Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse Judith Butler Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse

Judith Butler Within the terms of feminist theory, it has been quite important to refer to the category of “women” and to know what it is we mean. 324 We tend to agree that women have been written out of the histories of culture and literature that men have written, that women have been silenced or distorted in the texts of philosophy, biology, and physics, an that there is a group of embodied beings socially position as “women” who now, under the name of feminism, have something quite different to say. 324

Judith Butler Yet, this question of being a woman is more difficult than it perhaps originally appeared, for we refer not only to women as a social category but also as a felt sense of self, a culturally conditioned or constructed subjective identity. 324 But does feminist theory need to rely on a notion of what is fundamentally or discursively to be a “woman”? 324 The question becomes a crucial one when we try to answer what it is that characterizes the world of women that is marginalized, distorted, or negated within various masculinist practices. 324

Judith Butler Is there a specific femininity or a specific set of values that have been written out of various histories and descriptions that can be associated with women as a group? 325 Does the category of woman maintain a meaning separate from the conditions of oppression against which it has been formulated? 325 When the category is understood as representing a set of values or dispositions, it becomes normative in character and, hence, exclusionary in principle. 325

Judith Butler In response to the radical exclusion of the category of women from hegemonic cultural formations on the one hand and the internal critique of the exclusionary effects of the category from within feminist discourse on the other, feminist theorists are now confronted with the problem of either redefining and expanding the category of women itself to become more inclusive […] or to challenge the place of the category as a part of a feminist normative discourse. 325

Judith Butler Is there another normative point of departure for feminist theory that does not require the reconstruction or rendering visible of a female subject who fails to represent, much less emancipate, the array of embodied beings culturally position as women? 325

Judith Butler As much as psychoanalysis theory provided feminist theory with a way to identify and fix gender difference through a metanarrative of shared infantile development, it also helped feminists show how the very notion of the subject is a masculine prerogative within the terms of culture. 326 Hence, far from being subjects, women are, variously, the Other, a mysterious and unknowable lack, a sign of the forbidden and irrecoverable maternal body, or some unsavory mixture of the above. 326

Judith Butler [Irigaray] claims that the subject is always already masculine, that it bespeaks a refusal of dependency on the mother, and that this “autonomy” is founded on a repression of its early and true helplessness, need, sexual desire for the mother, even identification with the maternal body. 326 The subject thus becomes a fantasy of autogenesis (spontaneous generation), the refusal of maternal foundations and, in generalized form, a repudiation of the feminine. 326

Judith Butler For Irigaray, then, it would make no sense to refer to a female subject or to women as subjects, for it is precisely the construct of the subject that necessitates relations of hierarchy, exclusion, and domination. In a word, there can be no subject without an Other. 326 The destabilization of the subject within feminist criticism becomes a tactic in the exposure of masculine power and, in some French feminist contexts, the death of the subject spells the release or emancipation of the suppressed feminine sphere, the specific libidinal economy of women, the condition of écriture feminine. 327

Judith Butler If we fail to recuperate the subject in feminist terms, are we not depriving feminist theory of a notion of agency that casts doubt on the viability of feminism as a normative model? 327 What constitutes the “who,” the subject, for whom feminism seeks emancipation? If there is no subject, who is left to emancipate? 327 Clearly, the category of women is internally fragmented by class, color, age, and ethnic lines, to name but a few. 327

Judith Butler In this sense, honoring the diversity of the category and insisting upon its definitional nonclosure appears to be a necessary safeguard against substitution a reification of women’s experience for the diversity that exists. 327

Judith Butler Although these theories tend to destabilize the subject as a construct of coherence, they nevertheless institute gender coherence through the stabilizing metanarrative of infantile development. 329 In both sets of psychoanalytic analyses, a narrative of infantile development is constructed which assumes the existence of a primary identification (object-relations) or a primary repression […] which instantiates gender specificity and subsequently informs, organizes, and unifies identity. 329

