Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

As a field of study that is dense with theory, gender studies finds itself imbued with concepts that help us to make sense of the relationships between gender, sex, power, and identity. These key concepts function as a way to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical applications, and serve as the backbone of applied theory in the real world. In this paper I will be explaining and extrapolating upon two key concepts that have been introduced in the unit readings; performativity and intersectionality.

Having coined the term in her book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler's theory on gender peformativity is arguably one of the most widely referenced concepts in the gender studies field. Gender perfomativity theorises that we, as
Crenshaw concieved this theory as a professor, as she wanted a term that could express the “profound invisibility” of people trying to almagamate their discrimination claims within the legal system. She took inspiration from an incident that involved a black woman's case being dismissed because she could not combine her gender and race discrimination claims into one, as the company she was trying to sue hired both women and black men, despite the fact that the company would not hire black women. Crenshaw wanted to highlight the fact that the various forms of discrimination people faced intersected and overlapped, and these intersections were often ignored by both the law and activists. Crenshaw also argues that the fact that marginalised groups are still excluded from mainstream activism shows that the essence of intersectionality has been distorted; the idea that no one, regardless of gender or race, should be invisible. This invisibility of those who do not benefit from intersectionality can be seen even now; take for example, the Black Lives Matter movement - which, whilst being an important movement in itself - has been criticsed for failing to include black women, instead focusing most of its energy on men, thus spawing the Say Her Name movement (started by Crenshaw herself). Intersectionality is an important theory because it allows us to see what happens in the abnsense
The importance of theory and key concepts in gender studies lies in the fact that these theories spawn from lived experience, and it is this historical and social background that allows conceptual arguments - such as Butler's theory of performativity and Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality - to dechiper modern day arguments about sex, gender, and the relationship between identity and