Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published in New York in 1990, proposed the theory of gender performativity — the idea that gender identity is not an inner truth but a repeated set of performances, including dress, gesture, and embodied behaviour. Butler's analysis had direct implications for the history of the corset and bra: these garments, she would argue, were performances of femininity rather than expressions of it, open to parody, drag, and subversion. The book transformed feminist theory globally and remains one of the most cited academic works of the twentieth century.

Gender Trouble provided feminist and queer poets with an entire theoretical vocabulary for addressing the corset, the bra, and gendered clothing as material performances open to rewriting. Poets including Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, and others working at the intersection of queer theory and poetry drew directly on Butler's framework. The idea of subversive bodily repetition — wearing the corset differently — opened new literary territory for poets of the 1990s and beyond.