Judith Butler/Gender Trouble
Kaitlin Fertaly
Reading Questions for Gender Trouble
1. Why does Butler critique the category of woman 'as the subject of feminism'? How does she use Foucault and the idea of discursive formation to accomplish this?
2. The gender/sex distinction, often created to Beauvoir, was intended to dispute bio-deterministic approaches to gender, making gender the cultural construction and sex merely biology. How and why does Butler critique this distinction? What does she propose instead?
3. In Part II, Butler again, approaches the problem of sex as grounded in biology or a pre-discursive ontology, even if the sexed-body is politicized. What ideas or discursive formations is she "excavating" in order to deconstruct notions of the sexed body and the notion of a law of gender? What does she critique in Levi-Strauss's structuralism and Lacan and Freud's psychoanalysis?
4. How does Butler use Lacan's notion of masquerade to problematize a notion of law and the Symbolic?
5. How does Butler use her critiques of Kristeva's theory of symbolic and semiotic language and the maternal body as a springboard for her own approach?
6. Why is drag the solution?
Key Terms
1. Gender/Sex
3. Performativity
4. Masquerade
5. Incest Taboo
6. the Symbolic (Lacan)
7. Maternal Body
9. Transsexual and Drag
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Butler critique binaries like male/female, masculine/feminine, mind/body and distinctions like gender/sex? What does her argument propose instead?
2. Butler critiques the idea of sex as a substance, a metaphysical being. Why is this problematic for her? What is accomplished when we see bodies as discursive formations?
a. If this her strategy, what are the benefits and limitations? What, if anything, do we give up when we abandon on biology? What does this view mean for understanding the experiences of our bodies?
3. How does Butler draw on Foucault's ideas of normativity to discuss the delimitation of the field of description that we have for gender and sex? How does her approach to language and power overlap with Foucault? What are the benefits and limitations of a Foucauldian approach to power in feminist theory?
4. How does Butler draw on psychoanalysis and Freud’s work to open a space for her own theory? How does she both extend and overthrow Freud’s arguments?
5. Circling back to JJ’s question from our discussion on Freud, what are the differences or similarities between Freud’s concept of perversion and Foucault’s concept of deviance? How does Butler’s plan for subversion relate to these concepts?
6. Butler's aim is clearly a political one--to over throw reified notions of sex and gender. What are her strategies for subverting these? Are they effective? Can everyone take part?
a. What are the political or social stakes of this subversion?
b. Can Butler’s theoretical goals for subverting gender be applied practically? What constraints does she not account for?
7. Another reading of Butler’s goal to overthrow stabilized categories of sex and gender is the destruction of structure (the heterosexual matrix). What other kinds of structure can be disrupted through performativity? According to Arendt, the possibility of agency is created through structure. If Butler is overthrowing structure, what are the implications for agency?
8. Butler's use of language is difficult and opaque for many readers. She defends this use of style in her preface (1999) asking" What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does 'transparency' keep obscure?" Do you agree?
Chandler Griffith
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1z3l5o2732tzuez/butler-gender_trouble.pdf
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Ian Rowen
Ian Rowen
GEOG 5100
November 10, 2012
Commentary on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
Judith Butler sets herself the task of radically denaturalizing sex, gender, and compulsory heterosexuality, and largely succeeds. Gender Trouble is not only a poststructuralist interrogation of gender and sexuality, but also a call for a more inclusive politics that does not treat the category of “women” as natural or given, but rather one that is socially and performatively constructed.
Butler’s mission is to de-essentialize pregiven categories of self, particularly those of sex and gender; to not look at essentialized categories of the self or its roles but rather the acts and performances that construct the appearance of an essence. Butler’s approach to performativity does not deny the social experience of gendered selves or bodies—it explicitly does not deny the appearance or agency of a subject—but rather than take it as a prediscursive entity, it explores how it is constructed. Such an approach is explicitly in the spirit of Foucault’s work on the genealogies of knowledge, in which attention to the contingencies of subject formation reveals the relations of power that underlie them. This focus on practice allows Butler to question assumptions of pre-given, gendered selves, without ruling out agency or room for subversion or resistance. Interestingly, she does this in a very non-ethnographic way. Her arguments derive primarily from philosophical and psychoanalytical considerations. In this respect, her critique of Levi-Strauss’s arguments as “decontextualized” and reliant on a “totalizing logical structure” (50) could almost be turned back on her.
Having in the past approached Butler in a more roundabout fashion—first through her interlocutors, and then through brief readings of journal articles and Bodies That Matter—I’m struck by Gender Trouble’s omissions and eccentricities. Her notion of the performative is underdeveloped here—at least she rectifies this in her later work by reconstructing performativity with the help of JL Austin’s speech act theory and Derrida’s notions of citation and iterability. Moreover, Butler’s notoriously dense style can take its toll on the reader. As much as theoretical terminology (deployed quite precisely at least), it is mostly the repetition of multiple questions in the same paragraph that I find irritating. Based on her 1999 preface alone, it is obvious that Butler can write in a clear, straightforward, and even eloquent fashion when she chooses to. Apart from her contention that she intentionally twists grammar to support her claims for a radically different ontology (xviii), I suspect that her use of dense, abstract language is itself a kind of literary gender drag. As she implies, and as many feminist anthropologists (for example, Lutz) have noted, theory has been constructed as the Masculine to the Feminine of ethnography—this distinction is not only a epistemological quirk, but also a means to enforce a gendered, hierarchical division of labor in the academy. By twisting and torturing her prose into dense theoretical knots, Butler deploys a masculine idiom that challenges this conceptual gender division. Unfortunately, in the process, the reader’s patience may occasionally be challenged as well.
