Haircut Theory: Living with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble

I recently found myself in a bit of gender trouble when I discovered that Judith Butler and my girlfriend share a hairstylist. That Judith Butler does not cut her own hair was itself a shock. But the trouble was just that, well, my girlfriend is very femme, and it was all a bit too Between Men, bonding me to my beloved butch rival by her bespoke bowl-cut. (But maybe that's too much 1990 already; surely Sedgwick mustn't always steal the show.)

I first read Gender Trouble in 2010 as an undergraduate with a freshly shaved head, and I showed up shorn to office hours looking to make a scene. My TA redirected my baby-gay boundary-crossing to a book by Lauren Berlant. As it turns out, the book was not my cup of tea — I had yet to cultivate the taste for it — but Berlant's blog made me cry. It had not occurred to me that texts had authors, that academics were people, that blogs had content. I mistook it for a diary, not knowing that the ordinary was available for analysis. I recently returned to Supervalent Thought, searching for my prior punctum. The last entries I had read were a series from 2010 limning her idea of the "combover subject." I recalled my father's experiments with Rogaine for Men™ in the 90s, when my brother and I learned about the bottles of toxins we were to avoid in the bathroom cabinet. I recalled my mother's cries over my shaved head some years later — cries of delight! Far from queer militancy it evoked for her the smooth scalp of my infancy. Gender Trouble is 30 years old; I am 31. I have no memory of its publication, no memory of 1990 at all. Although I never knew the 90s, they have come to me across time and come back to me still.

Last month, when Karen Tongson started an Instagram account called @butchhairquarantine to capture the drama wrought on the queer visage by the closure of inessential services — I was disturbed; I really thought all lesbians cut their own hair, as I do. My girlfriend and I joke that a butch I love to make fun of, precisely because we are nearly identical, will start getting her fade done by the veterinarian who gives her cats their "therapeutic trims." I think of Derrida's cat seeing him naked; I think of Derrida naked shaving his pussy. "I don't fear losing my mind / I notice my dandruff," erstwhile lesbian performance artist Linda Montano writes of her chakras in the time of COVID-19. The highest mind is the lowest, the one that can't be lost because it marks its tracks in flakes — scalp and skin, hair dead and growing. We really do need haircut theory, and perhaps Judith Butler is just the man for the job. I fantasize about Judith Butler, auto-theorist of lesbian hair; Judith Butler, preeminent lesbian-with-a-haircut.

When I shaved my head my senior year of college I told everyone it was because I was depressed, not gay. Looking back it is hilarious to me that I felt this was a meaningful distinction. As if gay liberation's push to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness had got it exactly backwards, as if being a depressed Women's Studies major with a freshly shaved head weren't in every way a massive tell, as if it were more sensible to be read as unhinged than gay as a young white person on a college campus in Los Angeles in 2010.

If my fusion of madness and homosexuality smacks of an undergraduate Foucauldianism gone awry, it also had a more proximate etiology. Averse to nightlife, social scenes of all kinds, not to mention conviviality, conversation, and fun broadly construed, I was confused about how to "meet women." I was so obnoxious in my Women's Studies courses that I was functionally my own prophylaxis, but alighted upon a solution when I discovered a queer support group. Alone together, I thought: perfection. I was loath to admit I might be a legitimate beneficiary of a support group. I needed a cover story of impropriety, perversion, sexual intrigue.

I met my first girlfriend over trauma narratives, holding off on cross-talk in favor of a post-meeting cup of tea. Incidentally this was not only my first lesbian date, but it was also my first cup of tea! I burned my tongue. If only I'd had Amber Musser's insight about "Lesbians, Tea, and the Vernacular of Fluids" at my disposal then, I might have read the invitation for the open seduction it clearly was. My tea date became my lover and then after some time, not much time at all, my girlfriend. (I'll admit that it was tacky I'd taken a lover at the lesbian support group, not to mention that I'd attended a lesbian support group with the express intent to take a lover there. My girlfriend's ex-girlfriend made that crystal clear when we met up to help my girlfriend film a re-enactment of her suicide attempt. But that's another story.)

