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.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Butler's Performative Interpretation
The work for which Judith Butler is perhaps most famous revolves around the idea of gender as a performance; according to Butler, gender is not immanent or fixed, but rather a fluid social construction that is both held up as a cultural idea toward which individuals should aspire and to which individuals contribute through their own inevitably incomplete performances of gender. This performativity does not simply describe the process of gender construction, however, but rather the construction of all social and political identities; thus while individuals appear to be just that--discrete, independent (and embodied) subjectivities--they are in fact always already radically dependent on others for their self-definition. In this way, Butler deconstructs the concept of the cohesive (gendered) subject in her book Undoing Gender and posits a postmodern community of humanity that is radically dependent on intersubjective relations.
If one were to read this deconstruction as a simple, uncomplicated truth, however, one might be a bit confused: if gender "undoes" the discrete subject, why is the commonly accepted perception of the human an individualistic one? Why has this radical sense of community not instituted itself in the world as we know it? And why do we still define ourselves in the rigid terms of ideal gender, sexuality, race, etc.?
The key to these questions relates to the mechanism by which Butler deconstructs gender, which in turn relates back to her famous work with gender performance because, in a sense, the way in which she deconstructs gender is itself performative. In "Conjuring--Marxism" (in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International), Jacques Derrida argues that the only way to properly inherit Marx's original ideas and apply them to a socio-political situation that is radically different from that in which Marx himself wrote, theorists must "performatively interpret" Marxism: they must alter Marxist dogma through the very act of interpreting it. This type of performative interpretation is precisely what Butler mobilizes in her deconstruction of gender. She performs this interpretation on two different levels simultaneously, invoking both Foucauldian though and gender in order to shape them into new versions of themselves.
In his History of Sexuality: Volume I, Foucault suggests (among myriad other things) that sexuality is a.) socially constructed as a positive means of controlling individuals (as opposed to the negative threat of death) and b.) in a sense an agent of its own (e.g. the West has a historical obsession of making it speak itself and speak for us). Butler draws on both of these ideas but frames her interpretation of them in terms of gender: as I previously mentioned, she sees gender as a social structure that is both produced by subjects and produces subjects (more of a reciprocal relationship or process between the individual and society than a rigid signifier of identity); and she argues that "gender is for and from another before it becomes [one's] own" (16), that it is in fact an independent technology of power that works on both the subject and the social system she inhabits. Thus she performatively interprets Foucault, mobilizing his philosophy in service of her own agenda.
Her interpretation of gender as deconstructive is performative in that the concept of "identity" does no political work itself until it is engaged with. Identity discourse can be engaged in various ways toward various political ends (see Wendy Brown's "Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting 'The Jewish Question'" in Identities, Politics, and Rights, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns for an example of how special rights discourse can be variously interpreted), and Butler here engages gender as a fluid and changeable process. Her very claim that gender deconstructs the subject itself deconstructs the subject. Her performative interpretation is inherently a political action (it clearly does not have any effect on the anatomical or neurological configuration of individuals, but it has the ability to radically alter the political avatar of the social individual: the citizen), and her very engagement with gender through a postmodern, phenomenalist paradigm articulates a new politico-discursive situation in which gender becomes de-essentialized.
Butler's performative interpretation of gender as subject-deconstructing is compelling and represents an important step toward the political recognition of abject individuals (e.g. intersexual individuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, transgendered individuals) as human, the formation of a democratic and radically intraconnected human community, and the development of constantly evolving perception of the species in the context of "a certain openness and unknowingness" (Butler 39). True political and social progress, however, will only be achieved when the majority of humanity (not just an single gender theorist or mode of gender discourse) engages with gender and sexual identity through the same performative framework in which Butler experiences and theorizes the world.
If one were to read this deconstruction as a simple, uncomplicated truth, however, one might be a bit confused: if gender "undoes" the discrete subject, why is the commonly accepted perception of the human an individualistic one? Why has this radical sense of community not instituted itself in the world as we know it? And why do we still define ourselves in the rigid terms of ideal gender, sexuality, race, etc.?
The key to these questions relates to the mechanism by which Butler deconstructs gender, which in turn relates back to her famous work with gender performance because, in a sense, the way in which she deconstructs gender is itself performative. In "Conjuring--Marxism" (in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International), Jacques Derrida argues that the only way to properly inherit Marx's original ideas and apply them to a socio-political situation that is radically different from that in which Marx himself wrote, theorists must "performatively interpret" Marxism: they must alter Marxist dogma through the very act of interpreting it. This type of performative interpretation is precisely what Butler mobilizes in her deconstruction of gender. She performs this interpretation on two different levels simultaneously, invoking both Foucauldian though and gender in order to shape them into new versions of themselves.
In his History of Sexuality: Volume I, Foucault suggests (among myriad other things) that sexuality is a.) socially constructed as a positive means of controlling individuals (as opposed to the negative threat of death) and b.) in a sense an agent of its own (e.g. the West has a historical obsession of making it speak itself and speak for us). Butler draws on both of these ideas but frames her interpretation of them in terms of gender: as I previously mentioned, she sees gender as a social structure that is both produced by subjects and produces subjects (more of a reciprocal relationship or process between the individual and society than a rigid signifier of identity); and she argues that "gender is for and from another before it becomes [one's] own" (16), that it is in fact an independent technology of power that works on both the subject and the social system she inhabits. Thus she performatively interprets Foucault, mobilizing his philosophy in service of her own agenda.
Her interpretation of gender as deconstructive is performative in that the concept of "identity" does no political work itself until it is engaged with. Identity discourse can be engaged in various ways toward various political ends (see Wendy Brown's "Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting 'The Jewish Question'" in Identities, Politics, and Rights, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns for an example of how special rights discourse can be variously interpreted), and Butler here engages gender as a fluid and changeable process. Her very claim that gender deconstructs the subject itself deconstructs the subject. Her performative interpretation is inherently a political action (it clearly does not have any effect on the anatomical or neurological configuration of individuals, but it has the ability to radically alter the political avatar of the social individual: the citizen), and her very engagement with gender through a postmodern, phenomenalist paradigm articulates a new politico-discursive situation in which gender becomes de-essentialized.
Butler's performative interpretation of gender as subject-deconstructing is compelling and represents an important step toward the political recognition of abject individuals (e.g. intersexual individuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, transgendered individuals) as human, the formation of a democratic and radically intraconnected human community, and the development of constantly evolving perception of the species in the context of "a certain openness and unknowingness" (Butler 39). True political and social progress, however, will only be achieved when the majority of humanity (not just an single gender theorist or mode of gender discourse) engages with gender and sexual identity through the same performative framework in which Butler experiences and theorizes the world.
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