jacquelynjampolsky
Kaitlin Fertaly
Kaitlin Fertaly
GEOG 5100
Response to Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Butler’s main goal in Gender Trouble is argue that both sex and gender are constructed although they have been naturalized in discourse to appear as stable categories. In order to demonstrate their constructedness, much of her work in this volume is a critique or challenge to previous feminist theories that have made many problematic assumptions such as the category of “woman” or the oppression of patriarchy. Her goal is that feminist theorists come to understand that the category of “women” is produced and constrained by the very structures of power through which they are seeking emancipation (4). She both critiques and to some degree draws on the work of other authors including Beauvoir, Irigaray, Freud, Kristeva, and Wittig in order to lay out her own theory of gender, that of performativity, which tells us both how such hegemonic gender structures have been formed and how to subvert them.
The theory of performativity posits that gender is “not a noun” but a “doing” (34) and that there is no “doer” behind the deed. In other words, gender is performed and there is no identity that exists behind or before the expression of gender. Through repetition, these performative acts appear to congeal in such a way as to create a stable category of gender when in fact this stability is an illusion. This argument allows her to go further to say that if there is no stable gender identity, then there are no stable gender categories, only that which is constituted through practiced performance. Butler’s goal is also a political one of subversion. Having thoroughly broken down the idea that there is any substance to sex and gender, she draws on the idea of drag as parody, as a means of further destabilizing these binaries of gender/sex to show that all gender is practiced and performed (200).
Her project is clearly a deconstructivist one and her theory is an attempt to overthrow the reified categories of male/female and masculine/feminine and the heterosexual matrix (the link between sex, gender, and desire) in order to cultivate a “theory of agency “(xxv) where identities can be imagined as always multiple, contested, and shifting. However there are also a number of limitations to her theoretical perspective when examined more closely. For instance, her theory fails to address the consequences of trying to exist outside of socially constructed categories of gender. The closest Butler comes to acknowledging the tensions between structure and agency and the consequences of being outside or in-between is when she writes, “Not to have social recognition as an effective heterosexual is to lose one possible social identity and perhaps to gain one that is radically less sanctioned. The ‘unthinkable’ is thus fully within culture but fully excluded from dominant culture” (105). However, as this passage seems to indicate, Butler would argue that being transsexual or homosexual is not outside of structure itself, but outside of the dominant structure and therefore, despite risk, individuals still have possibilities for action.
Another issue that arises from Butler’s theory of performativity is its lack of attention, not to the body, but to bodily senses. For Butler, it seems that the body is entirely constructed and inaccessible to experience beyond language. In one instance, drawing on Mary Douglas, Butler is describing the relationship of social taboos to the boundaries of the body where are inherently social and writes “the naturalized notion of ‘the’ body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries” (181). Here Butler is clearly demonstrating the socially construction of the body itself through around understanding of its boundaries. Again, in her 1999 preface, she argues that the self is never outside language and although it is not determined by it, the language through which the self is constructed always influences it. This means “you never experience me apart from the grammar that establishes my availability to you” (xxvi), an argument that seems to completely separate us from our own bodily experiences. Though masculine or feminine gender and sex categories are constructed as hegemonic norms, how do I understand my experiences of my own “female” body?
Joel
Joel Correia
11 November 2012
GEOG 5100
Reading Response
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler critiques feminist scholarship and politics, exposes how normative categories and notions of gender, sex, and sexuality are socially constructed through the performance of culturally accepted norms and use of language, and calls for the disturbance of masculine heterosexual social hegemony. Butler challenges the notion that sex and gender are unified—that gender is a natural state based on the biology of the individual. On the contrary, for Butler sex and gender are separate. And though they are not equivalent categories, both equally are culturally and/or socially constructed. Sex, she posits, is always gendered. Butler argues that sex is not merely a biological fact and gender is not a given; rather, the two are effects of the application of power. To this end, power (i.e. cultural or societal) dictates that a person behaves/performs in a particular way and by doing so performs gender. Butler draws from Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to reveal how differing strains of feminism reify the false concept of a female-male binary. In doing so, Butler illustrates the contested and dynamic nature of gender. She also draws from examples that challenge the fixity of stable categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, for example Herculine, transsexual peoples, and drag. Consequently, Butler’s central argument is that gender is an amalgamation of performed acts distinct from biological physiology. Butler’s project is explicitly political and intended to not only critique feminism, but to instigate action on the part of the reader to disrupt or subvert normalized, hegemonic understandings of gender by creating gender trouble(s).
A central component of Butler’s argument focuses on the heterosexual matrix (i.e. biological sex equates gender which leads to desire for one of the opposite sex based on social and juridical regulations such as the incest taboo) for the maintenance of sexual social norms upon which the falsity of the male-female binary is established. Moreover, Butler critiques the category of woman because it does not accurately represent nor describe the experiences of those that the category is assigned. The notion of woman does not give agency to the difference and variation between peoples of the biological category woman (as the word is used in normative discourse). Rather, the category essentializes their experience and identity. Butler argues that woman is a category based on the discursive formation of heterosexual social norms and maintained through the application of power. This category, however, is based on the idea that there is natural binary between woman and man. Butler contends that this is a false binary because such distinctions reduce and essentialize males and females in manners that don’t reflect reality. She states, “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” (original emphasis, p. 9). Feminism and feminist scholars (particularly Irigaray, Witig, and Beauvoir), though arguably advocating for women and striving for greater gender equality, reify the discursive formation of woman as a category. “Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics” (p. 175). The feminist scholars and politics, which Butler is responding to, depend on and reproduce the male-female binary. Butler argues that feminist reliance on hegemonic distinctions of sex, gender, and sexuality maintains repressive norms. In Gender Trouble, Butler moves beyond a deconstruction and critique of feminist theory and posits methods to subvert and resist normative categorization.
