ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'GENDER TROUBLE (SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE)'

ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'GENDER TROUBLE (SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE)'

• Butler understands that 'existing identites' of women as the subject of feminism is only a representation, and this representation has a dual aspect
  a) Representation of the women as a subject serves as the operative term within a political process for visibility and legitimacy
  b) Representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women.
  • Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent
    • Juridical power inevitably produces what it claims merely to represent
    • the law produces and then conceals the notion of a subject before the law in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law's own regulatory hegemony
  • Apart from the foundationalist fictions that supports 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
    • Denise Riley's 'Am I That Name?' criticizes that
    • it becomes impossible to separate out gender from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained
      • Universalist feminism colonializes non-Westerns ('Third World' and 'Orient') as essentialist barbarisms
        • Strategic uses of essentialism are criticezed for strategies always have meanings that exceed the purposes for which they are intended
• An uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of 'women' will be clearly self-defeating !!!
  • This doesn't imply refusing representational politics, which is impossible for her, but simply to operate a feminist genealogy of the practices legitimizing gender departing from what Marx calls the historical present
    • Feminist genealogy must contest reifications of gender and identity on bases of the variable methodologies and normativities through which they are founded.
  • Perhaps, paradoxically, representation will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of women in nowhere presumed

• Her genealogy criticizes the compulsory order of Sex/Gender/Desire
  • One way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain
    • It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category
    • In one such interpretation the cultural horizons of gender would thus remain determined by the anatomically differentiated bodies
  • While she criticizes this essentialism of the Sex (body) settling the grounds of gender, she doesn't agree with Simone de Beauvoir (variable and volitional constructivism) that one can simply construct and deconstruct the body to experience gender as it pleases one better
    • Beauvoir proposes that woman are the Other in a sense that they are marked out of universality to which man belong
    • Women become women when they are marked/ restricted by the society due to their bodies, while the male body flows disavowed and universal without being ever marked
      • Butler points that the very 'choice' of how to experience the body is itself a socialy contructed aspect
        • Butler asks: 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 distinct material will?
      • Butler follows Irigary criticizing that women are not only the Other in a Saussurian (Sartrean, as she refers) relation of Self and Other but, instead, that women are unrepresentable in the phallogocentric language and its closed phallogocentric signifying economy
        • masculine constitute the closed circle of signifier and signified
        • The entire structure of representation is inadequate
        • Women as 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.
          • My personal comment is that here she follows Foucault on identifying a contest mechanism of power against the hegemonic one and, through it, develops its genealogy.
          • Butler points to a context of socially instituted gender asymetry
            • Butler finds Beauvoir feminism of a female body as the space of contestation and freedom to follow the philosophical tradition started with Plato and continued through Descartes, Husserl, and Sartre – that of distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and body
              • This distinction invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy
                • Mind subordinates the body, and eventually entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment.
                  • Asymetry comes as masculinity is associated with mind and body with feminism.
            • Butler contrasts Beauvoir and Irigary as the first points to an asymmetrical dialectic and the second to the dialectic itself as the monologic elaboration of a masculinist signifying economy
        • Butler, however, extends her critiques to Irigary for, despite broadening the scope of feminist critique, her analysis has a globalizing reach of a universalist aspect (as if she proposed another universality instead of the phallogocentric one)
          • 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 enmy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms
            • The colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist
          • Butler also criticizes the way Irigary pledges primacy to the 'dialectical appropriation and suppression of the Other' among the masculinist tacticts, for she – Butler – believes that not even the oppression operates itself in a universal linear and centralized way through which it sygnifies language;
          • Butler also claims that such oppressive tactique is also present on other opressions beyond the masculinist one.
      • Paradoxically, Beuvoir prefigured this impossibility [her own phallogocentrism] 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
  • Butler also criticizes efforts to formulate coalitional politics towards ideal models of women without assuming in advance a content for 'women', because in the process they end up imposing the ideal in advance
    • Creation of womens through dialogue misses the point that dialogue is itself culturally specific and historic, so some speakers may feel secure that conversation is happening while anothers may be sure it is not.
      • She points that the power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities needs first to be interrogated
        • My personal comment here is to highlight a connection with Kaviraj's (not sure) concept that imagination is the limit of a social reality.
        • Butler than proposes an antifundationalist approach to coalitional politics: assuming that neither identity is a premise nor that the shape or meaning of a coalitional assemblage can be known prior to its achievement
          • 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.
• As a result, Butler genealogy's aims at the issue of; to what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity?
  • Her genealogy shows that the heterosexualization of desire rquires 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