French historian and philosopher Foucault (1926-1984) is widely associated with post-structuralism and is known for seminal work including The Order of Things, and The History of Sexuality. In his post-structuralist work, Foucault was concerned with how systems of thought and knowledge intersect with power and institutional control. Foucault argued that what society calls truth is actually subjective, determined by the power structures of a society. Butler brings Foucault's work into Gender Trouble through his focus on the inescapable presence of power and domination within relationships and within society and his use of genealogy to uncover instances in which power's workings are concealed. They also refer to his critique of the repressive hypothesis, which argues that the modern world has been liberated from the repression of sexuality that existed the past several centuries.

A 20th-century French feminist whose work, including The Second Sex (1949), is the dividing line between first-wave and second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir serves as a point of departure for Butler's gender theory. De Beauvoir's statement that “‘one is not born a woman but becomes one’” (11) appears multiple times in Gender Trouble, as Butler grapples with what becoming means. While Butler ultimately rejects de Beauvoir's use of essentialist gender binaries, their re-reading of what becoming a woman is eventually leads Butler to their own theory of gender performativity.

Jacques Lacan was a 20th-century psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who revised and upended Sigmund Freud's work. His work impacted the study of post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and feminist theory. Post-structuralism argues that there is no fixed meaning in language; instead, it posits that language is fluid, and its meaning is constantly shifting. It also rejects the idea of binaries. One of Lacan's key ideas is that in order to enter language (the Symbolic order), one must repudiate the mother; as a child develops an independent self, separate from the mother, it begins to enter its own world of language and meaning. Butler is critical of Lacan's account of what precedes the Symbolic, but they also ultimately reject Julia Kristeva's attempt to recover the mother after the institution of the Symbolic through the semiotic as well.

Monique Wittig is a 20th-century French feminist whose work in Gender Trouble serves as an example of the foreclosing of subversive possibilities when one insists on enforcing specific configurations of gender. Butler argues that although Wittig seeks to move beyond binary ideas of sex and gender, she still roots her concepts within preestablished categories and in the idea of a core identity that is established before structures oppress it. Butler finds the idea of a core identity essentialist, but she nevertheless finds Wittig's account of the heterosexual contract, the idea that language is a key point of intervention in negotiating gender, and her focus on disintegration of the body to be suggestive.

A Bulgarian French feminist, Julia Kristeva ("Powers of Horror") appears in Gender Trouble due to her seminal work regarding the semiotic as a feminine language, and her work intersects with psychanalysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism. Kristeva posits that the semiotic is an order that emphasizes a lack of stable meanings and that erupts within the Symbolic order (associated with language in Lacan) as poetic language and in childbirth. Butler rejects Kristeva's argument that the semiotic has the potential to subvert the gender order because Kristeva's account of lesbianism reflects an underlying heterosexism and because it reinserts a binary in which the semiotic is subordinated to the Symbolic.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a 20th-century anthropologist whose work on kinship as a universal structure heavily influenced the field of structuralism. Structuralism, a theoretical framework that posits that the meaning of human language isn't intrinsic; instead, its meaning is developed in relation to deep, shared human patterns. Lévi-Strauss applies this theory, originally developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, in an anthropological context, using the field’s theories on language to understand social customs and myths and identify underlying social structures. He posited that a key element of kinship structure is the exchange of women to secure relations between men and kinship groups; this exchange is, in turn, a pivotal aspect of the development of symbolic language. Butler uses Lévi-Strauss as an example of how seemingly stable male-female binaries, especially those that subordinate women, frequently conceal the displacement of aspects of experience that would threaten that binary, including sexuality.

Sigmund Freud is a late-19th-century and early-20th-century Austrian doctor who founded the discourse of psychoanalysis. His theories, particularly the Oedipus complex, melancholia, and mourning, are significant because they offer accounts of identity formation that are rooted in the gendering of the child as it is taken up by the prohibition against incest. Butler re-reads Freud (and his intellectual descendent, Lacan) to highlight the futility of appealing to an identity before discourse as a means to subverting the gender order and to suggest that repression of homosexuality might also be an essential part of typical identity formation.