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Reserve Text--from
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Chapter 1: "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire"
i. "Women"
as the Subject of Feminism |
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[2] tions for being
a subject must first be met before representation can be extended. Foucault points
out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they
subsequently come to represent.1 Juridical notions of power appear to
regulate political life in purely negative terms-that is, through the
limitation, prohibition, regulation, control and even "protection"
of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent
and retractable operation of choice. But the subjects regulated by such
structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined,
and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures.
If this analysis is right, then the juridical formation of language
and politics that represents women as "the subject" of feminism
is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational
politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted
by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation.
This becomes politically problematic if that system can be shown to
produce gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination or
to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases,
an uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of "women"
will be clearly self-defeating. The question of
"the subject" is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics
in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably prof duced
through certain exclusionary practices that do not "show"
once the juridical structure of politics has been established. In other
words, the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain
legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are
effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes
juridical structures as their foundation. Juridical power inevitably
"produces" what it claims merely to represent; hence, politics
must be concerned with this dual function of power: the juridical and
the productive. In effect, the law produces and then conceals the notion
of "a subject before the law"2 in order to invoke that discursive
formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates
that law's own regulatory hegemony. It is not enough to inquire into
how women might become more fully represented in language and politics.
Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of "women,"
the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures
of power through which emancipation is sought. Indeed, the question
of women as the subject of feminism raises the possibility that there
may not be a subject who stands "before" the law, awaiting
representation in or by the law. Perhaps the subject, as [3] well as the invocation
of a temporal "before," is constituted by the law as the fictive
foundation of its own claim to legitimacy. The prevailing assumption
of the ontological integrity of the subject before the law might be
understood as the contemporary trace of the state of nature hypothesis,
that foundationalist fable constitutive of the juridical structures
of classical liberalism. The performative invocation of a nonhistorical
"before" becomes the foundational premise that guarantees
a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed and,
thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract. Apart from the
foundationalist fictions that support the notion of the subject, however,
there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption
that the term women denotes a common identity. Rather than a
stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports
to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become
a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. As Denise
Riley's title suggests, Am I That Name? is a question produced
by the very possibility of the name's multiple significations.3 If one
"is" a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails
to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered "person" transcends
the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not
always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical
contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic,
sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.
As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out "gender"
from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably
produced and maintained. The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination. The notion of a universal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists. Where those various contexts have been consulted within such theories, it has been to find "examples" or "illustrations" of a universal principle that is assumed from the start. That form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a "Third World" or even an "Orient" in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non- Western barbarism. The urgency of feminism to |
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[4] establish a universal
status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism's
own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut
to a categorial or fictive universality of the structure of domination,
held to produce women's common subjugated experience. Although the claim
of universal patriarchy no longer enjoys the kind of credibility it
once did, the notion of a generally shared conception of "women,"
the corollary to that framework, has been much more difficult to displace.
Certainly, there have been plenty of debates: Is there some commonality
among "women" that preexists their oppression, or do "women"
have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone? Is there a specificity
to women's cultures that is independent of their subordination by hegemonic,
masculinist cultures? Are the specificity and integrity of women's cultural
or linguistic practices always specified against and, hence, within
the terms of some more dominant cultural formation? If there is a region
of the "specifically feminine," one that is both differentiated
from the masculine as such and recognizable in its difference by an
unmarked and, hence, presumed universality of "women"? The
masculine/feminine binary constitutes not only the exclusive framework
in which that specificity can be recognized, but in every other way
the "specificity" of the feminine is once again fully decontextualized
and separated off analytically and politically from the constitution
of class, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power relations that both
constitute "identity" and make the singular notion of identity
a misnomer: [5] this case, exclusion
itself might qualify as such an unintended yet consequential meaning.
By conforming to a requirement of representational politics that feminism
articulate a stable subject, feminism thus opens itself to charges of
gross misrepresentation. Obviously, the
political task is not to refuse representational politics--as if we
could. The juridical structures of language and politics constitute
the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside
this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating practices.
As such, the critical point of departure is the historical present,
as Marx put it. And the task is to formulate within this constituted
frame a critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical
structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize. Perhaps there is
an opportunity at this juncture of cultural politics, a period that
some would call "postfeminist," to reflect from within a feminist
perspective on the injunction to construct a subject of feminism. Within
feminist political practice, a radical rethinking of the ontological
constructions of identity appears to be necessary in order to formulate
a representational politics that might revive feminism on other grounds.
On the other hand, it may be time to entertain a radical critique that
seeks to free feminist theory from the necessity of having to construct
a single or abiding ground which is invariably contested by those identity
positions or anti-identity positions that it invariably excludes. Do
the exclusionary practices that ground feminist theory in a notion of
"women" as subject paradoxically undercut feminist goals to
extend its claims to "representation"?5 Perhaps the problem
is even more serious. Is the construction of the category of women as
a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification
of gender relations? And is not such a reification precisely contrary
to feminist aims? To what extent does the category of women achieve
stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?6
If a stable notion of gender no longer proves to be the foundational
premise of feminist politics, perhaps a new sort of feminist politics
is now desirable to contest the very reifications of gender and identity,
one that will take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological
and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal. To trace the political operations that produce and conceal what qualifies as the juridical subject of feminism is precisely the task of a feminist genealogy of the category of women. In the course of this effort to question "women" as the subject of feminism, the unproblematic invocation of that category may prove to preclude the possibility of feminism as a representational politics. What sense does it make to extend representation to subjects who are constructed through |
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[6] the exclusion of
those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the
subject? What relations of domination and exclusion are inadvertently
sustained when representation becomes the sole focus of politics? 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 presumed. Although the unproblematic
unity of "women" is often invoked to construct a solidarity
of identity, a split is introduced in the feminist subject by the distinction
between sex and gender. Originally
intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction
between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biologicalintractability
sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender
is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. The
unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the distinction
that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex.? If gender is the
cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot
be said to follow from a sex in anyone way. Taken to its logical limit,
the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between
sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment
the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction
of "men" will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or
that "women" will interpret only female bodies. Further, even
if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology
and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason
to assume that genders ought also to remain as two.8 The presumption
of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic
relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise
restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized
as radically independent of sex, gender itself owes a free-floating
artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine
might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman
and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. This radical splitting
of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems. Can we refer
to a "given" sex or a "given" gender without first
inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And
what is "sex" anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal,
or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the [7] It would make no
sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex,
if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived
merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical
conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production
whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is
not to culture as sex is to nature; 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. This construction
of "sex" as the radically unconstructed will concern us again
in the discussion of Levi-Strauss and structuralism in chapter 2. At
this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability
and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality
of sex in a prediscursive domain. 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? Is there "a" gender which persons are said to have, or is it an essential attribute that a person is said to be, as implied in the question "What gender are you?"? When feminist theorists claim that gender is the cultural interpretation of sex or that gender is culturally constructed, what is the manner or mechanism of this construction? If gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently, or does its constructedness imply some form of socIal determinism, foreclosing the possibility of agency and transformation? Does "construction" suggest that certain laws generate gender differences along universal axes of sexual difference? How and where does the construction of [8] gender take place?