My first girlfriend was a soft butch ten years my senior. She introduced me to Gender Trouble and loaned me the copy she had. I wanted to steal it from her, and made detailed plans to do so upon what I correctly assumed would be our imminent breakup. I had already read it but I wanted to have it. I couldn't keep it, moved by the proleptic guilt of stealing it from the LGBT lending library from which she'd borrowed it. At the last minute I slipped it back into her pile of books and resolved to buy a copy of my own. Gender Trouble is the first thing I ever ordered on Amazon.com. (I bought Madness and Civilization in the same order.)

I graduated from UCLA in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in Women's Studies, the last class to bear that imprimatur before the move to departmentalization as Gender Studies. I remember the heated debates about this name change vividly, forging as they did my sense of the inextricability of gender from discipline. On some level reading Gender Trouble that year was superfluous: gender trouble was afoot institutionally; it formed the ground and frame of my education. It was an early crash course in the ways the institutional horizon of feminism might founder on the lived experience of its constituents. At that point I had been thinking of myself as a lesbian for a few years, but I had yet to consider that I was a woman. In fact, I had imbibed the wisdom of Monique Wittig askance: lesbians are not women, I thought, with relief rather than revolution in view. Dodged that bullet! Then I found out I was a butch. Many women told me so. I figured my good feminism should compel me to take them at their word.

When Jordy Rosenberg wrote about Gender Trouble on Mother's Day, he wrote about reading it without understanding, and re-reading it many years later with an understanding whose primary pleasure, it turns out, is not in the text, but rather in the recognition it makes available by contrast that the first reading had been characterized by a beautiful incomprehension. The pleasures of Gender Trouble are anticipatory, proleptic, and/or retrospective; no one has ever claimed reading it is fun. I had not yet learned to read at all in 1990, when Gender Trouble was first published. I read Gender Trouble out of time, just in time, at the perfect time, in the eternal 1990 that was the Women's Studies classroom at any given time.

I learned to be a symptomatic reader by scouring the Acknowledgements sections of academic monographs. Gender Trouble doesn't have one. I learned that Judith Butler and Wendy Brown are a couple from Brown's book on wounded attachments. I cathected to queer theory because it gave me a mode to register my incoherence, and a method to make every book about me.

Reading Gender Trouble now, I am more struck by the "social" than the "construction" of its social constructionist theory of gender. I have never felt that my gender was mine, and even less so as time has wrought its transformations on the social, reconstructing my gender along the way. I am troubling for others who give me trouble as if giving me what's coming, returning to me what's mine. I didn't know how to own it until my girlfriend gave me gender trouble, and then gave me Gender Trouble to fix it, but I was more concerned with figuring out how to get away with keeping Gender Trouble than with resolving my own trouble, such as it was, and anyway "perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence," as Gender Trouble itself offers in a prefatory proposition.1

I met with gender trouble when I met my girlfriend, a different one. At the end of our first date, walking home and passing a joint between us, she asked me my pronouns. I found the timing hilarious: not prompt enough to have informed the date, just prompt enough to enable her to gossip about me with friends after the fact in a way that might grammatically affirm my sense of self. As Judith Butler puts it in her chapter on Wittig — a chapter whose prose stumbles over too many instances of word "lesbian" to avoid rhetorically re-inscribing lesbians as women against Wittig's own insight — "the lesbian (pronouns are a problem here)."2

Pronouns are a problem here, I told her. I joked evasively and put the question back to her, but I was caught out when she told me in response that she identifies as a lipstick butch. I thought she was joking too. She was not. I looked at her vintage maxi dress, her clutch purse, her tresses, her conspicuously bare lips. Do you mean chapstick femme, I asked. Femme top? Power bottom? "Futch"?? None of these terms had traction. They signified precisely nothing to her. We were in the same universe orbiting different suns. I'm just a butch, I said, trying on seriousness. I love butches, she replied. I wasn't sure what this meant, a self-professed lipstick butch professing a love of butches. Is your love of butches charged with the thrill of sameness or difference, I asked, fishing for difference. Does this make me gay? — I hold my homophobia more dear than my pronouns, I told her before she could answer.

