According to Judith Butler in Undoing Gender, resistance to the rigid restrictions of gender structures--or the social implications of sexual difference; Butler herself suggests the relationship between these different discursive terms is complex and unstable--is a bit of a paradox: "For many, I think, the structuring reality of sexual difference is not one that one can wish away or argue against, or even make claims about in any reasonable way. It is more like a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world. And those who seek to take issue with it are arguing with the very structure that makes their argument possible" (176). Resistance to gender is always already futile; in order to resist its restrictive structuring of the subject (a discrete agent capable of political or social action), one must already be constituted as a subject and thus must already be constructed by the very terms one attempts to resist. This Foucauldian train of thought--that the subject is always already embedded in various (inevitably political) fields of discourse--problematizes the nature of political resistance and sets Butler at odds with various other (post-Marxian) feminist theorists such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde.
While Butler is invested in maintaining but modifying the existing manifestation of the political sphere, hooks and Lorde propose a complete overthrow of politics as we know it. They believe (and I am inclined to agree) that the very structure of democratic capitalism relies on various hierarchies, some of them inevitably gendered and racialized. Thus the only way to achieve gender and racial equality is to circumvent these foundational hierarchies by instituting a new socio-politico-economic system in which difference does not function as a basis for the hierarchization of individuals and cultural groups but rather carries no foundational significance.
Butler's refusal of this vision for feminism and her assumption that sexual difference inevitably structures the subject relies on a certain division of the political sphere from the social sphere. By this I mean that the lived experiences of individuals in relation to others (their social interactions) are distinctly removed from the abtracted "political subject" (a theoretical individual that is governed and structured by political discourse.) A specific type of post-Marxist political paradigm perhaps sidesteps this axiomatic assumption and provides a solution to the "question" of sexual difference by eliminating it altogether. If political discourse were to become conflated with social discourse--this would involve the dissolution of the state as we know it in favor of a brand of non-political localist collectivism (a process I would gladly discuss in person but for which there is too little space here)--the political subject would in effect become the social (or empirically perceptible) body. At this point, discourse would have to be differentiated into such specificity to fully encapsulate the uniqueness of each individual body that it would essentially dissolve into a meaningless infinitude of signifiers that would essentially construct a unique gender for each body; this dissolution of universalist discourse into hyperspecificity would render gendered or racial terms effectively useless and obsolete.
In essence, while Butler is invested in the maintenance of political democracy and the constant evolution of the state, I--and hooks and Lorde as I engage them through my own interpretive process--are invested in a type of social democracy the necessitates the dissolution of the state as we know it. Thus Butler's Foucaldian preoccupation with political discourse is circumvented by the radical abolition of the political sphere, and although this version of feminism may seem impractical and fantastic, Butler herself writes: "Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home...Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread" (29). My fantasy is that of a world in which the individual has broken free of the restrictions of gendered, racial, and sexual violence in all its forms, both bodily and discursive.
While your fantasy of "a world in which the individual has broken free of the restrictions of gendered, racial, and sexual violence in all its forms, both bodily and discursive" is intriguing, I question its plausibility. What would such a world look like, and how would difference be represented? Would it exist at all? Perhaps this is impossible to answer, as such a world would require, as you point out, a complete dissolution of the state as we know it. I think Butler's arguments recognize this difficulty, and therefore suggest we work within our current systems to facilitate positive change rather than focus on an undefinable alternative framework.
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