Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

"Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety." 

One of Butler's central arguments is that the assumption of a coherent identity called "women" by feminists is an error because it ignores the inability of that identity to encompass the many variations of woman as a gender and because it’s based on exclusionary practices that undercut feminism's commitment to liberation.

"If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all." 

Butler deconstructs the binary of sex/gender by pointing out that even sex is constructed by discourse/culture. Her insistence on seeing both sex and gender as constructed supports her later argument that there are more than two genders, and that our assumptions about the impact of biology on gendering tend to be wrong. Her use of deconstruction of binaries is an important analytical tool she uses to make her arguments.

"Irigaray would maintain, however, that the feminine 'sex' is a point of linguistic absence, the impossibility of a grammatically denoted substance, and, hence, the point of view that exposes that substance as an abiding and foundational illusion of a masculinist discourse. This absence is not marked as such within the masculine signifying economy." 

In this quote, Butler discusses two important concepts from Luce Irigaray: the idea of the phallogocentric economy (the system of masculinist discourse within which the terms of gender are defined) and the idea that the feminine as a gender is an absence in such a system because women are presented only as the negation of men. This notion of women as absence/absences highlights the degree to which language erases women in favor of men and, as such, must be a point of intervention if people are to escape oppressive gender identities.

"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 enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms." 

This quote gives some insight into Butler's relationship with feminism. Her focus on critiquing significant aspects and contributors to feminist thought is clearing out space that will support the aims of feminism, including establishment of a philosophical framework that creates more freedom, rather than less. Many of her critiques, as a result, focus on pointing out that the use of certain ideas are dead ends because they reinsert oppressive ideas that feminists would like to avoid.

“In other words, the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed.”

Butler addresses one of the practical implications of insisting there is a stable identity called women: exclusion of women who do not share every trait of those making such calls for unity. Butler is effectively calling for an intersectional feminism that does not rely on such definitions.

“Central to each of these views [of the parameters of sex], however, is the notion that sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance, as, metaphysically speaking, a self-identical being. This appearance is achieved through a performative twist of language and/or discourse that conceals the fact that ‘being’ a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible.” 

In this quote, Butler rejects the idea that one's sex is a self-evident fact that is based upon one's body. Instead, she argues that this idea of sex conceals the way that all identities, including sexual ones, are performative and never prior to discourse or culture.

“The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire. The act of differentiating the two oppositional moments of the binary results in a consolidation of each term, the respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire.” 

Compulsory heterosexuality is the idea that heterosexuality is enforced by the culture, discourse, and language within which people function. Naturalized heterosexuality is the idea that systems and cultures all function to make one assume that heterosexuality is the only natural and acceptable option instead of allowing for a critical perspective on there being just two genders. For Butler, the powerful force of the male/female binary is one of the major foundations of the functioning of a system of compulsory heterosexuality, in part because one's ability to count as a subject in such a system is dependent upon identity formation built upon acceptance of that male/female binary. The concept of compulsory heterosexuality in Butler reflects the influence of Monique Wittig on her work. 

"If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the ‘congealing’ is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means." 

In this quote, Butler gestures toward the idea that woman is not a stable identity but is instead unstable and variable. Her use of the concept of congealing here is her way of articulating that traits and behaviors we associate with femininity only seem feminine because of a long history of the arbitrary association of these traits and behaviors with femininity. Congealing is in effect another way of describing the process of naturalization.

“This text continues, then, as an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble, not through the strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity.”

In this quote, Butler articulates the central aim of her work as making "gender trouble" that will unsettle the idea that gender is stable and predetermined by a natural order and instead advance the idea that there are multiple genders that can exceed masculine and feminine.

"In effect, the relations among patrilineal clans are based in homosocial desire (what Irigaray punningly calls “hommo-sexuality”), a repressed and, hence, disparaged sexuality, a relationship between men which is, finally, about the bonds of men, but which takes place through the heterosexual exchange and distribution of women."

In this quote, Butler engages with structural anthropology's theory that the traffic in women is the critical exchange that underwrites the structures of kinship, which Claude Lévi-Strauss claims is a universal structure. Butler, following Irigaray, concludes that this exchange is an example of displacement—the traffic in women covers over what is apparently unspeakable: male-male bonds.

“The masculine subject only appears to originate meanings and thereby to signify. His seemingly self-grounded autonomy attempts to conceal the repression which is both its ground and the perpetual possibility of its own ungrounding. But that process of meaning-constitution requires that women reflect that masculine power and everywhere reassure that power of the reality of its illusory autonomy.” 

Butler deconstructs the apparent masculine/feminine and having/being the Phallus binaries by pointing out that these binaries conceal the dependence of masculine gender on women.

