Butler finds the most conscious understanding of the radical contingency of sex and gender in the lesbian-feminist work of Monique Wittig. The latter's deconstruction of the textual construction of sex and the naturalized institution of heterosexuality, particularly in her fiction, suggests that it is possible "to become a being whom neither man nor woman fully describes." But Butler complains that Wittig's theoretical work tends to claim a radical disjunction between heterosexual and homosexual economies, thus denying the constitutive function of the heterosexual in the homosexual. The point, says Butler, is not for lesbianism to define itself in exclusion from heterosexuality but to resignify subversively the heterosexual constructs by which it is inevitably partially constituted.

Since, for Butler, sex and gender are not given but enacted, by parodying the natural enactment of gender we can subvert it. Thus drag and cross-dressing are understood as parodies not just of stable gender and sex identities but of the very notions of natural sex and gender themselves. The act of resignification of gender categories through parody is what Butler offers as the way out of the identity-exclusion circuit. And it is here that I found her argument somewhat insubstantial. I wanted more.

Informative, provocative and compelling though Gender Trouble is, it suffers from the limitations imposed by its packaging. One of the Thinking Gender series, the book looks deceptively introductory. It is true that, because of Butler's clear, succinct style, even the uninitiated can profit from her work. But, as my partial delineation of the essential structure of her argument has shown, Butler pulls together a diverse set of texts - philosophical, psychoanalytical, anthropological, and literary - raising many more questions than she can possibly address in detail in a work of this length. Her analysis of the dangers of essentialism is convincing but the exhortation to resignify by acting periodically needs more discussion, development and illustration. It could be argued that her purpose - as in most poststructuralist work - was not to design a program but to suggest an orientation and raise a series of interrogations. Certainly her style, which proceeds by posing question after question, would substantiate this claim. We are left with these questions and it is perhaps up to us to work towards the answers.

Heather Wright is a Ph.D. student in English Literature, with special focus on women's writing and feminist theory, at York University.

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