Butler's Genealogy of Gender

Summary:
As Butler proceeds through her prefaces and the opening chapter of Gender Trouble we are given an outline of gender performativity and the production of sex through gender. Butler’s performativity is based on the notion of repetition and ritual as a naturalizing practice within the juridical sphere as well as an anticipation of gender that produces a binary conception of gender and effectually, sex (xv). Working within this binary field of representation produces a compulsory heterosexuality where gender, sex, and sexuality seemingly imply one another as signifiers of one another, where sex is the result of gender rather than the premise. (9&10)
Critiquing the universal category of women that Western feminists have purported, Butler discusses ways in which the notion of woman is progressively normalized and solidified through certain feminist cries. While this is problematic in many ways, we can see how representation can be/is exclusionary to certain peoples:
“On the one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women.” (2)
Hence, the problem of the subject. While one gains subjectivity through the normative juridical notions of the body we begin to see how the limitations of gender include and exclude certain bodies. And while Butler only briefly discusses race and its intersections with gender, one can imagine the problematics that certain representations might bring about. Here Butler brings up the point of how it is problematic and potentially self-defeating to seek emancipation through normalizing structures of representation.
Butler goes on to intertwine/critique/differentiate between Monique Wittig’s and Luce Irigiray’s feminist analysis’ of gender. Although I am not familiar with either of the authors, Butler’s analysis makes clear the importance of language within a discussion of gender and the ways in which representation plays out for certain bodies because of linguistic and political limitations.

Questions:
*First off, do you actually buy any of what Butler is arguing?

*Butler points out the impossible task of refusing representational politics (7), given that we cannot abandon rep. politics what are some ways in which normative notions of gender can be subverted? Is drag one of them or is it just spectacle reinstituting gender binaries? Is the field of representation doomed to be exclusionary to some extent, and if so what does/should this say about the ways in which we understand subjectivity? (i.e. coherence of identity v. the fluidity of identity?)

*(This might be semi-off topic but not really...) How do we understand gay/lesbian representation 15 years after Butler’s Gender Trouble? Does this say anything to Butler’s idea around gender and compulsory heterosexuality? And is recent gay politics (i.e. gay marriage for instance) problematic in the sense of the supposed self-defeating effect of emancipation through discursive practices? Another way to put it might be is gay marriage normative? Or hetero? Or queer? Or subversive? And if this even makes sense, is it another form of some compulsory normative sexuality?

*Broadly put, what way does race fit into Butler’s genealogy of gender?