GENDER TROUBLE/CHAPTER
1: SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE
1. “Women” as the Subject of Feminism
Butler begins "Gender Trouble" by discussing two controversial terms of
feminist interests: politics and representation (representation as the
process of extending visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects
but also representation as the normative function of language said to reveal or
distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women). She points out that the development of a
language that can adequately represent women has seemed necessary to create
political visibility of women and also that juridical power “produces” what it
claims to merely represent (so power has two functions: the juridical and the
productive), YET the very process of trying to establish a category for
representation described as “women” is problematic. There is no common identity
covered by the term “women” because the term is not exhaustive, gender is not
always constituted coherently/consistently in different historical contexts and
gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional
modalities. She says: “…it becomes
impossible to separate out ‘gender’ from the political and cultural
intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained” (4-5).
There is thus no universal basis (founded upon identity) for
feminism nor is there a singular form of the oppression of women. “Universal patriarchy” no longer holds the
credibility it once did. B. suggests
that: “the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is
effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in
which it functions” (6). She therefore
argues that the attempt to make a stable category of women produces multiple
refusals to accept the category and also opens itself up to charges of gross
misrepresentation (6-7). B. suggests that feminism must reformulate
a representational politics based upon some other need than one for a stable,
unified subject. The category of
“women” only finds stability within the context of the heterosexual matrix, and thus a new feminism should take
into account the variable construction of gendered identity specifically as a
resistance to the proscription that gender be fixed within the heterosexual
matrix. “the identity of the feminist
subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation
of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the
assertion of that foundation. Perhaps,
paradoxically, “representation” will be shown to make sense for feminism only
when the subject of ‘women’ is nowhere present” (8)
2. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
Butler defines the traditional arguments posed for
distinguishing sex and gender only to challenge these limited
understandings. In common understanding,
there is some sort of equation of sex with nature and gender with culture. In face of this, she describes how the
presumed binary system of gender has a strangely mimetic relation to the binary
system of sex (though it should not necessarily be mapped in that way), and she
asks if sex (as well as gender) is constructed by science in this binary way to
serve political and social interests.
She argues that sex is, itself, constructed as a gendered category, and
as a result, gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed
nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’
prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”
Further “ This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be
understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated
by gender. How then does gender need to be reformulated
to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex
and so conceal that very operation of discursive production?” (10).
3. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate
In the discussion of the construction of gender, Butler
suggests that there is a determinism of gender meanings inscribed on
anatomically differentiated bodies where those bodies are understood as passive
recipients of an inexorable cultural law.
In such cases, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny. Butler uses Beauvoir and Irigary to discuss
the fundamental structures by which gender asymmetry is reproduced.
Simone de Beauvoir suggests there is a degree of volition or
agency in the construction of gender.
Butler assesses her work and determines that “the limits of the
discursive analysis of gender presuppose and preempt the possibilities of
imaginable and realizable gender configurations within culture. This is not to say that any and all gendered
possibilities are open, but that the boundaries of analysis suggest the limits
of a discursively conditioned experience.
These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural
discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of
universal rationality. Constraint is
thus built into what that language constitutes as the imaginable domain of
gender” (12). In this light, Bulter
determines that gender is a signification. Luce Irigary, takes up the position of women
in language saying that women constitute the unrepresentable, the sex that
cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity because of the closed
phallogocentric signifying economy. For
Irigary, the feminine “sex” is a point of linguistic absence, the impossibility
of a grammatical denoted substance, and, hence, the point of view that exposes
that substance as an aiding and foundational illusion of masculinist
discourse. For Butler, the masculine and
feminine cannot be represented in a signifying economy in which the masculine
constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified (15). This
illustrates a problematic circularity of a feminist inquiry into gender which
is underscored by the presence of positions “which, on the one hand, presume
that gender is a secondary characteristic of persons and those which on the
other hand, argue that the very notion of the person positioned within language
as a ‘subject,’ is a masculinist construction and prerogative which effectively
excludes the structural and semantic possibility of a feminine gender”
(15).
4. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond
Though Irigary broadens the scope of feminist critique by
exposing the epistemological, ontological, and logical structures of a
masculinist signifying economy, the power of her analysis is undercut precisely
by its globalizing reach. It identifies
the masculinist signifying economy as monolithic and monologic. She then states that: “ Feminist critique
ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but
also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of
feminism. The effort to identify the
enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the
strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms”
(18). So she’s raising the question of
the universality of female identity as well as of masculinist oppression.