Fixed categories of sex, gender, and sexuality based on nature or biology are a fiction. Using a feminist genealogy Butler develops a novel ontology of gender as performance versus gender as nature/natural. She contends that gender is discursively created through the congealed multiplicity of acts, performances, and language. “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” (p. 45). Butler’s construction of gender as a series of performed acts is useful for interrogating the fixity of categories beyond sex, gender, and sexuality. It is arguable that the notion of performativity is applicable to all aspects of social interaction and categories of identity. In what ways do we not perform in the various social positions that we occupy? Seen is this light, an analytic based on the deconstruction of performance can be used to interrogate the seemingly stable position of the social actors whom we work with in our own respective research projects to disrupt hegemonic understandings and generate new avenues of inquiry.
Butler implores the reader to understand gender in new ways and challenge hegemonic compulsory heterosexual normatives by creating gender trouble(s) through action, language, and discourse. Yet, Butler goes beyond merely calling for the disruption of these norms. She disrupts the performance and structure of academic literature through her use of language and style in Gender Trouble. At first read, the text is cumbersome, obtuse, and overly complicated. The book is unnecessarily riddled with multiple series of questions and sentences that are far overwritten. Nevertheless, reflecting on to the difficulty of reading this book and the concept of gender trouble as performance led me to a different understanding of Butler’s exposition, the intent of her writing style, and method of argumentation. Though Butler’s writing is arguably obstructive and/or terrible, I see her use of language as an attempt to challenge and disrupt the “masculine hegemony and heterosexist power” (p. 46) of normative language structures and discourse. This book is an attempt to enact gender trouble through the written word by disturbing the structure of writing that (re)produces the male-female binary, and normative notions of gender, sex, and sexuality. The complication of the text parallels the complicated nature of sex and gender and Butler does this to illustrate the questions and complications of describing and understanding gender. As such, the text is a performance of gender trouble. Its complication and lack of formal structure not only challenge the way that topics such as gender and sex must be written about, but also create unease in the reader. Perhaps this is intended to make the reader reflect on the lack of fixity when thinking about gender? Perhaps the complication and obtuse language is intended to illuminate Butler’s argument that gender itself is endlessly complicated and contested? By refusing to ascribe to normative literary structures Butler demonstrates to the reader how gender trouble can be enacted through multiple forms and mediums.
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Judith Butler Gender Trouble
When one locates Butler's Gender Trouble within the broader genre of feminist studies, it is evident that she is rejecting both the essentialist ideas and foundationalist ideas that first-wave and second-wave feminists are thought to embody. Like other post-modern feminists (e.g. Donna Haraway and Nancy Fraser), she problematizes fixed categories like gender, and recognized that knowledge is produced through discourse. For post-modern feminists this means that the experiences of women are produced by the discourses available that shape their ability to make meaning; and that "woman" cannot be conceived outside of this discourse. Butler, however, takes her critique even further by arguing that feminists themselves create the category of "woman" in the same way that Foucault's "juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent" (p. 4). Furthermore, "the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions" (p. 7). One is left wondering is Butler is a feminist at all. While this debate can be settled elsewhere, it is important to note that she extends the feminist critique to argue that not only gender is constructed but that sex is as well; she holds the two as inseparable. Both are part of a hegemonic structure of sexuality that purports the oppositional binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine.
In chapter two Butler expands upon this hegemonic structure - which she calls the heterosexual matrix – in which biological sex equates with both gender and desire for the opposite sex. She challenges the ways in which sexual difference and the construction of sexuality have been conceived by structuralist, material feminists, and psychoanalysts in relation to the incest taboo. She is critical of Levi-Strauss, Riviere and Freud, showing how each creates and maintains the idea of a prediscursive self, despite their attempts to indicate a subject that precedes language and thought.
Butler continues her assault of the theorist before her in chapter three. She begins with a discussion of Julia Kristeva claiming that Kristeva, "depends upon the stability and reproduction of precisely the paternal law that she seeks to displace" (p. 102) and that any theory that relies on the "denial or repression of a female principle ought to consider whether that femaleness is really external to the cultural norms by which it is repressed" (p. 118-19). Similarly, Butler challenges Foucault's account of Herculine the hermaphrodite, arguing, "his own theory maintains an unacknowledged emancipatory ideal that proves increasingly difficult to maintain, even within the strictures of his own critical apparatus” (p 119-120).
Once Butler sets aside other theorists, she begins her own argument. The crux of her argument is that gender is a performance, not an expression. An expression would signify that there was in fact a pre-discursive self (which was argued against in chapter two.) Performances, on the other hand, effectively "constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal" (p. 180). There are no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender. Furthermore, the repeated performance of gender constructs the physical conditions of sex, while simultaneously hides this construction. In other words, the repeated performance of gender enables the sexed body to exist within the framework of our gendered discourse, while at the same time create the idea that sex is the basis for gender, and that our different "male" and "female" bodies lead us to perform particular expressions of masculinity or femininity. The task, then, for feminists who seek to understand the "effects" of gender is not whether to repeat performances of gender, but "how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself" (p. 189). This is one reason why she promotes "drag." Drag not only disrupts the association between anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender expression, it is a subversive performance of gender that can dismantle the structure of gender repetition.
