The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

The work of Judith Butler from the University of Berkeley was particularly popular in this regard. In Butler’s view (especially in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990), feminism has made a mistake in thinking that there are categories such as male and female. Both the masculine and the feminine are ‘culturally presupposed’. Indeed, gender itself is nothing more than a ‘reiterated social performance’ and definitely not the result of a ‘prior reality’. At the same time the same exercise took place in black studies, where the same work was being done – with reference to the same sets of thinkers – to assert that just like gender, race too was in fact a cultural construct, which was ‘culturally presupposed’ and to do only with ‘reiterated social performance’.