What sense can we make of a construction that cannot assume a human
constructor prior to that construction? On some accounts, the notion
that gender is constructed suggests a certain determinism of gender
meanings inscribed on anatomically differentiated bodies, where those
bodies are understood as passive recipients of an inexorable cultural
law. When the relevant "culture" that "constructs"
gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it
seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny
formulation. In such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny. On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that "one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one."12 For Beauvoir, gender is "constructed," but implied in her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender. Is gender as variable and volitional as Beauvoir's account seems to suggest? Can "construction" in such a case be reduced to a form of choice? Beauvoir is clear that one "becomes" a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. And clearly, the compulsion does not come from "sex." There is nothing in her account that guarantees that the "one" who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If "the body is a situation",13 as she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a pre discursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along. The controversy over the meaning of construction appears to founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between free will and determinism. As a consequence, one might reasonably suspect that some common linguistic restriction on thought both forms and limits the terms of the debate. Within those terms, "the body" appears as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning for itself. In either case, the body is figured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural meanings are only externally related. But "the body" it itself a construction, as are the myriad "bodies" that constitute the domain of gendered subjects. Bodi,es cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges: To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly, immaterial will?15 [9] Whether gender
or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse which, it will
be suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or to safeguard
certain tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any analysis of gender.
The locus of intractability, whether in "sex" or "gender"
or in the very meaning of "construction," provides a clue
to what cultural possibilities can and cannot become mobilized through
any further analysis. 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. In a move that
complicates the discussion further, Luce Irigaray argues that women
constitute a paradox, if not a contradiction, within the discourse of
identity itself. Women are the "sex" which is not "one."
Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language,
women constitute the unrepresentable. In other words, women represent
the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity. Within
a language that rests on univocal signification, the female sex constitutes
the unconstrainable and undesignatable. In this sense, women are the
sex which is not "one," but multiple.16 In opposition to Beauvoir,
for whom women are designated as the Other, Irigaray argues that both
the subject and the Other are masculine mainstays of a closed phallogocentric
signifying economy that achieves its totalizing goal through the exclusion
of the feminine altogether. For Beauvoir, women are the negative of
men, the lack against which masculine
identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray, that particular dialectic
constitutes a system that excludes an entirely different economy of
signification. Women are not only represented falsely within the Sartrian
frame of signifying-subject and signified Other, but the falsity of
the signification points out the entire structure of representation
as inadequate. The sex which is not one, then, provides a point of departure
for a criticism of hegemonic Western representation and of the metaphysics
of substance that structures the very notion of the subject. What is the metaphysics
of substance, and how does it inform thinking about the categories of
sex? In the first instance, humanist conceptions of the subject tend
to assume a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential
and nonessential attributes. A humanist feminist position might understand
gender as an attribute of a person who is characterized essentially
as a pregendered substance or "core," called the person, denoting
a universal capacity for reason, moral deliberation, or language. The
universal conception of the person, however, is displaced as a point
of departure for a social theory of gender by those historical and anthropological
positions that understand gender as a relation among socially
constituted subjects in specifiable contexts. This relational or contextual
point of view suggests that what the person "is," and, indeed,
what gender "is," is always relative to the constructed relations
in which it is determined.17 As a shifting and contextual phenomenon,
gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of
convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations. Irigaray would maintain, however, that the feminine "sex" is a point of linguistic absence, the impossibility of a grammatically denoted substance, and, hence, the point of view that exposes that substance as an abiding and foundational illusion of a masculinist discourse. This absence is not marked as such within the masculine signifying economy--a contention that reverses Beauvoir's argument (and Wittig's) that the female sex is marked, while the male sex is not. For Irigaray, the female sex is not a "lack" or an "Other" that immanently and negatively defines the subject in its masculinity. On the contrary, the female sex eludes the very requirements of representation, for she is neither "Other" nor the "lack," those categories remaining relative to the Sartrian subject, immanent to that phallogocentric scheme. Hence, for Irigaray, the feminine could never be the mark of a subject, as Beauvoir would suggest. Further, the feminine could not be theorized in terms of a determinate relation between the masculine and the feminine within any given discourse, for discourse [11] is not a relevant
notion here. Even in their variety, discourses constitute so many modalities
of phallogocentric language. The female sex is thus also the subject
that is not one. The relation between masculine and feminine cannot
be represented in a signifying economy in which the masculine constitutes
the closed circle of signifier and signified. Paradoxically enough,
Beauvoir prefigured this impossibility in The Second Sex when
she argued that men could not settle the question of women because they
would then be acting as both judge and party to the case. For Beauvoir, the subject, within the existential analytic of misogyny is always already masculine, conflated with the universal, differentiating itself from "feminine Other" outside the universalizing norms of personhood, hopelessly "particular," embodied, condemned to immanence. Although Beauvoir is often understood to be calling for the right of women, in effect, to become existential subjects and, hence, for inclusion within the terms of an abstract universality, her position also implies a fundamental critique of the very disembodiment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject.19 That subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female. This association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, [12] paradoxically,
the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom. Beauvoir's
analysis implicitly poses the question: Through what act of negation
and disavowal does the masculine pose as a disembodied universality
and the feminine get constructed as a disavowed corporeality? The dialectic
of master-slave, here fully reformulated within the nonreciprocal terms
of gender asymmetry, prefigures what Irigaray will later describe as
the masculine signifying economy that includes both the existential
subject and its Other. Beauvoir proposes
that the female body ought to be the situation and instrumentality of
women's freedom, not a defining and limiting essence.2o The theory of
embodiment informing Beauvoir's analysis is clearly limited by the uncritical
reproduction of the Cartesian distinction between freedom and the body.
