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A small boy, acute and precocious, afflicted with a heart of weak action, but beautifully intelligent, who saw their prowling precarious life exactly as it was, and measured and judged it, and measured and judged them, all round, ever so quaintly; presenting himself in short as an extraordinary little person.
-Henry James, describing Morgan Moreen in the Preface to What Maisie Knew, "In the Cage," "The Pupil"
Judith Butler once had an opportunity to write about James, but chose not to. The first issue of the journal GLQ, published in 1993, began with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," followed by Butler's essay "Critically Queer." Sedgwick opens with an account of the "productive impact" (1) of Gender Trouble on the then emerging field of queer theory. And Butler begins her essay by pointing out how Sedgwick's work has encouraged the observation "that 'queering' persists as a defining moment of performativity" (17). Butler ends with a footnote thanking Sedgwick for her essay and "for the provocations lodged in her text and perhaps more poignantly in earlier drafts" (29). Despite the fact that James pretty solidly occupies nine of the fifteen pages of Sedgwick's essay, Butler never mentions him once by name. If there was anything written about James in those earlier drafts that rendered them more "poignant," Butler chooses not to mention it.
But this is not to say that Butler's writing has not been Jamesian in the sense of taking up questions and problems that were central for James. A key moment in Gender Trouble occurs when Butler writes that "the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category" (7). Butler is politically troubled here by how an insistence on the representational efficacy of a homogenizing category- "women"-can disable that category's power. Nonetheless, like Morgan Moreen's prototype, Butler writes from within a political movement committed to the efficacious representation she finds so elusive and problematic. In April 1883, writing a note for The Bostonians, James recorded a similar dilemma:
Daudet's Évangéliste has given me an idea of this thing. If I could only do something with that pictorial quality! At any rate, the subject...