(I've been dating more than usual lately, and called upon to give accounts of myself more than usual as a consequence. Bored of this exercise, skeptical of its capacity to communicate much beyond the symptomatic, and wanting to perform as little faith as I have in the capacity of identity to resolve the alienation I feel, I've taken to telling the barest truth: the distillation of my self-concept to its essence would yield a boner with eyes. Sue-Ellen Case told me it was okay to feel this way; Judith Butler taught me it was inevitable. My girlfriend, a different one, told me if I cut out this aside she'll cut off my phallic power.)

I met my girlfriend at the birthday party she hosted for Susie Bright when Susie came to contribute metadata for her papers in the human sexuality archive, a birthday in the midst of the becoming-historical of lesbian feminism. We looked at a photograph of the On Our Backs offices, Susie in the back in big glasses, Debi Sundahl in a bustier bottle-feeding a computer, archived lesbianism. My girlfriend ordered a birthday cake frosted with a Honey Lee Cottrell photograph, which the Wegmans bakery department had, in compliance with corporate policy, silently edited to eliminate the word "sex." (As consolation, a vigilante dissenter sent her home with a small tube of red frosting and some encouraging words about DIY. The sex wars rage on at Wegmans.) The sexuality archivist had put me on a list of likely perverts, hoping to give Susie a good showing. The resultant party was a freaky scene indeed — very 1990 at 30 — and I felt troubled for feeling at home in it. Why is it that I feel at home in the trappings of a decade I have no memory of, a movement whose tenets I do not hold, a social scene whose proponents would not recognize me as one of their own? I get off on misrecognition, having an allergy to being seen. But more important perhaps is the fact that I have taken my education in queer theory, which, when I became a student of it, was hard at work self-genealogizing as a version of 1990 at n+1.

Judith Butler's 1999 preface to the reissue of Gender Trouble discloses some things that surprise me. She says the book was born of a reading of Kafka's "Before the Law"; that it was animated by a refusal of the logic of "feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice"; that she thought of it as a "crossover" book.

It was hard for me to imagine that this most famously "difficult" book had felt to its author like a synthesis of her life with her work, but harder still for me to come to terms with how much it has, in fact, become a crossover hit. The most recent copy of Gender Trouble I'd seen (prior to re-reading my own copy) was the one in the arms of an undergraduate horse standing shyly in her dormitory hallway in Bojack Horseman. The copy before that had been in the hands of Lisa Simpson in the pages of Books on the Simpsons, a compendium of the series' illustrated book covers, that I browsed in a clothing store in Los Angeles, waiting for my girlfriend to pick out Tom of Finland postcards to send to her boyfriend. The copy before that had been the papier-mâché mock-up at quadruple scale that served as a prop in Killjoy's Kastle, Allyson Mitchell and Dierdre Logues's lesbian feminist haunted house. Gender Trouble is a thing.

I feel most hailed by the moment in Gender Trouble when Judith Butler insists that she has a personality: "That I can write in an auto-biographical mode does not, I think, relocate this subject that I am, but perhaps it gives the reader a sense of solace that there is someone here (I will suspend for the moment the problem that this someone is given in language)."3 This caveat is itself communicated with a parenthetical performative that conjures Butler as a cunning linguist in the very moment of her hedging about the verifiability of her own personhood.

A lesbian who is willing to allow for skepticism about whether or not her language can vouch for her existence, a lesbian so committed to her train of thought that she carries it to the very brink of her own eradication as a thinking person, a lesbian who does not take for granted that her readers know her to be "someone" at all, a lesbian who is more present on the page as syntax than as subject, whose life is the obscene to her speech: this was someone I could get hailed by.

I want to perform as little faith as I have in the capacity of identity to resolve the alienation I feel. My girlfriend takes all my best lines for her poems. This is the first time I've taken one back. What's it to me, my words in her mouth or mine, when I learned them all from Judith Butler.

When I first encountered Gender Trouble I had yet to shave my head; my hair, waist length, had never been cut; I thought of it as gender neutral because natural: I was wrong. Gender troubled in 2010, I buzzed off all my hair. In 2020, I cut my hair and my cat's with the same clippers. "Local strategies for engaging the 'unnatural,'" as Gender Trouble might have it.4 Therapeutic trims.

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Joan Lubin is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Science & Literature at Cornell University. She is finishing a book project about the imprint of quantitative sexology on postwar literature and culture, and starting another about the construction of science fiction as an object of literary critical attention and feature of English department curricula.

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