Despite my own previous efforts to argue the contrary, it appears that
Beauvoir maintains the mind/body dualism, even as she proposes a synthesis
of those terms.21 The preservation of that very distinction can be read
as symptomatic of the very phallogocentrism that Beauvoir underestimates.
In the philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues
through Descartes, Husserl, and Sartre, the ontological distinction
between soul (consciousness, mind) and body invariably supports relations
of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy. The mind not only
subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing
its embodiment altogether. The cultural associations of mind with masculinity
and body with femininity are well documented within the field of philosophy
and feminism.22 As a result, any uncritical reproduction of the mind/body
distinction ought to be rethought for the implicit gender hierarchy
that the distinction has conventionally produced, maintained, and rationalized. The discursive
construction of "the body" and its separation from "freedom"
in Beauvoir fails to mark along the axis of gender the very mind-body
distinction that is supposed to illuminate the persistence of gender
asymmetry. Officially, Beauvoir contends that the female body is marked
within masculinist discourse, whereby the masculine body, in its conflation
with the universal, remains unmarked. Irigaray clearly suggests that
both marker and marked are maintained within a masculinist mode of signification
in which the female body is "marked off," as it were, from
the domain of the signifiable. In post-Hegelian terms, she is "cancelled,"
but not preserved. On Irigaray's reading, Beauvoir's claim that woman
"is sex" is reversed to mean that she is not the sex she is
designated to be, but, rather, the masculine sex encore (and en corps)
parading in the mode of otherness. For Irigaray, that phallogocentric
mode of signifying the female sex perpetually reproduces phantasms
of its own self-amplifying desire. Instead of a self-limiting linguistic
gesture that grants alterity or difference to women, phallogocentrism
offers a name to eclipse the feminine and take its place. iv. Theorizing
the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond 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. That the tactic can operate
in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing
gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist. It can operate
to effect other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist subordination,
to name but a few. And clearly, listing the varieties of oppression,
as I began to do, assumes their discrete, sequential coexistence along
a horizontal axis that does not describe their convergences within the
social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient; oppressions
cannot be summarily ranked, causally related, distributed offering a mapping
of intersecting differentials which cannot be summarily hierarchized
either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other candidate for
the position of "primary condition of oppression." Rather
than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying economies, dialectical
appropriation and suppression of the Other is one tactic among many,
deployed centrally but not exclusively in the service of expanding and
rationalizing the masculinist domain. The contemporary
feminist debates over essentialism raise the question of the universality
of female identity and masculinist oppression in other ways. Universalistic
claims are based on a common or shared epistemological standpoint, understood
as the articulated conscious ness or shared structures of oppression
or in the ostensibly transcultural structures of femininity, maternity,
sexuality, and/or ecriture feminine. The opening discussion in
this chapter argued that this globalizing gesture has spawned a number
of criticisms from women who claim that the category of "women"
is normative and exclusionary and is invoked with the unmarked dimensions
of class and racial privilege intact. In other words, the insistence
upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively
refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections
in which the concrete array of "women" are constructed. Some
efforts have been made to formulate coalitional politics which do not
assume in advance what the content of "women" will be. They propose instead
a set of dialogic encounters by which variously positioned women articulate
separate identities within the framework of an emergent coalition. Clearly,
the value of coalitional politics is not to be underestimated, but the
very form of coalition, of an emerging and unpredictable assemblage
of positions, cannot be figured in advance. Despite the clearly democratizing
impulse that motivates coalition building, the coalitional theorist
can inadvertently reinsert herself as sovereign of the process by trying
to assert an ideal form for coalitional structure in advance,
one that will effectively guarantee"unity as the outcome. Related
efforts to determine what is and is not the true shape of a dialogue,
what constitutes a subject-position, and, most importantly, when "unity"
has been reached, can impede the shelf-shaping and self-limiting dynamics
of coalition. The insistence
in advance on "coalitional uniity" as a goal assumes that
solidarity--whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action. But what sort of politics demands that kind of advance purchase on unity? Perhaps a coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact. Perhaps also part of what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often tortuous [15] process of democratization.
The very notion of "dialogue" culturally specific and historically
bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is
happening, another may be sure it is not. The power relations
that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated.
Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model
that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and
speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes "agreement"
and "unity" and, indeed, that those are the goals to be sought.
