Butler’s article draws on a previous work, “Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault” in which they examine Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quotation “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”—an essential motto of the feminist movement (Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley, Vintage, 1974). In The Second Sex, first published in 1949, Beauvoir articulates the idea that sex—the physiology of the body—and gender (masculinity and femininity) are distinct and that the oppression of women comes from positioning women as the “Other.” Theorists like Monique Wittig argued that oppression is inherent in binary thinking and, therefore, to combat the oppression of women, we must move outside the gender binary. But Butler deprioritizes the idea of binary gender and instead complicates the usual feminist analysis of gender by investigating the way bodies create gender through the performance of gendered acts.

The idea that gender is “performative” is easily misinterpreted, and Butler seeks to prevent these misreadings. For one, the idea of performance in relation to theater suggests that people perform gender acts of their own volition, like theater roles, and thus gender is something a person can freely choose.