In the first preface, Butler contextualizes her work. She originally envisioned her work as an intervention in feminist theory and did not anticipate that it would be received as a founding text for queer theory. Her worry in 1989 was about exclusionary practices she saw at work in essentialist formulations of feminism, and writing Gender Trouble was an effort to counter the panic in the face of an increasing diversity of genders.

Butler engaged with French feminist theory and poststructuralism, making the work one of “cultural translation” (ix) of a disparate set of texts and authors who were lumped together in most Anglo-American work, for some reason. Although her engagement with poststructuralism in particular opened her work up to criticism that it was aloof from social and political concerns, the inroads poststructuralism has since made in cultural studies would seem to argue that this characterization is a false one. Her engagement with Anglo-American feminists has since caused her to recognize that gender hierarchy functions to reinforce heterosexual norms.

Butler writes that her work also emerges out of an autobiographical context. She grew up watching an uncle who was persecuted because of his gender, and she herself was scarred by the homophobia she had to navigate as a young lesbian living on the East Coast.