It would be wrong to assume in advance that there is a category of "women"
that simply needs to be filled in with various components of race, class,
age, ethnicity, and sexuality in order to become complete. The assumption
of its essential incompleteness permits that category to serve as a
permanently available site of contested meanings. The definitional incompleteness
of the category might then serve as a normative ideal relieved of coercive
force. Is "unity"
necessary for effective political action? Is the premature insistence
on the goal of unity precisely the cause of an ever more bitter fragmentation
among the ranks? Certain forms of acknowledged fragmentation might faciliate
coalitional action precisely because the "unity" of the category
of women is neither presupposed nor desired. Does "unity"
set up an exclusionary norm of solidarity at the level of identity that
rules out the possibility of a set of actions which disrupt the very
borders of identity concepts, or which seek to accomplish precisely
that disruption as an explicit political aim? Without the presupposition
or goal of "unity," which is, in either case, always instituted
at a conceptual level, provisional unities might emerge in the context
of concrete actions that have purposes other than the articulation of
identity. Without the compulsory expectation that feminist actions must
be instituted from some stable, unified, and agreed upon identity, those
actions might well get a quicker start and seem more congenial to a
number of "women" for whom the meaning of the category is
permanently moot. This antifoundationalist approach to coalitional politics assumes neither that "identity" is a premise nor that the shape or meaning of a coalitional assem'blage can be known prior to its achievement. Because the articulation of an identity within available cultural terms instates a definition that forecloses ifi advance the emergence of new identity concepts in and through politically engaged actions, the foundationalist tactic cannot take the transformation or expansion of existing identity concepts as a normative goal. Moreover, when agreed-upon identities or agreed-upon dialogic structures, through which already established identities are communicated, no longer [16] 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. What can be meant by "identity," then, and what grounds the presumption that identities are self-identical, persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coherent? More importantly, how do these assumptions inform the discourses on "gender identity"? It would be wrong to think that the discussion of "identity" ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that "persons" only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibillty. Sociological discussIons have conventionally sought to understand the notion of the person in terms of an agency that claims ontological priority to the various roles and functions through which it assumes social visibility and meaning. Within philosophical discourse itself, the notion of "the person" has received analytic elaboration on the assumption that whatever social context the person is "in" remains somehow externally related to the definitional structure of personhood, be that consciousness, the capacity for language, or moral deliberation. Although that literature is not examined here, one premise of such inquiries is the focus of critical exploration and inversion. Whereas the question of what constitutes "personal identity" within philosophical accounts almost always centers on the question of what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time, the question here will be: To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the suject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person? To what extent is "identity" a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligi- |
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[17]
The notion that
there might be a "truth" of sex, as Foucault ironically terms
it, is produced precisely through the regulatory practices that generate
coherent identities through the matrix of coherent gender norms. The
heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production
of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between "feminine"
and "masculine," where these are understood as expressive
attributes of "male" and "female." The cultural
matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires
that certain kinds of "identities" cannot "exist"--that
is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which
the practices of desire do not "follow" from either sex or
gender. "Follow" in this context is a political relation of
entailment instituted by the cultural laws that establish and regulate
the shape and meanng of sexuality. Indeed, precisely because certain
kinds of "gender identities" fail to conform to those norms
of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as developmental failures
or logical impossibilities from within that domain. Their persistence
and proliferation, however, provide critical opportunities to expose
the limits and regulatory aims of that domain of intelligibility and,
hence, to open up within the very terms of that matrix of intelligibility
rival and subversIve matrIces of gender disorder. Before such disordering
practices are considered, however, it seems crucial to understand the
"matrix of intelligibility." Is it singular? Of what is it
composed? What is the peculiar alliance presumed to exist [18] between a system
of compulsory heterosexuality and the discursive categories that establish
the identity concepts of sex? If "identity" is an effect of
discursive practices, to what extent is gender identity, construed as
a relationship among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire, the effect
of a regulatory practice that can be identified as compulsory heterosexuality?
Would that explanation return us to yet another totalizing frame in
which compulsory heterosexuality merely takes the place of phallogocentrism
as the monolithic cause of gender oppression? Within the spectrum
of French feminist and poststructuralist theory, very different regimes
of power are understood to produce the identity concepts of sex. Consider
the divergence between those positions, such as Irigaray's, that claim
there is only one sex, the masculine, that elaborates itself in and
through the production of the "Other," and those positions,
Foucault's, for instance, that assume that the category of sex, whether
masculine or feminine, is a production of a diffuse regulatory economy
of sexuality. Consider also Wittig's argument that the category of sex
is, under the conditions of compulsory heterosexuality, always feminine
(the masculine remaining unmarked and, hence, synonomous with the "universal").
Wittig concurs, however paradoxically, with Foucault in claiming that
the category of sex would itself disappeilr and, indeed, dissipate through
the disruption and displacement of heterosexual hegemony. The various explanatory
models offered here suggest the very different ways m which the category
of sex is understood depending on how the field of power is articulated.
