Judith Butler addresses the “need” for “solidarity as a prerequisite for political action” in Gender Trouble. She claims that, without a need for unity, a group would focus more on the actions instead of the articulation of identity, and therefore would be more successful in reaching the major goals at hand. Then she goes on to propose that groups should form coalitions without predefining categories such as “woman” and instead learn to “acknowledge [their] contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact.” However, I think this approach is problematic when it comes to actions that revolve around discrimination based on identity and how systems of oppression have created a need for those actions.

How is one supposed to fight a discriminatory system without establishing the definitions on which the system has been operating? I agree with Butler in saying that, for example, the category of “women” is too broad, vague, and ignorant of intragroup differences, BUT I feel that we need SOME sort of definition of what “woman” is so that we can counteract the oppression that people who have been identified and/or marked as women have experienced. SOME organizational principle must be used, even though it may act as exclusionary sometimes; I don’t believe there is any term or group that does not somehow exclude a part of the community at large. However, we must try to find the least exclusionary terms that still help reach our objectives, whatever those may be, and try to continually broaden our categories to acknowledge different systems simultaneously at work, while still keeping our original purposes in mind.