In Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble," she addresses the problems of gender distinction and the inherent flaws related

to current modes of thought. Her essay is an argument of why gender is a performance rather than a natural fact. Butler begins by explaining how she will question the gender hierarchy. She notes that current feminism seeks to define gender. However, this is problematic. The focus on defining gender and the perceived risks of failing to do so ignore the political issue that requires a distinction (2540). Gender itself is a performance - an artificial attempt that is accepted as natural. The proof she cites is Divine, a drag queen.The impersonation of women through drag suggests that gender itself is an impersonation. Men dressing as women proves to Butler that being a culturally accepted woman is a combination of the right clothes and mannerisms and not some inherent quality that all women are born with. While Divine's drag performance is not a man attempting to "pass" as a woman, the exaggeration of his clothing and makeup The performance destabilizes the binaries we accept as true. She goes on to discuss the genealogical critique and how it refuses to search for an original (natural) distinction between genders and instead investigates what has happened because of the need for some sort of origin of distinction. In less words, the genealogical approach refuses to search for the cause, instead examining what effect the need for a cause had. Because of these issues, feminism must move past the obsession with finding a distinction and think of what could happen when that constraint is lifted. She proposes that the need for a definition is a manifestation of society's "construction and regulation of identity" (2541). The identity and "natural" state of the body extends to the genitals and what acts they are naturally meant to perform. Butler discusses the body, first citing Foucault's notion that the body is inscribed, which implies that there is a natural state before the inscription - representing societal constraints and ideals that are applied (2543). The "stable" body - pre-inscription - extends to sexual practices, where it is perceived that certain types of sex are natural. But these types are subject to change within the cultures they are present, and thus this disproves the theory. Butler cites anal sex among homosexual males as a remarking of the body (2545). Butler moves on to discuss the concept of inner and outer. She references Foucault's idea that the soul is part of that outer inscription of the body. While the soul is understood as being invisible and within the body, its presence marks the body as a sacred vessel for the soul. Thus the soul is also what the body lacks, as the two are separate entities in that sense - enclosed within each other, but not one. It is therefore assumed that the body acts in accordance with the soul enclosed, and that the outer mannerisms are performing inner workings. Reality itself is therefore created by the interior - the unseen, hidden, invisible force (2548). Bringing her argument back to gender, Butler goes on to discuss Newton's Mother Camp, where Newton argues that drag reveals a "key fabricating mechanism through which the social construction of gender takes place" (2549). Butler extends this, saying that drag fully subverts the inner and outer, and questions the "true gender identity." She notes that traditional feminist theory treats drag as an imitation and the sex as original. While drag does portray a woman, it highlights the "falsely naturalized" elements (2550). Drag is the parody of the gender dichotomy. We understand that the body is able to be imprinted. Society accepts the notion

of the soul/body, and Butler extends that to say that the world is created by internal minds, and is therefore artificial in some sense. Thus the way that gender affects the body must also be artificial. Drag performances by men support this idea, and call into question what it means to be a woman, and how that image is constructed. Gender itself must therefore be a representation, a performance, and not a natural/original state. When feminism accepts this, it can move past what Butler would consider to be useless worries and focus on how society has been set up to privilege one gender, rather than how that gender came to be.