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.There are other notableprecursors of the move towards post-feminism, including those wholike Butler query the self-evident quality of the category of woman(see Riley, 1988).But the appearance of Gender Trouble in 1990nonetheless enacts has the performative effect (to use Butler s ownterms) of bringing into being the disputatious troubling dynamic itannounces by interrogating the stability and very existence of the cat-egory of woman which feminist politics has organised itself around. Who are its women ?, is the kind of question she asks.What kindof women does feminism have in mind, or institute for its politics toproceed?1 And which women are in this process left out, excluded, orless immediately invoked by such a framing? Butler s work coincides(as she herself later describes) with a moment of breaking away fromfeminism by a younger generation of queer-oriented lesbians, forwhom this sexual identity motivates a critique of the feminist politics Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 69Judith Butler and the Politics of Post-feminist Cultural Studies 69of an older generation and also of existing lesbian and gay politics.But likewise, for younger feminist scholars, not necessarily lesbian,this work resonates because it offers a theoretical framework, influ-enced by Foucault, for reviewing the possibilities for political agencyon the basis of an understanding of power as providing (and circum-scribing) the terms for its own critique, and thus, for envisagingradical social change within these constraints.This too marks a shiftfrom the previous generation for whom politics was directed towardsa kind of grand revolutionary rupture, and, thus with a definitivemove away from one power regime to another, though the conse-quences of taking power were rarely considered.2For some critics, (for example McNay, 1999a) Butler s work suggestsa narrower, perhaps individualistic politics.Others, including myself,have seen the politics of destabilising norms and deconstructing powerby interrogating its foundations, more positively.This can be understoodas a critical part of the process of extending radical democracy by con-tinually examining the claims political groups, in this case feminism,make, in order to represent their subjects, in this case women.In addi-tion this is a politics which is conceived of, in a post-structuralist move,as without either beginning or end, as dependent on no great truth nar-rative to drive it forward to some moment of grand finale, to theend-point of revolution, as though there was no politics beyond thatmagical point.The expansionist possibilities, wherein many differentkinds of women can conceivably invent and revise different kinds offeminism and strive to maintain coalitional connections across their dif-ferences, suggests a means by which feminism continues to have anexistence.The second theme is the relation between Butler s writing on genderand the field of academic work described as feminist cultural studies.If culture is relieved of those meanings which suggest a kind of delim-ited and recognisably unified set of practices (as in for example theculture of working-class girls ), and is instead understood as the sites ofeveryday life where power relations take normatively symbolic forms,then the practices which Butler describes as re-signification , which forher mark the possibilities for radical critique, can be understood inthese expansive terms, that is, as capable of operating and havingeffect right across the field of everyday life.Butler s post-structuralismpropels her towards a range of discursive phenomena, the literarytext, psychoanalytic texts, film, philosophical writing and, of course, Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 7070 The Uses of Cultural Studiesfeminist theory.This has been seen by her critics to indicate a turningaway from what are understood to be larger political concerns, tothose of language, images, even just words; in short, Butler has beenaccused of being at the forefront of the cultural turn.While thiscriticism suggests a particular appropriation of the political as alwayshaving primacy over the merely cultural , and being more closelyconnected with the various strong axes of power which in turn shapethe kind of world we live in, and while this is surely a narrow and con-ventional account of the political, the question of how exactlyre-signifying cultural practices work in a politically effective way mustbe continuously examined.Thus my second theme is also that Butler s work is absolutely nec-essary to feminist media and cultural studies, that we cannot dowithout it.While this might seem unnecessary to state, given theextraordinary impact of Butler s work, there has actually been littlesustained attempt to engage with this writing in relation to media orpopular culture.Her work allows us to understand how, within popu-lar culture, the heterosexual matrix ( that grid of culturalintelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are natu-ralised Butler 1999a: 194) retains its dominance.Butler s work allowsus to navigate better the complex ways in which popular culture, in apost-feminist environment, where some degree of gender equality isnominally invoked and upheld, nonetheless works to reconsolidategender norms.Whether in the context of successful television pro-grammes like Channel Four s Big Brother (whose winner in the summerof 2004 was a transsexual called Nadia of Portugese origin), or in anynumber of other popular genres where the breaking of gender normsis a mark of the liberal underpinnings of the text, there are still invari-ably moves to differentiate between men and women in ultimatelyreassuring ways.3 Indeed the complexity of the whole landscape ofcontemporary sexual popular culture where so many traditionalassumptions are now routinely overturned, literally call out for ananalysis informed by Butler s writing
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