Is it possible to maintain the Central to each
of these views, however, is the notion that sex appears within hegemonic
language as a substance, as, metaphysically speaking, a self-identical
being. This appearance is achieved through a performative
twist of language and/or discourse that conceals the fact that "being"
a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible. For Irigaray, grammar
can never be a true index of gender relations precisely because it supports
the substantial model of gender as a binary relation between two positive
and representable terms.25 In Irigaray's view, the substantive grammar
of gender, which assumes men and women as well as their attributes of
masculine and feminine, is an example of a binary that effectively masks
the univocal and hegemonic discourse of the masculine, phallogocentrism,
silencing the feminine as a site of subversive multiplicity. For Foucault,
the substantive grammar of sex imposes an artificial binary relation
between the sexes, as well as an artificial internal coherence within
each term of that binary. The binary regulation of sexuality suppresses
the subversive multiplicity of a sexuality that disrupts heterosexual,
reproductive, and medicojuridical hegemonies. For Wittig, the
binary restriction on sex serves the reproductive aims of a system of
compulsory heterosexuality; occasionally, she claims that the overthrow
of compulsory heterosexuality will inaugurate a true humanism of "the
person" freed from the shackles of sex. In other contexts, she
suggests that the profusion and diffusion of a nonphallocentric erotic
economy will dispel the illusions of sex, gender, and identity. At yet
other textual moments it seems that "the lesbian" emerges
as a third gender that promises to transcend the binary restriction
on sex imposed by the system of compulsory heterosexuality. In her defense
of the "cognitive subject," Wittig appears to have no metaphysical
quarrel with hegemonic modes of signification or representation; indeed,
the subject, with its attribute of self-determination, appears to be
the rehabilitation of the agent of existential choice under the name
of the lesbian: "the advent of individual subjects demands first
destroying the categories of sex. ...the lesbian is the only concept
I know of which is beyond the categories of sex.,,26 She does not criticize
"the subject" as invariably masculine according to the rules
of an inevitably patriarchal Symbolic, but proposes in its place the
equivalent of a lesbian subject as language-user.27 The identification of women with "sex," for Beauvoir as for Wittig, is a conflation of the category of women with the ostensibly sexualized features of their bodies and, hence, a refusal to grant freedom and autonomy to women as it is purportedly enjoyed by men. Thus, the destruction of the category of sex would be the destruction of an attribute, sex, that has, through a misogynist gesture of synecdoche, come to take the place of the person, the self-determining cogito. In other words, only men are "persons," and there is no gender but the feminine:
The metaphysics
of substance is a phrase that is associated with Nietzsche within
the contemporary criticism of philosophical discourse. In a commentary
on Nietzsche, Michel Haar argues that a number of philosophical ontologies
have been trapped within certain illusions of "Being" and
"Substance" that are fostered by the belief that the grammatical
formulation of subject and predicate reflects the prior ontological
reality of substance and attribute. These constructs, argues Haar, constitute
the artificial philosophical means by which simplicity, order, and identity
are effectively instituted. In no sense, however, do they reveal or
represent some true order of things. For our purposes, this Nietzschean
criticism becomes instructive when it is applied to the psychological
categories that govern much popular and theoretical thinking about gender
identity. According to Haar, the critique of the metaphysics of substance
implies a critique of the very notion of the psychological person as
a substantive thing:
illusion goes back basically to a superstition that deceives not only common sense but also philosophers-namely, the belief in language and, more precisely, in the truth of grammatical categories. It was grammar (the structure of subject and predicate) that inspired Descartes' certainty that "I" is the subject of "think," whereas it is rather the thoughts that come to "me": at bottom, faith in grammar simply conveys the will to be the "cause" of one's thoughts. The subject, the self, the individual, are just so many false concepts, since they transform into substances fictitious unities having at the start only a linguistic reality.31
For gender to "belong to philosophy" is, for Wittig, to belong to "that body of self-evident concepts without which philosophers believe they cannot develop a line of reasoning and which for them go without saying, for they exist prior to any thought, any social order, in nature."33 Wittig's view is corroborated by that popular discourse on gender identity that uncritically employs the inflectional attribution of "being" to genders and to "sexualities." The unproblematic claim to "be" a woman and "be" heterosexual would be symptomatic of that metaphysics of gender substances. In the case of both "men" and "women," this claim tends to subordinate the notion of gender under that of identity and to lead to the conclusion that a person is a gender and is one in virtue of his or her sex, psychic sense of self, and various expressions
of that psychic self, the most salient being that of sexual desire.
In such a prefeminist context, gender, naively (rather than critically)
confused with sex, serves as a unifying principle of the embodied self
and maintains that unity over and against an "opposite sex"
whose structure is presumed to maintain a parallel but oppositional
internal coherence among sex, gender, and desire. The articulation "I
feel like a woman" by a female or "I feel like a man"
by a male presupposes that in neither case is the claim meaninglessly
redundant. Although it might appear unproblematic to be a given anatomy
(although we shall later consider the way in which that project is also
fraught with difficulty), the experience of a gendered psychic disposition
or cultural identity is considered an achievement. Thus, "I feel
like a woman" is true to the extent that Aretha Franklin's invocation
of the defining Other is assumed: "You make me feel like a natural
woman. "34 This achievement requires a differentiation from the
opposite gender. Hence, 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. Gender can denote
a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire, only when
sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate genderwhere gender
is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self-and desire-where
desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an
oppositional relation to that other gender it desires. The internal
coherence or unity of either gender, man or woman, thereby requires
both a stable and oppositional heterosexuality. That institutional heterosexuality
both requires and produces the univocity of each of the gendered terms
that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within an oppositional,
binary gender system. This conception of gender presupposes not only
a causal relation among sex, gender, and desire, but suggests as well
that desire reflects or expresses gender and that gender reflects or
expresses desire. The metaphysical unity of the three is assumed to
be truly known and expressed in a differentiating desire for an oppositional
gender-that is, in a form of oppositional heterosexuality. Whether as
a naturalistic paradigm which establishes a causal continuity among
sex, gender, and desire, or as an authentic-expressive paradigm in which
some true self is said to be revealed simultaneously or successively
in sex, gender, and desire, here "the old dream of symmetry,"
as Irigaray has called it, is presupposed, reified, and rationalized. This rough sketch
of gender gives us a clue to understanding the political reasons for
the substantializing view of gender. The institution of a compulsory
and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary
relation in which the masculine term [23] is differentiated
from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through
the practices of heterosexual desire. The act of differentiating the
two oppositional moments of the binary results in a consolidation of
each term, the respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire. The strategic displacement
of that binary relation and the metaphysics of substance on which it
relies presuppose that the categories of female and male, woman and
man, are similarly produced within the binary frame. Foucault implicitly
subscribes to such an explanation. In the closing chapter of the first
volume of The History of Sexuality and in his brief but significant
introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered journals
of a Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite,35 Foucault suggests that
the category of sex, prior to any categorization of sexual difference,
is itself constructed Foucault's introduction
to the journals of the hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin, suggests that
the genealogical critique of these reified categories of sex is the
inadvertent consequence of sexual practices that cannot be accounted
for within the medicolegal discourse of a naturalized heterosexuality.