So Butler supports a model of coalitional politics as a
“dialogic encounter in which variously positioned women articulate separate
identities” with political intent. A coalition is an assemblage of positions
that cannot be figured in advance.
Though coalitions typically resort back upon some notion of unity that
is, in the end, exclusionary, Butler argues for a coalition that does not
assume solidarity/unity as a prerequisite for political action, and she argues
for us to interrogate the power relations that condition and limit dialogic
possibilities. She calls for “acknowledged
fragmentation,” incompleteness, and an “antifoundationalist approach to
coalitional politics, and the model she describe is one in which identities as
a group come into being and dissolve depending on the concrete practices that
constitute them. She says that “Gender
is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred never fully what it is
at any given juncture in time. An open
coalition then will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and
relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage
that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a
normative telos of definitional closure” (22).
5. Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance
Butler claims that questions of identity cannot proceed
questions of gender identity because “persons only become intelligible through
becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender
intelligibility. She asks if regulatory
practices of gender formation and division constitute identity and if
“identity” is a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of
experience. “incoherent” and
“discontinuous” gendered beings appear as persons but fail to conform to the
gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined. With another round of circular assessment,
Butler argues that discontinuity and incoherence are produced by the very laws
that seek to establish causal or expressive lines of connection among
biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the expression or effect of
both in the manifestation of sexual desire though sexual practice (23). Butler argues that identity is an effect of
discursive practices--regulatory practices of compulsory heterosexuality, and
gender identity is understood as a relationship among sex, gender, sexual
practice, and desire.
Within the spectrum of French feminist and poststructuralist
theory, there are very different interpretations of how regimes of power
produce the identity concepts of sex, but central to each view is the notion
that sex appears within hegemonic language as a “substance,” as, metaphysically
speaking, a self-identical being achieved through a performative twist of
language or discourse that conceals the fact that ‘being’ a sex or gender is
fundamentally impossible (26). According
to grammarians, the mark of gender concerns “substantives” and they talk about
it in terms of function.
Aretha Franklin (30).
One is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a
formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that
binary pair. This conception of gender
presupposes a casual relation among SEX/GENDER/DESIRE (that desire reflects or
expresses gender and that gender reflects or expresses desire) and the metaphysical
unity of the three is assumed to be truly known and expressed. This dream of symmetry is presupposed,
reified and rationalized (31). So the
appearance fo an “abiding substance or gendered self” is thus produced by the
regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of coherence.
Butler then claims that the “ontology of substances itself
is not only an artificial effect, but essentially superfluous” (34). THUS the substantive effect of gender is
performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender
coherence. Gender proves to be performative within the discourse of the
metaphysics of substance. Performative,
that is, constituting the identity it is purported to BE. She challenges us to rethink gender outside
the categories of the metaphysics of substance, and consider that: “there is no
gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is
performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its
results.” (34)
6. Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement
Here Butler is analyzing whether or not the destruction of a
metaphysics of substance allows for an agent.
Monique Wittig’s “materialist theories” maintain that it does. “The differences between the materialist and
Lacanian and post-Lacanian positions emerge in a normative quarrel over whether
there is a retrievable sexuality either ‘before’ or ‘outside’ the law in the
mode of the unconscious or ‘after’ the law as a postgenital sexuality” (39). There is a need to recognize that power
relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a
‘liberated’ heterosexuality or lesbianism (41).
She discusses how to rethink subversive possibilities for sexuality and
identity within the terms of power, and she agues that there is a possibility
of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation but its
displacement. Thus “The repetition of
heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight may well
be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization of gender
categories…Thus gay is to straight not as copy is to original but rather as
copy is to copy. The original is nothing
more than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original (43).
Butler then asks the crucial question: “What kind of subversive repetition might
call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself? What possibilities exist by virtue of the
constructed character of sex and gender (44).
“If the regulatory fictions of sex and gender are themselves multiply
contested sites of meaning, then the very multiplicity of their construction
holds out the possibility of a disruption of their univocal posturing” (
44).
“Gender is the
repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid
regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance,
of a natural sort of being. A political
genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive
appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for
those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police
the social appearance of gender. To
expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic
necessity…is a task that now takes on the added burden of showing how the very
notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered,
admits of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various
reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies” (45).
Butler calls for the “mobilization, subversive confusion,
and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep
gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity”
(46).
Next parts of "Gender Trouble"'s summary:
Additional books by Butler to check out:
