Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions of feminist theory, that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language.

Examining the work of the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Butler explores the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender.

Discussing the patriarchy, Butler notes that feminists have frequently made recourse to the supposed pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which to base a new, non-oppressive society.

For this reason, accounts of the original transformation of sex into gender by means of the incest taboo have proven particularly useful to feminists.

Butler revisits three of the most popular: the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, in which the incest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Riviere's psychoanalytic description of "womanliness as a masquerade" that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one, in which cathexis becomes identification.

In response to the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that posited a paternal Symbolic order and a repression of the "feminine" required for language and culture, Julia Kristeva added women back into the narrative by claiming that poetic language—the "semiotic"—was a surfacing of the maternal body in writing, uncontrolled by the paternal logos.

In his introduction to the journals, Foucault writes of Barbin's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity.

"[8] Butler accuses Foucault of romanticism, claiming that his proclamation of a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in The History of Sexuality, in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that system itself.

Butler traces the feminist theorist Monique Wittig's thinking about lesbianism as the one recourse to the constructed notion of sex.

"[10] Building on the thinking of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, outlined in her Purity and Danger (1966), Butler claims that the boundaries of the body have been drawn to instate certain taboos about limits and possibilities of exchange.

Butler attempts to construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the gendered pronoun has been removed or not presumed to be a reasonable category.