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I suggest that a Native feminist analysis could be used to read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble against her and other scholars’ analysis of Bush’s policies. In Gender Trouble, for example, Butler explicitly challenges theorists who posit a naturalized, prediscursive sexed body as the foundation by which to critique contemporary heteropatriarchal practices. She argues that theorizing a prediscursive body necessarily means that the body cannot be prediscursive and hence its account cannot be made outside of prevailing power relations within a specific discursive economy. But positing the body as prediscursive allows the theorist to disavow her or his political investments because the theorist is supposedly rendering an account of the body prior to power relations. Butler’s critique could then be more broadly applied to a critique of “origin stories.” That is, when we critique a contemporary context through an appeal to a prior state before “the fall,” we are necessarily masking power relations through the evocation of lost origins. “The self-justification of a repressive … law almost always grounds itself in a story about what it was like before the advent of the law…. The fabrication of those origins … thereby justifies the Constitution of the law… making the constitution of the law appear as a historical inevitability.”[11]

—Against the Law: Indigenous Feminism and the Nation-State | Smith | Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action