Lindsay Skog
Lindsay Skog
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler at once critiques and situates herself within feminist thought in the late twentieth century by arguing that mobilizations of the categories of ‘women’ and ‘woman’ to combat dominate masculine discourses actually serve to perpetuate such discourses. To do this Butler first challenges the sex/gender dichotomy by arguing that both sex and gender are constructed. That is to say that, drawing on Foucault’s History of Sexuality vol I., the designation of sex as either male or female based on genitalia—or more specifically, based on the presence or absence of male genitalia—is itself a discursive practice that masks the male-dominated power structures in constructions of sexuality as uncontestable scientific ‘truth’. After demonstrating that sex is not an essential quality of a body, Butler argues that understandings of gender as a performance of an essentialized sex are misguided; rather, Butler argues that gender is not a performed mask or expression of sex, rather the performance of gender is constitutive of identity. In other words, the performance constructs both the signifier and the signified. Once freed of its moorings, gender may then be used as a tool to illuminate and subvert the juridical and naturalized structures that delimit and constrain identity.
While I find Butler’s immediate argument compelling and persuasive, I find it instructive to think about the ways in which we can push her argument into the concerns of geography. One of the ways we can apply Butler’s work is in conceptualizations of space. Geographers broadly conceptualize space as the nexus of power, knowledge, and geography (Thrift 2006). Through Butler’s argument that performance is constitutive of identity rather than expressive of an essential form we can understand space, not as a void to be filled by the actions at this nexus, but rather as constituted by the performance of this nexus. As Butler draws on Foucault to demonstrate the discursive structures that shape gender performance, we can look to Lefebvre to understand the ways in which the performance of space—the nexus of power, knowledge, and geography—discursively produces space.
In addition to contributing to an understanding of space, Butler’s argument illuminates interesting questions within my own research on constructions of indigenous identity and sacred space. Specifically, my work examines mobilizations of a constructed, singular, and exclusionary Sherpa identity within a specific political context, and the way that construction shapes sacred space. Yet, Butler would argue that the performance of a homogenizing mobilized Sherpa identity is not signifying an essential Sherpa identity, rather it is constituting Sherpa identity itself. However, the performance of a singular Sherpa identity elides significant religious and social differences between those who claim a Sherpa identity. This example highlights what I see as a limit in Butler’s argument: Identity debates are not limited to the scale of the individual.
Eric Reiff
Eric A. Reiff
GEOG 5100 – Social Theory
Discussion Paper 9
Judith Butler, Gender Troubles
10 November 2012
In Gender Troubles Butler sets to work pulling on the various threads of gender theory as presented by Iragaray, Kristiva and Wittig as well as the anthro-structuralism of Levi-Strauss, the Symbolic phallus argued by Lacan, and Foucault’s apparent difficulty in consistently seeing sex as part of the larger discursive and disciplining power structure rather than essential. Butler deploys a Foucauldian genealogy to these various theories of sex and gender—including Foucault—until she exposes them as essentializing gender and/or sex, which she argues reproduces the discursive power structures which the theorists are trying to overcome or subvert. Her constant point of departure is Beauvoir’s argument that the feminine is the object against which the masculine is created in counter distinction (Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic); “one is not born, but rather, becomes a women”. This notion that the feminine is created and not essential gives Butler a theoretical opening into which she proceeds in order to dismantle other feminist theories for reproducing the same discursive power dynamics that they are trying to overcome. Butler argues that when the feminine gender is assumed to have some essential ontological nature that this recreates discursive power structures by reifying gender as pre-cultural. This is a problem because if theorists assign essential qualities to genders that forecloses on their ability to see that gender is socially constructed and that it is in this construction that inequality is made, not in any essence. The way out of this for Butler is to stop looking for a pre-juridical, pre-cultural masculine/feminine divide; it doesn’t exist. There is in other words no essential divide between the masculine and the feminine. They are culturally created, discursive categories that empower the masculine subjects at the expense of the female objects. She argues that this discursive power matrix that creates and divides the masculine and feminine can only be overcome by exposing it for what it is. As made categories the feminine and the masculine genders and sexes have imperfect boundaries—e.g. a body with male genitalia could have a very feminine disposition and vice versa. By exposing these boundaries as porous and permeable we show them for the normative cultural creations that they are. For Butler the example for this is a drag performance, which puts the gender and sex of the performer in play. She points out that in drag we see anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance and that this should show us that the gendered body should have no ontological status other than the actions that constitute reality (185). Therefore, gender is a performance that recreates itself through repetition. Thus the path to change is to find places in which gender identity is repeated and to perform gender in a way that is subversive to the norm.
Perhaps we see her prescription of creating gender trouble in the recent election with the election of the first openly gay US Senator, the first openly gay Speaker of the House in Colorado, and three states confirming gay marriage through popular vote. This would have been almost unthinkable a decade or maybe even a year ago, but after years of performing non-heterosexually in the public sphere there has been normalization of non-heterosexuality; that is, society got used to new ideas about gender and gender roles and these new public performances became possible and potentially part of the new normal. It seems this is also what we have saw in how close H. Clinton got to the presidency in 2008, instead becoming the 3rd female of the last 4 Secretaries of State; again repetition of the non-conforming gender role performances reshapes what is possible. I’m glad I got to read this book, because it is obviously the foundational text of queer theory and the works of Gibson-Graham which have been not only formative in my thinking about the disconnection from and consumption of nature but my entry point into geography as a discipline.