Herculine is not an "identity," but the sexual impossibility
of an identity. Although male and female anatomical elements are jointly
distributed in and on this body, that is not the true source of scandal.
The linguistic conventions that produce intelligible gendered selves
find their limit in Herculine precisely because she/he occasions a convergence
and disorganization of the rules that govern sex/gender/desire. Herculine
deploys and redistributes the terms of a binary system, but that very
redistribution disrupts and proliferates those terms outside the binary
itself. According to Foucault, Herculine is not categorizable within
the gender binary as it stands; the disconcerting convergence of heterosexuality
and homosexuality in her/his person are only occasioned, but never caused,
by his/her anatomical discontinuity. Foucault's appropriation of Herculine
is suspect,36 but his analysis implies the interesting belief that sexual
heterogeneity (paradoxically foreclosed by a naturalized "hetero"-sexuality)
implies a critique of the metaphysics of substance as it informs the
identitarian categories of sex. Foucault imagines Herculine's experience
as "a world of pleasures in which grins hang about without the
cat. "37 Smiles, happinesses, pleasures, and desires are figured
here as qualities without an abiding substance to which they are said
to adhere. As free-floating attributes, they suggest the possibility
of a gendered experience that cannot be grasped through the substantializing
and hierarchizing grammar of nouns (res extensa) and adjectives
(attributes, essential and accidental). Through his cursory reading
of Herculine, Foucault proposes an ontology of accidental attributes
that exposes the postulation of identity as a culturally restricted
principle of order and hierarchy, a regulatory fiction. If it is possible
to speak of a "man" with a masculine attribute and to understand
that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it
is also possible to speak of a "man" with a feminine attribute,
whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender.
But once we dispense with the priority of "man" and "woman"
as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate
dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics
of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of
an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the
compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then
it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as
nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that
fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility. The appearance
of an abiding substance or gendered self, what the psychiatrist Robert
Stoller refers to as a "gender core",38 is thus produced by
the regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of coherence.
As a result, the exposure of this fictive production is conditioned
by the deregulated play of attributes that resist assimilation into
the ready made framework of primary nouns and subordinate adjectives.
It is of course always possible to argue that dissonant adjectives work
retroactively to redefine the substantive identities they are said to
modify and, hence, to expand the substantive categories of gender to
include possibilities that they previously excluded. But if these substances
are nothing other than the coherences contingently created through the
regulation of attributes, it would seem that the ontology of substances
itself is not only an artificial effect, but essentially superfluous. In this sense,
gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of freefloating attributes,
for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively
produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence.
Hence, within the inherited discourse
Because this production of "nature" operates in accord with the dictates of compulsory heterosexuality, the emergence of homosexual desire, in her
view, transcends the categories of sex: "If desire could liberate
itself, it would have nothing to do with the preliminary marking by
sexes."41 Wittig refers to
"sex" as a mark that is somehow applied by an institutionalized
heterosexuality, a mark that can be erased or obfuscated through practices
that effectively contest that institution. Her view, of course, differs
radically from Irigaray's. The latter would understand the "mark"
of gender to be part of the hegemonic signifying economy of the masculine
that operates through the self-elaborating mechanisms of specularization
that have virtually determined the field of ontology within the Western
philosophical tradition. For Wittig, language is an instrument or tool
that is in no way misogynist in its structures, but only in its applications.42
For Irigaray, the possibility of another language or signifying economy
is the only chance at escaping the "mark" of gender which,
for the feminine, is nothihg but the phallogocentric erasure of the
female sex. Whereas Irigaray seeks to expose the ostensible "binary"
relatiortbetween th~§eiesas a masculinist ruse that excludes the
feminine altogether ,Wittig argues that positions like Irigaray's reconsolidate
the binary between masculine and feminine and recirculate a mythic notion
of the feminine. Clearly drawing on Beauvoir's critique of the myth
of the feminine in The Second Sex, Wittig asserts, "there
is no 'feminine writing.' "43 Wittig is clearly attuned to the power of language to subordinate and exclude women. As a "materialist," however, she considers language to be "another order of materiality,"44 an institution that can be radically transformed. Language ranks among the concrete and contingent practices and institutions maintained by the choices of individuals and, hence, weakened by the collective actions of choosing individuals. The linguistic fiction of "sex," she argues, is a category produced and circulated by the system of compulsory heterosexuality in an effort to restrict the production of identities along the axis of heterosexual desire. In some of her work, both male and female homosexuality, as well as other positions independent of the heterosexual contract, provide the occasion either for the overthrow or the proliferation of the category of sex. In The Lesbian Body and elsewhere, however, Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function.45 Here the proliferation of pleasures outside the reproductive economy suggests both a specifically feminine form of erotic dif'\ fusion, understood as a counterstrategy to the reproductive construction of genitality. In a sense, The Lesbian Body can be understood, for
for Wittig, as
an "inverted" reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality, in which he argues for the developmental superiority
of genital sexuality over and against the less restricted and more diffuse
infantile sexuality. Only the "invert," the medical classification
invoked by Freud for "the homosexual," fails to "achieve"
the genital norm. In waging a political critique against genitality,
Wittig appears to deploy "inversion" as a critical reading
practice, valorising precisely those features of an undeveloped sexuality
designated by Freud and effectively inaugurating a "post-genital
politics.,,46 Indeed, the notion of development can be read only as
normalization within the heterosexual matrix. And yet, is this the only
reading of Freud possible? And to what extent is Wittig's practice of
"inversion" committed to the very model of normalization that
she seeks to dismantle? In other words, if the model of a more diffuse
and antigenital sexuality serves as the singular, oppositional alternative
to the hegemonic structure of sexuality, to what extent is that binary
