"Judith Butler has provided the most authoritative attack to date on the 'naturalness' of gender.  This is a brilliant and innovative book." - Sandra Lee Bartky / University of Illinois, Chicago

"Butler's startling analysis shows that much progressive thought, as well as the dominant ideologies it opposes, wrongly assumes that there are true gender identities and natural sexes. . . Gender Trouble sets a new high standard for contemporary cultural analysis." - Sandra Harding / University of Delaware

"Butler's lucid, witty arguments provoke a very promising kind of trouble in which the key regulatory fictions supporting gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality become literally incredible . . . Butler makes the category of 'female' as problematic as recent feminist theory has made the category of 'woman'". - Donna Haraway / University of California, Santa Cruz

"Gender Trouble is a lucid critique of the notion of fixed gender 'identities' said to be rooted in nature, bodies, or a necessary heterosexuality.   Judith Butler critically engages the work of Lacan, Freud, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, Foucault and others to develop an original 'performative theory of gender.' . . . Gender Trouble is a provocative, engaging, and subversive book." - Joan W. Scott / Institute for Advanced Study

"We will all use this book in our feminist theory classes.  With agile control of the intertextuality of philosophy, anthropology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, Judith Butler looks at the problems of essentialism and/in gendering.   She uses the dimension of gendered homosexuaity as a critical instrument to examine the negotiation of woman's body.  This powerful and constructive political autocritique of gender theory performs, on its way, a critique of the ethical philosophy of gender in general." - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak / University of Pittsburgh

1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

1. "Women" as the Subject of Feminism
2. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
3. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate
4. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond
5. Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance
6. Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement

2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix

1. Structuralism's Critical Exchange
2. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade
3. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender
4. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification
5. Reformulating Prohibition as Power

3. Subversive Bodily Acts

1. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva
2. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity
3. Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex
4. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions