3.31.2006
Gender Trouble (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Gender Trouble, and in a way, the idea of Judith Butler herself, have become part of the canonical interventionist texts in contemporary feminist and queer theory. It is perhaps odd approaching the work ten years after it was written, after it so troubled the politics of identity formation and the possibilities of subversion. When Butler asserts, for example, “the ‘being’ of gender is an effect,” (43) or contests reification of sex / gender binaries, it is easy as readers who have encountered the reiterations and effects of these ideas on subsequent theorizing in gender studies (and indeed, beyond) to gloss the importance of the interventions made in the text. However, it is important to perform a reading of Gender Trouble that attempts to both engage (and critique) the ideas put forth while seeking to conduct genealogical investigations (much like the ones in which Butler engages) of those very ideas.
Butler begins her text with the question, can feminist theory assume as its subject the category of “women.” As she begins the task of “taking on” the theorists Lacan, Freud, Wittig, Kristeva, Irigiray and Beauvoir, she uses a Foucauldian rubric to unsettle notions regarding the primacy of sex, after which gender follows, attempting to conclude:
“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.”(11)
Butler attempts dislodge the idea that gender (conflated with sex) is a substance (something she finds to be underlying the arguments of most of the writers she confronts, particularly Wittig) – “that sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance.”(25) The reliance on the oppositionality between the binary of “woman” and “man” is used to situate Wittig’s Lesbian is critiqued as reifying a heterosexist, humanist foundation. In using Foucault’s theory regarding the confusion of the cause of sexuality with the effect – the strategic, juridical purpose for which sexuality is created. Thus Butler moves to the position, “gender is always a doing.” (33) The impetus of identity formation is taken away from a static, pre-emptive idea of the subject and placed on the construction of that very identity. Further, Butler is revelatory in suggesting that it is not sex that comes before and informs gender, but rather gender that can (and does) inflect and re-inscribe sex.
It is perhaps interesting to note, briefly, the ways in which this first chapter of Gender Trouble serve to engage the ways in which race crosscuts sexuality and gender identity formation. As she brings up for the first time (and certainly not for the last) Foucault’s introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Journals of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, in Butler’s teasing out of the idea of gender as doing, one may be reminded of the ways race, along side gender, can be seen as both constructed for strategic purposes and a kind of “doing,” particularly when considering, as just one example, the work of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Here three coefficients of identity - nation, gender, and race – cross one another in a troubling account that reflects Butler’s later discussion of ambivalence and drag – a discussion that implicates race, although not explicitly.
As Butler begins her second chapter, she seeks to trouble the psychoanalytic frameworks of origin regarding patriarchy and the possibility of a feminist intervention that posits an space a priori to the Law (in Lacan’s terms) that might serve as a means to dislodge the heterosexual matrix and the repressive, limited possibility for identity. However, Butler argues, once again using Foucault, that the attempt to find a space or an identity that exists before the Law is problematic in two distinct and important ways:
1. When critiquing Rivievere’s concept of a primary bisexuality: “To presume the primacy of bisexuality or the primary characterization of the libido as masculine is still not to account for the construction of these various ‘primacies.’”(69) In other words, there is no way to effectively posit a primacy before the Law if the Law is the structuring element. Foucault’s theory of productive power is neglected for a purely juridical interpretation.
2. Such assumptions as noted above lead to a tautological framework that eventually allows for the unraveling of the entire idea of an a priori identarian space.
It is with these two points that a general thrust of Gender Trouble becomes clear: it is an endeavor to dismantle the ways in which a discourse of transcendence pervades the goals of feminism (although this can be applied to other activist / subversive impulses), therefore ignoring the very real power structures to which subjects are subjected to and in which they are forced to operate. To once again interject with a simultaneous reading of race and nation, it is important to note the ways in which these particular insights can aid in a nuanced reading of diasporic longing and racial melancholia – situations that call for intervention and a space for generative identity which fall into the similar pitfalls noted above.
These general themes continue in Butler’s final chapter which aims not to dictate a means to an end (subversion, positive identity formation, etc.) but rather an opening up of possibilities by questioning how and in what ways the discourse of inscription upon the body has become naturalized. Here Kristeva, in her positing of the oppositionality of the Symbolic and the semiotic is revealed as tautological based on her simultaneous reliance and disavowal of the primacy of language:
“To attribute a causality to drives which facilitates their transformation into language and by which language itself is to be explained cannot reasonably be done within the confines of language itself.”(112)
Language is linked back to the body as creational, once again through Foucault; “the body gains meaning in discourse only in the context of power relations.”(117)
While the references to Foucault throughout this book review may seem facetious in their repetition, Butler does subject his own work to a theory of strategic power systems as she returns to his discussion of Herculine. It is at this point that the text moves into the real possibilities of opening up the body to multiple expressions of gender identity – Herculine leads Butler into a discussion of drag and performative gender. In both drawing on and critiquing Wittig’s attempt to destroy / transcend gender in the reclaiming of the “I” by the Lesbian, Butler suggests a way that the subject can speak (perhaps similar to the ways in which the subaltern seeks language?) through the performance of gender. This performance is always aware of the predilections and currency of power that informs the construction of sex / gender. Butler interjects, “Indeed, in my own view, the normative focus for gay and lesbian practice ought to be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of it’s full scale transcendence.”(158)
The tenth anniversary edition of Butler’s Gender Trouble begins with a new preface in which the author attempts to situate, from a medium-range perspective, the occasion and context of the writing of the book. Additionally, Butler indicates the modifications and interventions her subsequent work has made to the possibilities and “troubles” she incites in this book. I conclude with this as it offers at least some interjections and possibilities to push Gender Trouble further. The book seems to be known best for it’s positing of performance as intervention – it is not difficult to imagine this as the final chapter is the most troubling and problematic. As Butler herself notes in the 1999 Preface, “It is important for me to concede, however, that the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sexual practice.” (xiv) Indeed, in the closing of the final chapter, Butler seems to fall into the same trap of which she faults Foucault when he resorts to a vague description of the possibilities of productive power and the genesis of juridical power. How exactly is drag a better recourse for intervention as opposed to say, Wittig’s idea of the Lesbian? Butler does not allow herself the time to satisfactorily explain. Furthermore, Butler acknowledges the place of a strategic essentialism in the activist / interventionist impulse of queer studies and gender studies, calling into question her “tend to conceive of the claim of ‘universality in exclusive negative and exclusionary terms.”(xvii) Perhaps it is in this particular appeal that one can find a generative call to a specific and strategic (and yet multiple) identity production that may serve to engage power structures that impose gender (or other coefficients of identity) on the subject: “The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes. That is no reason not to use, and be used, by identity.”(xxvi)
Keywords
Gender, Production, Performance, Representation, Discourse.
Other QE Works Cited
Butler, J. Bodies That Matter (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Spivak, G. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror (History and Theory of the Body)
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1999.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Gender Trouble, and in a way, the idea of Judith Butler herself, have become part of the canonical interventionist texts in contemporary feminist and queer theory. It is perhaps odd approaching the work ten years after it was written, after it so troubled the politics of identity formation and the possibilities of subversion. When Butler asserts, for example, “the ‘being’ of gender is an effect,” (43) or contests reification of sex / gender binaries, it is easy as readers who have encountered the reiterations and effects of these ideas on subsequent theorizing in gender studies (and indeed, beyond) to gloss the importance of the interventions made in the text. However, it is important to perform a reading of Gender Trouble that attempts to both engage (and critique) the ideas put forth while seeking to conduct genealogical investigations (much like the ones in which Butler engages) of those very ideas.
Butler begins her text with the question, can feminist theory assume as its subject the category of “women.” As she begins the task of “taking on” the theorists Lacan, Freud, Wittig, Kristeva, Irigiray and Beauvoir, she uses a Foucauldian rubric to unsettle notions regarding the primacy of sex, after which gender follows, attempting to conclude:
“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.”(11)
Butler attempts dislodge the idea that gender (conflated with sex) is a substance (something she finds to be underlying the arguments of most of the writers she confronts, particularly Wittig) – “that sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance.”(25) The reliance on the oppositionality between the binary of “woman” and “man” is used to situate Wittig’s Lesbian is critiqued as reifying a heterosexist, humanist foundation. In using Foucault’s theory regarding the confusion of the cause of sexuality with the effect – the strategic, juridical purpose for which sexuality is created. Thus Butler moves to the position, “gender is always a doing.” (33) The impetus of identity formation is taken away from a static, pre-emptive idea of the subject and placed on the construction of that very identity. Further, Butler is revelatory in suggesting that it is not sex that comes before and informs gender, but rather gender that can (and does) inflect and re-inscribe sex.
It is perhaps interesting to note, briefly, the ways in which this first chapter of Gender Trouble serve to engage the ways in which race crosscuts sexuality and gender identity formation. As she brings up for the first time (and certainly not for the last) Foucault’s introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Journals of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, in Butler’s teasing out of the idea of gender as doing, one may be reminded of the ways race, along side gender, can be seen as both constructed for strategic purposes and a kind of “doing,” particularly when considering, as just one example, the work of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Here three coefficients of identity - nation, gender, and race – cross one another in a troubling account that reflects Butler’s later discussion of ambivalence and drag – a discussion that implicates race, although not explicitly.
As Butler begins her second chapter, she seeks to trouble the psychoanalytic frameworks of origin regarding patriarchy and the possibility of a feminist intervention that posits an space a priori to the Law (in Lacan’s terms) that might serve as a means to dislodge the heterosexual matrix and the repressive, limited possibility for identity. However, Butler argues, once again using Foucault, that the attempt to find a space or an identity that exists before the Law is problematic in two distinct and important ways:
1. When critiquing Rivievere’s concept of a primary bisexuality: “To presume the primacy of bisexuality or the primary characterization of the libido as masculine is still not to account for the construction of these various ‘primacies.’”(69) In other words, there is no way to effectively posit a primacy before the Law if the Law is the structuring element. Foucault’s theory of productive power is neglected for a purely juridical interpretation.
2. Such assumptions as noted above lead to a tautological framework that eventually allows for the unraveling of the entire idea of an a priori identarian space.
It is with these two points that a general thrust of Gender Trouble becomes clear: it is an endeavor to dismantle the ways in which a discourse of transcendence pervades the goals of feminism (although this can be applied to other activist / subversive impulses), therefore ignoring the very real power structures to which subjects are subjected to and in which they are forced to operate. To once again interject with a simultaneous reading of race and nation, it is important to note the ways in which these particular insights can aid in a nuanced reading of diasporic longing and racial melancholia – situations that call for intervention and a space for generative identity which fall into the similar pitfalls noted above.
These general themes continue in Butler’s final chapter which aims not to dictate a means to an end (subversion, positive identity formation, etc.) but rather an opening up of possibilities by questioning how and in what ways the discourse of inscription upon the body has become naturalized. Here Kristeva, in her positing of the oppositionality of the Symbolic and the semiotic is revealed as tautological based on her simultaneous reliance and disavowal of the primacy of language:
“To attribute a causality to drives which facilitates their transformation into language and by which language itself is to be explained cannot reasonably be done within the confines of language itself.”(112)
Language is linked back to the body as creational, once again through Foucault; “the body gains meaning in discourse only in the context of power relations.”(117)
While the references to Foucault throughout this book review may seem facetious in their repetition, Butler does subject his own work to a theory of strategic power systems as she returns to his discussion of Herculine. It is at this point that the text moves into the real possibilities of opening up the body to multiple expressions of gender identity – Herculine leads Butler into a discussion of drag and performative gender. In both drawing on and critiquing Wittig’s attempt to destroy / transcend gender in the reclaiming of the “I” by the Lesbian, Butler suggests a way that the subject can speak (perhaps similar to the ways in which the subaltern seeks language?) through the performance of gender. This performance is always aware of the predilections and currency of power that informs the construction of sex / gender. Butler interjects, “Indeed, in my own view, the normative focus for gay and lesbian practice ought to be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of it’s full scale transcendence.”(158)
The tenth anniversary edition of Butler’s Gender Trouble begins with a new preface in which the author attempts to situate, from a medium-range perspective, the occasion and context of the writing of the book. Additionally, Butler indicates the modifications and interventions her subsequent work has made to the possibilities and “troubles” she incites in this book. I conclude with this as it offers at least some interjections and possibilities to push Gender Trouble further. The book seems to be known best for it’s positing of performance as intervention – it is not difficult to imagine this as the final chapter is the most troubling and problematic. As Butler herself notes in the 1999 Preface, “It is important for me to concede, however, that the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sexual practice.” (xiv) Indeed, in the closing of the final chapter, Butler seems to fall into the same trap of which she faults Foucault when he resorts to a vague description of the possibilities of productive power and the genesis of juridical power. How exactly is drag a better recourse for intervention as opposed to say, Wittig’s idea of the Lesbian? Butler does not allow herself the time to satisfactorily explain. Furthermore, Butler acknowledges the place of a strategic essentialism in the activist / interventionist impulse of queer studies and gender studies, calling into question her “tend to conceive of the claim of ‘universality in exclusive negative and exclusionary terms.”(xvii) Perhaps it is in this particular appeal that one can find a generative call to a specific and strategic (and yet multiple) identity production that may serve to engage power structures that impose gender (or other coefficients of identity) on the subject: “The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes. That is no reason not to use, and be used, by identity.”(xxvi)
Keywords
Gender, Production, Performance, Representation, Discourse.
Other QE Works Cited
Butler, J. Bodies That Matter (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Spivak, G. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror (History and Theory of the Body)
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