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary set of discourses in order to resist the domestication of gender studies or women studies within the acade- my and to radicalize the notion of feminist critique.

The writing of this text was made possible by a number of institutional and individual forms of support. The American Council of Learned Societies provided a Recent Recipient of the Ph.D. Fellowship for the fall of 1987, and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton provided fellowship, housing, and provocative argumentation during the 1987–1988 academic year. The George Washington University Faculty Research Grant also supported my research during the summers of 1987 and 1988. Joan W. Scott has been an invaluable and incisive critic throughout various stages of this manuscript. Her commitment to a critical rethinking of the presuppositional terms of feminist politics has challenged and inspired me. The “Gender Seminar” assembled at the Institute for Advanced Study under Joan Scott’s direction helped me to clarify and elaborate my views by virtue of the significant and provocative divisions in our collective thinking. Hence, I thank Lila Abu-Lughod, Yasmine Ergas, Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Dorinne Kondo, Rayna Rapp, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Louise Tilly. My students in the seminar “Gender, Identity, and Desire,” offered at Wesleyan University and at Yale in 1985 and 1986, respectively, were indispensable for their willingness to imagine alternatively gendered worlds. I also appreciate the variety of critical responses that I received on presentations of parts of this work from the Princeton Women’s Studies Colloquium, the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Kansas, Amherst College, and the Yale University School of Medicine. My acknowledgment also goes to Linda Singer, whose persistent radicalism has been invaluable, Sandra Bartky for her work and her timely words of encouragement, Linda Nicholson for her editorial and critical advice, and Linda Anderson for her acute political intuitions. I also thank the following individuals, friends, and colleagues who shaped and supported my thinking: Eloise Moore Aggar, Inés Azar, Peter Caws, Nancy F. Cott, Kathy Natanson, Lois Natanson, Maurice Natanson, Stacy Pies, Josh Shapiro, Margaret Soltan, Robert V. Stone, Richard Vann, and Eszti Votaw. I thank Sandra Schmidt for her fine work in helping to prepare this manuscript, and Meg Gilbert for her assistance. I also thank Maureen MacGrogan for encouraging this project and others with her humor, patience, and fine editorial guidance. As before, I thank Wendy Owen for her relentless imagination, keen criticism, and for the provocation of her work.