Judith Butler [the] originally undifferentiated state of the sexes suffers the process of differentiation and hierarchization through the advent of a repressive law. 330 In the beginning is sexuality without power, then power arrives to create both culturally relevant sexual distinction (gender) and, along with that, gender hierarchy and dominance. 330 By grounding the metanarratives in a myth of the origin, the psychoanalytic description of gender identity confers a false sense of legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific and, in some contexts, culturally oppressive version of identity. 330

Judith Butler […] It is important to note that primary identifications establish gender in a substantive mode, and secondary identifications thus serve as attributes. 331 Hence, we witness the discursive emergence of “feminine men” or “masculine women,” or the meaningful redundancy of a “masculine man.” 331 The primary identification in which gender becomes “fixed” forms a history of identifications in which the secondary ones revise and reform then primary one but in no way contests its structural primacy. 331

Judith Butler As a result, psychoanalysis as feminist metatheory reproduces that false coherence in the form of a story line about infantile development were it ought to investigate genealogically the exclusionary practices which condition that particular narrative of identity formation. 332 The result is a narrativized myth of origins in which primary bisexuality is arduously rendered into a melancholic heterosexuality through the inexorable force if the law. 332

Judith Butler Within these appropriations of psychoanalytic theory, gender identity and sexual orientation are accomplished at once. 332 […] one identifies with one sex and, in so doing, desires the other, that desire being the elaboration of that identity, the mode by which it creates its opposite and defines itself in that opposition. 332 In other words, there are male and female libidinal dispositions in every psyche which are directed heterosexually toward the opposite sexes. 332

Judith Butler When bisexuality is relieved of its basis in the drive theory, it reduces, finally, to the coincidence or dispositions, depending on the theory, so that desire, strictly speaking, can issue only from a male-identification to a female object or form a female-identification to a male object. 332-333

Judith Butler Granted, it may well be: a woman, male-identified, who desires another woman, female-identify a man, male-identified, who desires a man, female-identified a man, female-identified, who desires a woman, male identified. a woman, female identified, who desires a woman, male identified. 333

Judith Butler In fantasy, a variety of positions can be entertained even though they may not constitute culturally intelligible possibilities. 333 [according to Kristeva] the semiotic designates precisely those sets of unconscious fantasies and wishes that exceed the legitimate bounds of paternally organized culture. 333 The semiotic domain, the body’s subversive eruption into language, becomes the transcription of the unconscious […]. 333

Judith Butler Identification is never simply mimetic but involves a strategy of wish fulfillment; one identifies not with an empirical person but with a fantasy, the mother one wishes one had, the father one thought one had but didn’t […]. 334 Hence, the gender fantasies constitutive of identifications are not part of the set of properties that a subject might be said to have, but they constitute the genealogy of that embodied/psychic identity, the mechanism of its construction. 334

Judith Butler If gender is constituted by identification and identification is invariably a fantasy within a fantasy, a double figuration, then gender is precisely the fantasy enacted by and through the corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations. 334 What is the prohibitive law that generates the corporeal stylization of gender, the fantasied and fantastic figuration of the gendered body? 335

Judith Butler Freud points to the incest taboo and the prior taboo against homosexuality as a generative moments of gender identity, the moments in which gender becomes fixed (meaning both immobilized and, in some sense, repaired). 335 The acquisition of gender identity is thus simultaneous with the accomplishment of coherent heterosexuality. 335

Judith Butler The taboo against incest, which presupposes and includes homosexuality, works to sanction and produce identity at the same time that it is said to repress the very identity it produces. 335 This disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality. 335 The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow gender. 336

Judith Butler That the gendered body is performative [that is, the essence of identity becomes a fabrication manufactured and sustained through corporeal sings and other discursive means], suggests that it has no ontological status apart form the various acts which constitute its reality, and if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is a function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body. 336

Judith Butler In other words, acts and gestures articulate and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. 337 If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then, it seems that genders can be neither true nor false but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity. 337

Judith Butler In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be conceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations, and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self. 338 It is crucial to resist the myth of interior origins, understood either as naturalized or culturally fixed. Only then, gender coherence might be understood as the regulatory fiction it is – rather than the common point of our liberation. 339