 The concern with which Butler opens her 1990 and now-classic book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, is the relation between construction and representation. As a political movement, feminism supposes that it represents a set of pre-existing subjects, namely women, who are uniformly oppressed by a uniform patriarchy. Yet if we follow Foucault, we have to ask who these pre-existing subjects are. More specifically, if we return to de Beauvoir’s claim that “One is not born, but rather becomes a women” we have to ask who or what it is that becomes a woman. It is misleading to think of oppression in terms of structures of power over against the subjects that precede them because subjects, as the particular subjects they are, are first constituted through specific authorizations “through the forms of power that regulate, control, represent and protect them.” Hence, “the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as ‘the subject’ of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics” (1990, 2). While de Beauvoir’s claim assumes a pre-existing female sexed person who acquires the attitudes, behaviors and aspirations of a feminine gender through socialization, Butler maintains that it is through regimes of gender that we first conceive of bodies as sexed. “Gender is … the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’” (1990, 7). This discursive formation of both gender and sex is not only inevitably exclusionary and not only “the mark imposed by the oppressor” (Wittig 1992, 11) but also inconsistent and incoherent both across different historical contexts (see Riley 1988) and in relation to race, class, sexual identities and so on. 