This is from Belsey’s Culture and the Real, but it sounds like what I wrote:
In 1990 Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble electrified cultural critics all over the world. Butler’s brilliant insight was that speech-act theory could be harnessed for feminism and queer studies to demonstrate the performativity of sexual identity. She countered essentialism and identity politics with sexuality as theatre, a display of ‘corporeal style’ (1999: 177), in which parody and the masquerade demonstrated the constructed character of gender as impersonation. Sexual disposition was not an origin but an effect of repeated social performances, none more ‘natural’ than any other. And just as gender is constituted by repeated acts, the idea of ‘an essential sex’ is culturally produced to mask gender’s contingent character (180).
The conventional feminist distinction between biological sex and cultural gender was regressive, Butler argued, leading to a naturalization of gender characteristics rooted in the body. For her, by contrast, sex and gender were one and the same (10– 11); what passed for nature was in practice a product of culture; nature was incorporated into culture. Butler’s anti-foundational feminism, and her opposition to heterosexual hegemony, which I wholeheartedly share, are secured by overriding the anxiety about the limits of culture that I have suggested is evident in culture itself. Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005, 11
🙂 But then Belsey goes on to critique Butler’s book Gender Trouble
Gender Trouble stressed the regulatory character of culture: heterosexuality was a discursive regime, and the possibilities for resistance were limited. But subversion could be read, in Butler’s account, as a matter of choice, as if, because it was purely cultural, sexual identity could be improvised from moment to moment, ‘enacted’ at will: “The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.” (Butler 1999: 119) At such moments Gender Trouble sounds remarkably close to the American dream.
In practice, norms are not so easily subverted, however, and this reading had to be corrected, along with the impression that physiology was reducible to mere discourse. Three years later, in Bodies that Matter, Butler insists on performativity rather than performance; the emphasis on theatricality is much reduced in the analysis (though it returns in the style of the writing); and the politics is less utopian, an issue of rearticulation and resignification.