Chapter 1, Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire, Section VI, Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement Summary and Analysis

Feminist theory often looks for a bad person who is wreaking havoc behind the scenes. It cannot explain how oppression occurs without a hidden agent. Oppression is institutionalized by those who had an interest in maintaining it and language is constructed by those intending to obliterate conceptual categories that hurt their positions. However, matters are more complex than this.

Butler discusses various thinkers like Wittig, Freud, Lacan, and Irigary on these matters, arguing that sexual differences themselves are not mere constructions rooted in the metaphysics of substance proffered by a masculinist society. Feminists can appropriate the idea of sexual difference for themselves. Butler then covers the debate between materialist and Lacanian positions on...