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
GEOG 5100
Review: Butler
Judith Butler’s seminal work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, takes to feminist theory with a critical eye toward various understandings of identity construction and to what she terms a normalizing “heterosexual matrix”. In contrast to her writing style, which is admittedly dense and at times almost indecipherable, Butler’s lays out her argument in a relatively accessible format. She outlines her arguments by explaining, deconstructing, and critically evaluating traditional feminist theory. Butler then comes back, time and time again, to the criticism that all such theories are founded upon either a heterosexual norm or at least normative gender presumptions that construct the very identity they intend to emancipate. To this problematic circularity Butler’s offers the explanation of performativity.
In her first section, Butler outlines her argument that gender is performative by addressing several weaknesses in common feminist theory. These weaknesses have, she argues, ultimately rendered the discourse paralyzed in the very heterosexual matrix it attempts to subvert. First, she argues, the very specification of the woman as the subject of feminism is problematic. After all, as Foucault notes, we can think of subjects as produced by particular juridical systems of power, and thus as defined, regulated and reproduced by such systems (4). The woman as the subject of feminism, therefore, represents a system of power that has ascribed certain cultural significance, limitations, and stereotypes to a particular type of body. In other words, “woman” is a category belonging to a particular juridical power, not existing previous to it, and its construction cannot be understood separately from that structure of power. To that end, she states, “…the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitable generates multiple refusals to accept the category. The domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes” (7). Thus, just like gender, then, the sexed body is a constructed identity.
Butler goes on to discuss the contributions of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigay to feminist theory and the relationship between sex and gender. To Beauvoir, women constitute a “lack” of gender, whereas Irigay posits a signifying economy of phallagocentric language that that excludes women altogether. However, as Butler notes, at the foundation of both of these theories is the notion of a universal subject, which can only be defined or understood within the very heterosexual matrix they attempt to subvert. She continues, in her next section, to explore such “regulatory fictions” (44) by which hegemonic heterosexist power creates sex, coherent gender, and the sex-and-gender binaries and through which we have come to conceive of our identities. Here, she takes on the notion of “pre-patriarchy”, which has been invoked in feminist theory to expose the “self-reification” of the patriarchal power structure. Again, Butler argues that such an invocation itself represents an instance of reification (45).
Thus, to uncover the weaknesses in the notion of patriarchal law (as universal and all-encompassing), Butler turns first to Levi-Strauss’s structuralism discourse related to kinship. In what she terms the “explicit, male-mediation of Levi-Strauss’s Hegalian economy” the incest taboo creates a structure that bonds men (homoerotically) through the exchange of women (51). Here, Butler observes that incest for Levi-Strauss is “not a social fact, but a pervasive cultural fantasy” (54). She argues that such pervasiveness is itself suggestive of a reproduction by virtue of prohibition. In other words, by eroticizing certain social practices and actions, we actually create desires for them.
Next, Butler examines the notion of the masquerade, referring to Lacan’s signifier of the phallus (which the man has, while the woman is) and the heterosexual comedy (61). Here, Lacan argues, women find space to operate within the realm of paternal law, signified by the phallus (58). The ensuing masquerade thus reflects a failed heterosexuality. To Riviere, on the other hand, the masquerade is a means of conflict resolution that mediates a variety of gender attributes (65). Again, Butler critiques both theories as guilty of presupposing a heterosexual, male-centric, point of departure. Thus, the mask hides nothing; it is only a mask.
Finally, Butler beings to come around to the body itself. She starts Subversive Bodily Acts with Julia Kristeva, who responds to the Lacanian notion of paternal law (which depends on the repression of the libido and establishes a necessarily hetero-normative symbolic structure) with subversion via poetry (101). She continues on to address Foucault, Wittig, and Douglass, continually ending up at the same conclusion: that previous feminist theories have all fallen into the trap of assuming the existence of a sex or gender identity independent of predating culture. Her solution, therefore, is to view gender as performative, and thus malleable. By turning traditional notions of gender on their head (for example, by performing drag), one is able to subvert and recreate the structure of signification (146).
Overall, I enjoyed Butler, despite my continual struggle to digest psychoanalytic theory. In the end, though, I kept coming back to Agamben and the space of exception. How has the history of feminist theory essentially reified a particular realm of the juridical? Can we read Butler’s criticism of such theories, and her suggestions for actual subversion through conscientious performance, as a rejection of an entire system of hegemony or merely making space for dissensus within the same old heterosexual matrix of power?
On Monday, November 5, 2012 8:15:35 PM UTC-7, Kaitlin Fertaly wrote:
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
Gender Trouble (Judith Butler)
11 November2012
GEOG 5100
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler challenges the idea of feminist theory as a catchall theoretical frame that casts women as a singular and similar entity. The roots of feminist theory, at first, required such a unified front to combat the dominant, patriarchal discourse. But eventually two issues arose that challenged the accepted notions of feminist theory. First was the realization that all women do not share a common experience. How can feminism be representative of the female experience, if that commonality is not universal? Second, notions of “sex” and “gender” further confounded established feminist theory. “The sex/gender distinction,” writes Butler, suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders” (9). If gender was a social construct separate from the physical body, simply identifying as a woman did not automatically correlate with presupposed notions of the female experience.