"This recourse to an original or genuine femininity is a nostalgic and parochial ideal that refuses the contemporary demand to formulate an account of gender as a complex cultural construction. This ideal tends not only to serve culturally conservative aims, but to constitute an exclusionary practice within feminism, precipitating precisely the kind of fragmentation that the ideal purports to overcome." 

This quote articulates one of the many reasons why Butler rejects reliance on a stable women's identity as the foundation for a subversive feminism. Doing so almost inevitably reinstitutes oppression that feminism claims to want to escape.

“If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?” 

In this quote, Butler subtly points out that Lacan's account of gender identity formation is marred by assumptions that are likely heterosexist. Her use of a question to upend what seems natural is also typical of her approach to critique.

“Far from foundational, these dispositions are the result of a process whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy. In other words, ‘dispositions’ are traces of a history of enforced sexual prohibitions which is untold and which the prohibitions seek to render untellable. The narrative account of gender acquisition that begins with the postulation of dispositions effectively forecloses the narrative point of departure which would expose the narrative as a self-amplifying tactic of the prohibition itself.”

In this quote, Butler critiques Freud's recourse to sexual dispositions to explain heterosexuality and homosexuality. She identifies it as one of the many instances in which things identified as given or as natural are actually the result of historical processes that are ignored or concealed in the interest of maintaining the status quo.

“Precisely by virtue of its melancholic structure, this literalization of the body conceals its genealogy and offers itself under the category of ‘natural fact.’”

One of the ways Butler engages in critique is by pointing out that things assumed to be natural in opposition to things that are unnatural frequently have a traceable history—a genealogy—that is concealed in order to maintain the status quo. The assumption that the body's sex is natural, as opposed to a culturally-constructed phenomenon, is an example of just this kind of naturalization.

“By projecting the lesbian as ‘Other’ to culture, and characterizing lesbian speech as the psychotic ‘whirl-of-words,’ Kristeva constructs lesbian sexuality as intrinsically unintelligible. This tactical dismissal and reduction of lesbian experience performed in the name of the law positions Kristeva within the orbit of paternal-heterosexual privilege.”

Butler's work bridges feminist and queer theory in many instances. In this passage, the difference in these two theoretical perspectives becomes clear as she takes Kristeva to task by pointing out that the semiotic, articulated by Kristeva as a particularly subversive order of experience, is in fact mired in heterosexism.

“Indeed, repression may be understood to produce the object that it comes to deny. That production may well be an elaboration of the agency of repression itself. As Foucault makes clear, the culturally contradictory enterprise of the mechanism of repression is prohibitive and generative at once and makes the problematic of ‘liberation’ especially acute.” 

The repressive hypothesis holds that discourse around sexuality was forced into hiding during the Victorian age and thus brought sexuality under the firm control of the dominant culture. Foucault's critique of this hypothesis is that repression attempts to tamp down unsanctioned sexuality, but prohibitions generate the very thing they hope to repress. Butler relies on Foucault's work in this instance to discount Kristeva's account of the semiotic as potentially liberating.

“In order to avoid the emancipation of the oppressor in the name of the oppressed, it is necessary to take into account the full complexity and subtlety of the law and to cure ourselves of the illusion of a true body beyond the law. If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.” 

Butler rejects the necessity of an essential female identity and woman's body as a source of liberation in this passage. Her rejection of the body (in this case in the work of Kristeva) reflects her understanding that there is no escape from discourse and relations of power, which ultimately means that subversion has to be negotiated from within the existing terms of reality. 

“‘Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.’” 

Butler quotes Monique Wittig as an opening to her discussion of compulsory heterosexuality, a gender reality in which becoming a person capable of producing discourse requires acceptance of a heterosexual contract that silences and disappears homosexuals. Wittig's contention is that one must intervene in language in order to overthrow the power of compulsory heterosexuality.

“[P]ower can be neither withdrawn nor refused, but only redeployed. Indeed, in my view, the normative focus for gay and lesbian practice ought to be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of its full-scale transcendence.”

Butler rejects the idea that one can escape being handled by relations of power. Her discounting of many second-wave feminist efforts to liberate women by overthrowing the current gender order is based on this rejection. 

“The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance.” 

Butler uses drag as an example of the disconnection between bodies and gender. Her focus on drag as an example is a key moment in her argument that gender is performative.

“[I]n my earlier reading of Beauvoir, I suggest that gendered bodies are so many 'styles of the flesh.' These styles all never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condition and limit the possibilities. Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an 'act,' as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where 'performative' suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.”

In this quote, Butler describes her notion of the body in a world in which neither gender nor sex are essential, inherent traits. In addition, this account of gender as a kind of style references Butler's understanding that things that seem natural are actually the effects of processes that have a history.

“If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old. Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness.” 

Butler articulates what she imagines a postfeminist politics might look like. Instead of relying on an essential women's identity, feminists might instead speak to a much broader constituency of genders that might not have fit into the restrictive old model.