relation fated to reproduce itself endlessly? What possibility exists
for the disruption of the oppositional binary itself? Wittig's oppositional
relationship to psychoanalysis produces the unexpected consequence that
her theory presumes precisely that psychoanalytic theory of development,
now fully "inverted," that she seeks to overcome. Polymorphous
perversity, assumed to exist prior to the marking by sex, isvalorised
as the telos of human sexuality.47 One possible feminist psychoanalytic
response to Wittig might argue that she both undertheorizes and underestimates
the meaning and function of the language in which "the mark of
gender" occurs. She understands that marking practice as contingent,
radically variable, and even dispensable. The status of a primary prohibition
in Lacanian theory operates more forcefully and less contingently than
the notion of a regulatory practice in Foucault or a materialist account
of a system of heterosexist oppression in Wittig. In Lacan, as in
Irigaray's post-Lacanian reformulation of Freud, sexual difference is
not a simple binary that retains the metaphysics of substance as its
foundation. The masculine "subject" is a fictive construction
produced by the law that prohibits incest and forces an infinite displacement
of a heterosexualizing desire. The feminine is never a mark of the subject;
the feminine could not be an "attribute" of a gender. Rather,
the feminine is the signification of lack, signified by the Symbolic,
a set of differentiating linguistic rules that effectively create sexual
difference. The masculine linguistic thereby instates
the kinship relation between them is a law enacted "in the name
of the Father." Similarly, the law that refuses the girl's desire
for both her mother and father requires that she take up the emblem
of maternity and perpetuate the rules of kinship. Both masculine and
feminine positions are thus instituted through prohibitive laws that
produce culturally intelligible genders, but only through the production
of an unconscious sexuality that reemerges in the domain of the imaginary.48 The feminist appropriation
of sexual difference, whether written in opposition to the phallogocentrism
of Lacan (Irigaray) or as a critical reelaboration of Lacan, attempts
to theorize the feminine, not as an expression of the metaphysics of
substance, but as the unrepresentable absence effected by (masculine)
denial that grounds the signifying economy through exclusion. The feminine
as the repudiated/excluded within that system constitutes the possibility
of a critique and disruption of that hegemonic conceptual scheme. The
works of Jacqueline Rose49 and Jane Gallop50 underscore in different
ways the constructed status of sexual difference, the inherent instability
of that construction, and the dual consequentiality of a prohibition
that at once institutes a sexual identity and provides for the exposure
of that construction's tenuous ground. Although Wittig and other materialist
feminists within the French context would argue that sexual difference
is an unthinking replication of a reified set of sexed polarities, these
criticisms neglect the critical dimension of the unconscious which,
as a site of repressed sexuality, reemerges within the discourse of
the subject as the very impossibility of its coherence. As Rose points
out very clearly, the construction of a coherent sexual identity along
the disjunctive axis of the feminine/masculine is bound to fail;51 the
disruptions of this coherence through the inadvertent reemergence of
the repressed reveal not only that "identity" is constructed,
but that the prohibition that constructs identity is inefficacious (the
paternal law ought to be understood not as a deterministic divine will,
but as a perpetual bumbler, preparing the ground for the insurrections
against him). The differences
between the materialist and Lacanian (and postLacanian) 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.
Paradoxically, the normative trope of polymorphous perversity is understood
to characterize both views of alternative sexuality. There is no agreement,
however, on the manner of delimiting that "law" or set of
"laws." The psychoanalytic critique succeeds in giving an
account of the construction of "the subject"--and perhaps
also the Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire
/ 29 illusion of substance--within
the matrix of normative gender relations. In her existential-materialist
mode, Wittig presumes the subject, the person, to have a presocial and
pregendered integrity. On the other hand, "the paternal Law"
in Lacan, as well as the monologic mastery of phallogocentrism in Irigaray,
bear the mark of a monotheistic singularity that is perhaps less unitary
and culturally universal than the guiding structuralist assumptions
of the account presume.52 But the quarrel
seems also to turn on the articulation of a temporal trope of a subversive
sexuality that flourishes prior to the imposition of a law, after its
overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge to its authority.
Here it seems wise to reinvoke Foucault who, in claiming that sexuality
and power are coextensive, implicitly refutes the postulation of a subversive
or emancipatory sexuality which could be free of the law. We can press
the argument further by pointing out that "the before" of
the law and "the after" are discursively and performatively
instituted modes of temporality that are invoked within the terms of
a normative framework which asserts that subversion, destabilization,
or displacement requires a sexuality that somehow escapes the hegemonic
prohibitions on sex. For Foucault, those prohibitions are invariably
and inadvertently productive in the sense that "the subject"
who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those prohibitions
does not have access to a sexuality that is in some sense "outside,"
"before," or "after" power itself. Power, rather
than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory)
and the productive (inadvertently generative) functions of differential
relations. Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power
relations is not a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform
repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The productions swerve
from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities
of "subjects" that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural
intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in
fact, culturally intelligible. 30 / Subjects
of Sex/Gender/Desire Indeed, it is often
unclear within Irigaray's text whether sexuality is culturally constructed,
or whether it is only culturally constructed within the terms of the
phallus. In other words, is specifically feminine pleasure "outside"
of culture as its prehistory or as its utopian future? If so, of what
use is such a notion for negotiating the contemporary struggles of sexuality
within the terms of its construction? Within the terms
of feminist sexual theory, it is clear that the presence of power dynamics
within sexuality is in no sense the same as the simple consolidation
or augmentation of a heterosexist or phallogocentric power regime. The
"presence" of so-called heterosexual conventions within homosexual
contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically gay discourses
of sexual difference, as in the case of "butch" and "femme"
as historical identities of sexual style, cannot be explained as chimerical
representations of originally heterosexual identities. And neither can
they be understood as the pernicious insistence of heterosexist constructs
within gay sexuality and identity. 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.