Butler’s poststructuralist approach to feminist theory allows her to deconstruct its epistemology in order to re-imagine its usefulness in a world where discourses around sex, gender and marginalization have changed. In light of this re-conceptualization, the feminist framework eventually evolved to include any representation outside the patriarchy: race, class, ethnicity, etc. But Butler takes it further, arguing that feminist ideas only exist in relation to masculine ones. Referencing Irigary, Butler writes that socially constructed masculine, power-dominant discourses require an “other” to be subjugated; therefore the notion of the oppressed/repressed/disenfranchised emerged as a way to develop a converse for the subject/other relationship. Feminist theory, then, was a space in which to explore notions of “other.” But the limits to this framework were exposed as the boundaries of “other” blurred with the developing ontology around gender.
Towards the end of the book, Butler acknowledges the limitations of language and labeling bodies according to their race, gender, social status, etc. Labeling begins to afford agency to its subjects, but falls short. “Identity is asserted through a process of signification,” (196) she writes, but there is power in the spaces that remain un-labeled or unnamed. The ambiguity of gender, then, challenges dominant notions of the binary opposition strategy of subject/other, and begs the need for a re-conceptualization of feminist political theory. Part of this re-conceptualization would include a deconstruction of the apparatus through which the binary itself is constituted.
Early on, Butler asks, “Does sex have a history?” (9) This questions really takes on the integrity of feminist political thought. It asks: Is a shared history or experience really possible? If not, how can one pose an entire theoretical frame on the experience of the “other,” especially when the notion of “other” simply exists in relation to the subject? And, if sex does have a history, can that history change as new intellectual pathways open or are discovered?
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
November 12, 2012
GEOG 5100
Response: Butler
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler deconstructs and challenges the discursive formation of sex, sexuality, and gender. In so doing, she provides an early, direct critique of Feminism and establishes a logical foundation for Queer Theory, arguing that agency is gained through performativity and the repetition of subversive bodily acts. Employing a Foucauldian genealogy and Freudian psychoanalytic on gender discourse, Butler’s engagement with Lacan, Irigaray, de Beauvoir, Kristeva, and Wittig (amongst others) illuminates numerous theorists’ problematic dependence on ‘prediscourse’ and shows first-wave Feminism’s self-defeating categorization of ‘women’ according to binary sex and gender constructs. Butler’s assault on normative constructions on the ‘naturalness’ of sex and gender is not only a theory to shift the status quo, but a subversive act in itself that finds representation by employing ‘unorthodox’ methods of language and rhetoric.
Butler challenges the classic binary categorization of sex and gender by demonstrating that they are mutually dependent stylized acts. So deeply imbedded are these notions, that they are considered ‘natural,’ with biological foundations, as opposed to a socially formed discourse. As gender is grafted onto sex, “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, a natural sort of being” (45). This ‘highly rigid regulatory framework’ is the false binary of male and female sex (and sexuality), a purported biological ‘fact’ that under rigorous analysis is revealed to be nothing more than another socially constructed but historically embraced (and erroneous) concept.
Butler follows Freud in showing that ‘sex’ is a continuum, not a duality, and therefore argues that it defies categorization. One may be born with genitalia features that defy the simplistic, anatomical categories of ‘male’ or ‘female.’ Moreover, the conflation and association of arbitrary, anatomical structures with the categories of ‘male’ or ‘female’ is highly problematic, as it ignores the variety and diversity that are natural to the human (and animal?) species. Futhermore, through acts and methods of outward appearance, surgical change, and inward disposition, one person can, according to biology and performativity, simultaneously exist between ‘male’ and ‘female,’ and constantly shift along the continuum at will. Thus, Butler argues, we must first be disabused of the false construct of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in order to take the next step of breaking apart the false, normative gender binary of masculine and feminine.
Butler’s ‘Heterosexual Matrix’ takes sex/sexuality/gender as a social construction in which desire is regulated and employed to maintain the existence of the heterosexual norm and binaries of male-female and masculine-feminine. Society has so subscribed to this discursive formation and false binary that it acts as Freud’s Uber-Ich, establishing hidden expectations and systems that normalize and perpetuate the construct. Accordingly, the unreflexive self does not select its gender, but rather experiences it only through imposition. Instead of conforming to this ossified and entrenched ‘normality,’ Butler argues that gender and desire should be “flexible, free-floating, and not caused by other stable factors.”
Because gender is socially constructed and dependent on language and bodily acts, gender is performative. And because it is performative, gender is thereby flexible, subversive, and political. This performative flexibility is indeed liberating and, moreover, the means to agency. “That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (185). It is thus both powerful and vulnerable, as its reality is determined and dependent on the acts.
Drag, Butler proposes, is a key means by which to act subversively, turning the inward outward, and, conversely, making the external internal. Such performativity challenges the culturally constructed ‘coherence’ of sex/gender discourse, and disrupts the “frameworks of intelligibility” that comprises society’s “foundationalist fiction.” As a result, this coming New Year’s Eve, when I visit my in-laws in Key West, I will consider, and participate, in the festivities with new eyes and ideas. The drag shows will no longer merely be gender-defying acts of performativity, but rather, I will known them to be subversive actions in coalition against the dominant discourse.
