Judith Butler considers herself primarily committed to feminist theory, and believes that gender comes from performativity . She distinguishes performativity from performance by explaining that the former presumes a subject, but the latter does not accept the idea of a subject. Butler does not believe in distinctions between male and female, but rather that they are based on performativity. For instance, she does not see such factors as the ability to become pregnant as being necessary to define a woman. She points out that there are females - very young, very old, or even of child bearing age who do not want to become pregnant or who cannot become pregnant, and does not feel that this should reflect on their gender assessment by others. She does not believe that such capabilities should be considered when assigning sex to a person: only the performativity of the person should count. She is rejecting all those attributes by which most people determine sex and gender. She rejects all the sexual norms of society.
Butler was most influential in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , in which she argued that feminism took the wrong approach by suggesting that women were a group with common characteristics and common goals. This made a strong statement about the difference between the genders, dividing them into clearly separate groups - men and women. Butler argues that sex causes gender which, in turn, causes a desire for the opposite sex. Inspired by the earlier works of Michel Foucault, her aim is to destroy the links between men and women to make gender and desire more flexible and free-floating, rather than being caused by stable factors. She sees it as connected to performance, a key idea in the Queer Theory.
In Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of "Sex" Butler examined the History of Sexuality and takes bodies as being gender neutral, and shows how they become destabiliz...