Political Representation without Identity: a feminist dilemma

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler criticizes the way in which feminism traditionally maintained an unjustified binarism between female and male based on the well-known dichotomy gender and sex. By deconstructing these categories showing how the content of gender and sex are constructed and contingent, Butler also empties the feminist political subject known as “woman”. Given the heterogeneity of the content that constitutes this “woman”category, Butler denies the possibility of an effective political representation through the use of a shared identity, because she denies the existence of characteristics shared among women. Some authors, like Iris Young, considered this denial of the political subject of feminism as a political risk that could undermine the emancipatory potential of the feminist movement. In this article, I show how Young seeks to reconceptualize the gender category as disconnected from identity based on the criticisms made by Butler. As a result, Young allows the construction of a gender theory that is committed to the political representation of women in a non-essentialist and democratic form.