On Monday, November 5, 2012 8:15:35 PM UTC-7, Kaitlin Fertaly wrote:
Caitlin Ryan
Judith Butler response
11/11
If we view Butler’s book Gender Trouble as if it were a sandwich, then I want to use this response to tackle the two slices of bread: Butler’s critique of feminist theory at the beginning, and her ideas about performativity at the end. Butler’s book is a spiral and the main argument is repeated several times as you read through it, so this strategy of summarizing her arguments in the slices of bread will actually capture much of the book.
Butler critiques feminism for the way in which it has tended to construct and represent its subject as a singular, universal and stable category of identity. The subject of feminism is in fact multiple, complex and indeterminate. Butler draws on Foucault’s notion of “discursive formations”--structures of power that form, define and reproduce their subjects--in order to show that the feminist construction of its subject as “woman” actually produces woman rather than liberating her (p. 3). In Butler’s view, better linguistic and political representations of woman cannot free her from structures of power because doing so only serves to reproduce, or reify, her within that same structure. In claiming that the subject of “woman” exists before a structure of power (i.e., prior to the law), the discursive formation of feminism hoodwinks us into thinking that sex and gender are natural, preceding culture and power structures. The law, then, becomes a deceptive veil that is understood to benignly shape what already exists, hiding the fact that it actually produces the categories that it then represses. In Butler’s words, “feminist goals risk failure by refusing to take account of the constitutive powers of their own representational claims (6).” One of the key things that Butler adopts from Foucault is this notion that political representations tend to reverse our perceptions of what is a cause, and what is an effect. Gender, she argues, is an effect of feminism, it does not exist prior to it. If the power structures regulate gender and thereby produce it, then we can say that gender is performed within an inherited discourse (34).
While Judith Butler’s book is titled Gender Trouble, I think it might just as easily have been titled Identity Trouble, because the book is clearly about far more than feminist thought, sex and gender. I can imagine numerous applications of her structural analysis to understanding other types of political identity formations, including those she mentions such as race, class and the other “embarrassed” and “exasperated” et ceteras. In addition, another essentialized identity is the subject-object divide of mainstream development and humanitarianism, in which target populations, the subjects of outside interventions, are often constructed as being one-dimensional, unitary and pre-historical (e.g. poor, woman, elderly, marginalized, displaced, ethnic minority, vulnerable, urban, rural subsistence worker, etc.). These constructed identities have significant effects on they way that states and international organizations classify and assist certain groups. But in a Butlerian/Foucauldian reading, one might view these identities as discursive formations that produce identities that are then worked upon in certain ways - legislated for and against, regulated, and so on.
The second half of the first chapter is concerned with understanding where the incest taboo and the homosexual taboo originated, and how they are related to one another. Butler draws on Levi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan here, although I think her point is understandable without the psychoanalysis. According to Levi-Strauss, the incest taboo arises out of a practice of exchange in which the bride, traded or gifted across clans, is a relational figure who does not have identity but who serves a symbolic purpose through which collective, male-dominated clan or group identity is maintained vis-a-vis other groups. The taboo on incest and the rule of exogeny (marriage outside the group) establish and reproduce the process of identity formation. Butler reverses Levi-Strauss’ assertion that the homosexual taboo is a spinoff of the incest taboo, insisting instead that the homosexual taboo precedes the incest taboo, and that this is the key moment in which gender identity is born.
The second slice of bread in this book sandwich is concerned with gender performativity, and its draws out the Foucauldian critique of feminist theory, especially the cause/effect question that is worked out in the first slice of bread, into a discussion of more binaries: internal and external gender identities, or the boundaries of the body. Butler tells us that if the source or cause of a gender identity is internal to the body, based on a psychological core, then the disciplinary practices that created that identity are effectively hidden from view (p.186). In this way, Butler is arguing that sex/gender can’t have a primary or original source from within the body. From this analysis, Butler moves on to suggest that drag and cross-dressing is a “double inversion” that mocks the notion of a true gender identity by externalizing what is internal. Through the example of drag, Butler identifies not two but three dimensions of the body that are all contingent: anatomical sex, gender identity and gender performance. Thus gender is divided into both identity (internal and external) and performance.
Silly question: what does Butler mean by the term “self-identical”?
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
GEOG 5100: Social Theory
Commentary on Butler’s Gender Trouble
November 12, 2012
In Gender Trouble Judith Butler takes on two primary and linked projects: first, to lay out the ways that gender identity is formed, and to demonstrate that it is constituted through performance; and second, to ask how this understanding of the ontology of gender formation can inform the possibility of subversion. The performativity at the heart of gender identity, she argues, provides the avenue for its destabilization.
While her main arguments are evident throughout, the bulk of the text is focused on engaging and describing the work of various thinkers on feminism, gender, identity and power. All are potential or partial allies in her project, but all also present intellectual edifices against which she argues back (while taking what she finds useful) in the construction of her own argument. Butler begins by focuses on critiquing the dominant strains of feminism as essentially complicit in upholding the very structures they seek to counter by re-creating and reifying the gender subject of “female” or “woman” in order to advocate for its representation. She turns here to several feminist thinkers who have made inroads to address this problem – although in the end she finds each wanting in some respect. For example, Beauvoir, while recognizing that gender status is a construction – “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one” (11) – still takes biological sex as given. Wittig, in contrast, shares Butler’s view that it is not only gender identity but biological sex as well that “naturalizes” what are “political categories, and not natural facts” (157). However, in responses to Wittig in both the opening and closing sections of the book, Butler finds her call for a complete overthrow of heterosexual normativity to risk the creation of new oppressive categories and to be based on a possibility of operating outside of “the law” – a possibility that Foucault has demonstrated to be impossible.