The replication of heterosexual constructs in nonheterosexual frames
brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual
original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but,
rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of "the original,"
discussed in the final sections of chapter 3 of this text, reveals the
original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of thtt natural
and the original.56 Even if heterosexist constructs circulate as the
available sites of power/discourse from which to do gender at all, the
question remains: What possibilities of recirculation exist? Which possibilities
of doing gender repeat and displace through hyperbole, dissonance, internal
confusion, and proliferation the very constructs by which they are mobilized? Consider not only
that the ambiguities and incoherences within and among heterosexual,
homosexual, and bisexual practices are suppressed and redescribed within
the reified framework of the disjunctive and asymmetrical binary of
masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender
confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement
of these reifications. In other words, the "unity" of gender
is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity
uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The force of this practice
is, through an exclusionary apparatus of production, to restrict the
relative meanings of "hetero- 32 / Subjects
of Sex/Gender/Desire sexuality,"
"homosexuality," and "bisexuality" as well as the
subversive sites of their convergence and resignification. That the
power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves
through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and
their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought
to be stopped-as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as
the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial
question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into
question the regulatory practice of identity itself? If there is no
recourse to a "person," a "sex," or a "sexuality"
that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively
produce and regulate the intelligibility of those concepts for us, what
constitutes the possibility of effective inversion, subversion, or displacement
within the terms of a constructed identity? What possibilities exist
by virtue of the constructed character of sex and gender? Whereas Foucault
is ambiguous about the precise character of the "regulatory practices"
that produce the category of sex, and Wittig appears to invest the full
responsibility of the construction to sexual reproduction and its instrument,
compulsory heterosexuality, yet other discourses converge to produce
this categorial fiction for reasons not always clear or consistent with
one another. The power relations that infuse the biological sciences
are not easily reduced, and the medicolegal alliance emerging in nineteenth-century
Europe has spawned categorial fictions that could not be anticipated
in advance. The very complexity of the discursive map that constructs
gender appears to hold out the promise of an inadvertent and generative
convergence of these discursive and regulatory structures. 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. Clearly this project
does not propose to layout within traditional philosophical terms an
ontology of gender whereby the meaning of being a woman or a man is
elucidated within the terms of phenomenology. The presumption here is
that the "being" of gender is an effect, an object of a genealogical
investigation that maps out the political parameters of its construction
in the mode of ontology. To claim that gender is constructed is not
to assert its illusoriness or artificiality, where those terms are understood
to reside within a binary that counterposes the "real" and
the "authentic" as oppositional. As a genealogy of gender
ontology, this i.nquiry seeks to understand the discursive production
of the plausibility of that binary relation and to suggest that certain
cultural configurations of gender take the place
of "the real" and consolidate and augment their hegemony through
that felicitous self-naturalization. If there is something
right in Beauvoir's claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a
woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming,
a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end.
As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.
Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the "congealing"
is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated
by various social means. It
is, for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if there
were a telos that governs the process of acculturation and construction.
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, wiIl 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,
a move which has been a part of cultural critique at least since Marx,
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. The following chapter
investigates some aspects of the psychoanalytic structuralist- account
of sexual difference and the construction of sexuality with respect
to its power to contest the regulatory regimes outlined here as well
as its role in uncritically reproducing those regimes. The univocity
of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and the binary framework for
both sex and gender are considered throughout as regulatory fictions
that consolidate and naturalize the convergent power regimes of masculine
and heterosexist oppression. The final chapter considers the very notion
of "the body," not as a ready surface awaiting signification,
but as a set of boundaries, individual and social, politically signified
and maintained. No longer believable as an interior "truth"
of dispositions and identity,sex will be shown to be a performatively
enacted signification (and hence not "to be"), one that, released
from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the parodic
proliferation and subversive play of gendered meanings. This text continues,
then, as an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and
displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender
that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender
trouble, not through the strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but
through 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. movement sought
to "ground" itself in a program that eventually "grounded"
that movement. Her historical thesis implicitly raises the question
of whether uncritically accepted foundations operate like the "return
of the repressed"; based on exclusionary practices, the stable
political identities that found political movements may invariably become
threatened by the very instability that the foundationalist move creates. Sex and Scientific
Inquiry, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Anne Fausto-Sterling,
Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men (New
York: Norton, 1979).
34. Aretha's song,
originally written by Carole King, also contests the naturalization
of gender. "Like a natural woman" is a phrase that suggests
that "naturalness" is only accomplished through analogy or metaphor. In other
words, "You make me feel like a metaphor of the natural,"
and without "you," some denaturalized ground would be revealed.
For a further discussion of Aretha's claim in light of Simone de Beauvoir's
contention that "one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,"
see my "Beauvoir's Philosophical Contribution," in eds. Ann
Garry and Marjorie Pearsall, Women, Knowledge, and Reality (Rowman
and Littlefield, forthcoming). 44. Monique Wittig,
"The Straight Mind," Feminist Issues, Vol. 1, No.1,
Summer 1980, p. 108. Of course, Freud
himself distinguished between "the sexual" and "the genital,"
providing the very distinction that Wittig uses against him. See, for
instance, "The Development of the Sexual Function" in Freud,
Outline of a Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1979). [Notes / 157] Quintanales, "the Complexity of Desire: Conversations on Sexuality and Difference," Conditions, #8; Vol. 3, No.2, 1982, pp. 52-71. Irigaray's perhaps most controversial claim has been that the structure of the vulva as "two lips touching" constitutes the nonunitary and autoerotic pleasure of women prior to the "separation" of this doubleness through the pleasure-depriving act of penetration by the penis. 54. See Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. Along with Monique Plaza and Christine Delphy, Wittig has argued that Irigaray's valorization of that anatomical specificity is itself an uncritical replication of a reproductive discourse that marks and carves up the female body into artificial "parts" like "vagina," "clitoris," and "vulva." At a lecture at Vassar College, Wittig was asked whether she had a vagina, and she replied that she did not. 55. See a compelling
argument for precisely this interpretation by Diana J. Fuss, Essentially
Speaking, (New York: Routledge, 1989). |