The notion that gender is something you do, something you perform, is associated with poststructuralist feminism and especially with a book Judith Butler published a generation ago, Gender Trouble from 1990. Butler explicitly challenges the notion of two sexes as a natural biological fact. Instead, she is interested in our preoccupations with the sexed body as a way of making the body culturally meaningful. Our notions even of sex are constructed by regulative discourse - that is, by language. Poststructuralist theory has helped us understand how language shapes our perception of reality in profound ways.

Butler is a thinker who has never stagnated, but continued to develop over the years. To define her position on the basis of one book she wrote a long time ago would thus be more unfair to her than to any other scholar I can think of. Still, Gender Trouble is beyond doubt her most influential book, and it has been stated that nowhere was the impact stronger than in the Scandinavian countries. It is this research, drawing on poststructuralist notions of gender, that has come under particularly heavy criticism in the Norwegian gender debates.

Critical humanities research is often about finding new and surprising ways of looking at things, of approaching things, talking about things, in short: to suggest new and hopefully more adequate theories than the tacit assumptions we often hold.

However, it is a different task to find the most accurate description of society as we see it, or of the human being we have in front of us. Such tasks also belong within the field of gender studies, but poststructuralist theory may not be the best tool to complete them, as even many gender scholars themselves have repeatedly pointed out for over 10 years. But the fact that a theory is used in unhelpful ways does not in itself prove that the theory is wrong. A theory may still be correct, or adequate or useful for its purposes even if it doesn't explain everything. In my opinion this is the case with poststructuralist theory.

Judith Butler is professor of rhetoric, not of social sciences. Her research material is words, and her tool the English language. The transfer of her reflections on gender, language and identity into Scandinavian social scientific method was, not surprisingly, an awkward one that sometimes reduced the complexity of her thought into banality. But the process by which this happened was in no way a unique one: It has happened many times before that a popular theory has been imported into neighbouring fields and ended up as a totalizing explanation of phenomena it never set out to explain in the first place.

The ancient texts that I work on are way beyond what can be analysed through in-depth interviews, questionnaires or statistics. I need tools that acknowledge and respect that in a text, the author is free to construct the world in whichever way he or she wishes. Poststructuralism is not THE theoretical foundation of gender studies, it cannot be used as dogma. Where it does not have explanatory force it should be ditched rather than just invoked. But it can still be very useful when you try to understand why ancient texts present women who are pregnant for years and years before giving birth, women who became men by accident (their genitals "fell out" during exercise) or people who travel to heaven or to the Underworld. How did such stories affect women and men’s experiences of their selves, their bodies? And what can we today learn, by way of the ancients, about our own stories about ourselves, and how they influence our perception of ourselves, our bodies?

Judith Butler's work up to and including Gender Trouble was an attempt to think through the foundations of Western feminist theory. Gender Trouble became so important because of the way it questioned the "presuppositional terms" of feminism up until that point. It paved the way for many who had felt excluded by the previous feminist wave, with its strong focus on feminine qualities, values, and on (heterosexual) motherhood.

 

Research moves in waves, but the water of the previous wave is always used to form the new wave. That will also be the case with whichever wave is about to supersede the poststructuralist one.