In her second chapter Butler still addresses a strand of thinking among feminists: that it should be possible to determine the origins of patriarchy, to locate the “pre-patriarchal” within human experience. But here she turns to thinkers beyond feminist circles who have theorized gender formation. Among others (Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Riviere), she gives extensive attention to Freud’s idea of melancholia – the incorporation of a lost loved one – as a central mechanism to the formation of “character” and gender identity. Melancholia, according to Freud is not only a way to deal with loss, but to address loss that is in part a function of repudiation, such as a son’s repudiation of his mother (80-81). However, Freud’s argument regarding the consolidation of gender identity that results, depends on an assumption of masculine or feminine “dispositions”, assumed to pre-exist, but for which he is unable to fully account (82). Throughout this section (and overlapping in others as well), Butler takes each argument for a pre-discursive source of gender identity and dismantles it, revealing the “source” to in fact be only an effect.
In her final and longest chapter, Butler turns more fully to the question of subversion, considering the possible approaches posited by Kristeva, Foucault and Wittig in turn, with each offering tantalizing possibilities but ultimately coming up short. Instead, Butler argues for an approach that accepts the necessity of operating within – and yet against – the given structure of “laws”. By recognizing that all of gender identity is a performance, and that it has no intrinsic stability other than the repetition of the performance, she argues, we can engage in the repetition of that performance differently, with the effect of subverting it.
Interestingly, despite her extensive citation of Foucault’s works, which arguably form the theoretical scaffolding on which her entire argument hangs, his description of counter-conduct (Security, Territory, Population, Lecture 8) never explicitly enters this discussion. Nevertheless, Butler’s “subversion” seems to accord very closely with Foucault’s “counter-conduct.” Foucault describes “movements whose objective is a different form of conduct” (STP, 194) that fit neither the heroics of the dissident nor explicitly political acts of resistance, but still can be understood as countering dominant power structures, including those that affect the status of women (STP, 196). This seems entirely consistent with Butler’s call for locating “strategies of subversive repetition” (201).
On Monday, November 5, 2012 8:15:35 PM UTC-7, Kaitlin Fertaly wrote:
Austin Cowley
Austin Cowley
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
Liminal Expression, Queer Theory, and Breaking Down the Binary of Gender
Judith Butler’s primary motive in Gender Trouble, it seems, is a rigorous deconstruction of deeply entrenched binary mode of thinking towards mind and body, man and woman, as well as being and knowing even more broadly. In completing this task, Butler decenters the typically male-dominated, categorical vision of humanity but also, and more importantly the very definitional poles – male/female, masculine/feminine, and heterosexual/homosexual – that have come to outline the human condition itself. Ultimately, Butler not only disrupts the tenuous balance of terms around gender but in putting forth the notion that gender is performed rather than simply embodied or conceived of, the author challenges an even more fundamental analytic binary between the epistemological and ontological. In this paper, I wish to briefly explore Butler’s motive and method of analysis to ask broader questions on the theme of gender. Ultimately, I refer back to Butler’s own question as the starting point for asking such questions: “What possibilities of gender configurations exist among the various emergent and occasionally convergent matrices of cultural intelligibility that govern gendered life? (41).”
Butler’s mode of inquiry through deconstructive critique is one clearly influenced by the work of Derrida. This method of deconstruction for Butler pushes from the center outward, a view from the margins that disregards the flimsy assumptions of previous thinkers around gender and sex. This view not only challenges the hegemonic (re)production of the hetero-male gaze, phallocentric logic as Irigaray calls it, but in turn, the popular feminist notion that this male-centric view produces a kind of universal subjectification for women. It’s the latter point that made Butler a contentious figure among feminist activists in the 90s. While there are certainly cases in which women are subjected to similar forms of oppression and domination, assuming a “universal” mode of such practices washes over a range of different particularities of culture, class, race, and ethnicity that certainly color the different experiences of being a man, woman, or something in between or to the side. Most importantly for Butler’s theory on gender, this conventional resistance to patriarchy and misogyny relies on a kind of originary notion of the feminine and maternal that only reifies the very categories that produce the subjugation of women. These binary categories of male and female, heterosexual and homosexual provide little or no liminal modes of expression between – and in some cases completely outside – the poles at either sides of the spectrum. Through an extensive critique, Butler ultimately provides new entry points that break apart these categories and reenvision gender, sex, and the body on new terms.
Butler makes the claim that gender is an identity “tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” rather than a “stable identity” or “locus of agency” (191). That is to say, the norms that constitute the sexual, gendered knowledge of the self are inherently unstable, ripe for critique and exposed as farce through acts of subversion. For Butler, the performance of drag is one that highlights this mutability of gender. Drag assumes the role of pastiche, or parody that avoids perpetuating the myth of originality, to demystify the notion that internal truth embodies external expression. Here, genuine truth and humor arise when what is perceived as “originary” is simply itself another construction. In other words, underneath the mask of “normal” sexual expression is simply another mask. What is conceived of as the norm – despite appeals to science and biological determinism and regardless of its political predominance – has no more legitimacy than the perceived deviations of that norm. Not surprisingly, Gender Trouble opened up an entirely new avenue of discussion around queer theory and the broader spectrum of gender performativity. Thus, the book’s enduring quality is located in its applicability and ability to generate new questions around the gendered practices of everyday life.
On Monday, November 12, 2012 12:45:29 AM UTC-7, alspa21 wrote:
Hello all,
Looking forward to a lively discussion of Gender Trouble~~
Amy
