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Those last questions had also been raised by Judith Butler before they had come to be called queer theory. Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble, in addition to its well-known (but still widely misunderstood) arguments about performativity of gender, had its deepest impact through the same kind of shift in perspective. Instead of starting with the nature of sex, she urged us to analyze the normative frameworks by which gender and sexuality are constituted and inhabited in the first place. Fusing insights from phenomenology and Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory together with a long history of feminist thought, Butler foregrounded a problem that has still not been fully grasped in most philosophy or the social sciences. Where most accounts of norms imagine an agent who acts on the basis of beliefs or desires and reflects on what ought to be done, Butler called attention to the ways we find ourselves already normatively organized as certain kinds of agents, for example by having gender in ways that must be intelligible to others. The problem, she said, was the “regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence,” which “disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe.
