Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

The life of the text has exceeded my intentions, and that is surely in part the result of the changing context of its reception.

There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation.

How do certain sexual practices compel the question: what is a woman, what is a man? If gender is no longer to be understood as consolidated through normative sexuality, then is there a crisis of gender that is specific to queer contexts?

Gender can be rendered ambiguous without disturbing or reorienting normative sexuality at all.

The anticipation conjures its object.

I went to many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds of genders, understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of them, and encountered sexuality at several of its cultural edges.

As Drucilla Cornell, in the tradition of Adorno, reminds me: there is nothing radical about common sense.

It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such.

The effort to name the criterion for subversiveness will always fail, and ought to.

Drag is an example that is meant to establish that “reality” is not as fixed as we generally assume it to be.

I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this “I” possible.

Those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital instability is produced by that performative surprise.

Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates.

As a strategy to denaturalize and resignify bodily categories, I describe and propose a set of parodic practices based in a performative theory of gender acts that disrupt the categories of the body, sex, gender, and sexuality and occasion their subversive resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame.

The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network or marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and that, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.

“The feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation.”

Perhaps the subject, as well as the invocation of a temporal “before,” is constituted by the law as the fictive foundation of its own claim to legitimacy.

The political task is not to refuse representational politics—as if we could. The juridical structures of language and politics constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating practices.

Perhaps, paradoxically, “representation” will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of “women” is nowhere presumed.

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.

“But ‘the body’ is itself a construction, as are the myriad ‘bodies’ that constitute the domain of gendered subjects.”

Women are the “sex” which is not “one.”

That subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female.

The mind not only subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment altogether.

Perhaps a coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact.

Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time.

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.

“Their persistence and proliferation, however, provide critical opportunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of that domain of intelligibility and, hence, to open up within the very terms of that matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender disorder.”

There is only one: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general.

“Both indeed give way to a primitive ontological concept that enforces in language a division of beings into sexes.”

Hence, one is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair.

Foucault imagines Herculine’s experience as “a world of pleasures in which grins hang about without the cat.”

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.

“In other words, if the model of a more diffuse and antigenital sexuality serves as the singular, oppositional alternative to the hegemonic structure of sexuality, to what extent is that binary relation fated to reproduce itself endlessly?”

The feminine as the repudiated/excluded within that system constitutes the possibility of a critique and disruption of that hegemonic conceptual scheme.

The productions swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of “subjects” that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible.

It offers the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement.

Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy.

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.

The story of origins is thus a strategic tactic within a narrative that, by telling a single, authoritative account about an irrecoverable past, makes the constitution of the law appear as a historical inevitability.

The binary relation between culture and nature promotes a relationship of hierarchy in which culture freely “imposes” meaning on nature, and, hence, renders it into an “Other” to be appropriated to its own limitless uses, safeguarding the ideality of the signifier and the structure of signification on the model of domination.

If the very designation of sex is political, then “sex,” that designation supposed to be most in the raw, proves to be always already “cooked,” and the central distinctions of structuralist anthropology appear to collapse.

What might an alternative logic of kinship be like?

The relation of reciprocity established between men, however, is the condition of a relation of radical nonreciprocity between men and women and a relation, as it were, of nonrelation between women.

The prohibition exists in no way suggests that it works. Rather, its existence appears to suggest that desires, actions, indeed, pervasive social practices of incest are generated precisely in virtue of the eroticization of that taboo.

By claiming that the Other that lacks the Phallus is the one who is the Phallus, Lacan clearly suggests that power is wielded by this feminine position of not-having.

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.

Hence, there is a necessary or presuppositional impossibility to any effort to occupy the position of “having” the Phallus, with the consequence that both positions of “having” and “being” are, in Lacan’s terms, finally to be understood as comedic failures that are nevertheless compelled to articulate and enact these repeated impossibilities.

It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the one to whom she addresses her demand for love.

The mask thus conceals this loss, but preserves (and negates) this loss through its concealment.

“I shall attempt to show that women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.”

What is hidden is not sexuality, but rage.

My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing.

The “bisexuality” that is posited as a psychic foundation and is said to be repressed at a later date is a discursive production that claims to be prior to all discourse, effected through the compulsory and generative exclusionary practices of normative heterosexuality.

The injunction to become sexed in the ways prescribed by the Symbolic always leads to failure and, in some cases, to the exposure of the phantasmatic nature of sexual identity itself.

“So by taking flight into the ego, love escapes annihilation”

This internalizing strategy of melancholia does not oppose the work of mourning, but may be the only way in which the ego can survive the loss of its essential emotional ties to others.

What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders?

The melancholic refuses the loss of the object, and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt toward the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled.

Indeed, the stricter and more stable the gender affinity, the less resolved the original loss, so that rigid gender boundaries inevitably work to conceal the loss of an original love that, unacknowledged, fails to be resolved.

Far from foundational, these dispositions are the result of a process whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy.

Thus, the repressive law effectively produces heterosexuality, and acts not merely as a negative or exclusionary code, but as a sanction and, most pertinently, as a law of discourse, distinguishing the speakable from the unspeakable.

The alternative perspective on identification that emerges from psychoanalytic theory suggests that multiple and coexisting identifications produce conflicts, convergences, and innovative dissonances within gender configurations which contest the fixity of masculine and feminine placements with respect to the paternal law.

The loss of the pleasurable object is resolved through the incorporation of that very pleasure with the result that pleasure is both determined and prohibited through the compulsory effects of the gender-differentiating law.

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

The love for the father is stored in the penis, safeguarded through an impervious denial, and the desire which now centers on that penis has that continual denial as its structure and its task.

The incest taboo, then, would repress no primary dispositions, but effectively create the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” dispositions to describe and reproduce the distinction between a legitimate heterosexuality and an illegitimate homosexuality.

“the description of that “before” will always be in the service of the “after.””

The object of repression is not the desire it takes to be its ostensible object, but the multiple configurations of power itself, the very plurality of which would displace the seeming universality and necessity of the juridical or repressive law.

In other words, the law which prohibits that union is the selfsame law that invites it, and it is no longer possible to isolate the repressive from the productive function of the juridical incest taboo.

The “unthinkable” is thus fully within culture, but fully excluded from dominant culture.

In effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law.

On the contrary, poetic language, she claims, is the linguistic occasion on which drives break apart the usual, univocal terms of language and reveal an irrepressible heterogeneity of multiple sounds and meanings.

In its semiotic mode, language is engaged in a poetic recovery of the maternal body, that diffuse materiality that resists all discrete and univocal signification.

Poetic language thus always indicates a return to the maternal terrain, where the maternal signifies both libidinal dependency and the heterogeneity of drives.

The homosexual-maternal facet is a whirl of words, a complete absence of meaning and seeing; it is feeling, displacement, rhythm, sound, flashes, and fantasied clinging to the maternal body as a screen against the plunge ... for woman, a paradise lost but seemingly close at hand.

The heterosexual poet-mother suffers interminably from the displacement of the homosexual cathexis.

Pleasure beyond the paternal law can be imagined only together with its inevitable impossibility.

Surely, her description warrants not only the charge of Orientalism, but raises the very significant question of whether, ironically, multiplicity has become a univocal signifier.

The law that is said to repress the semiotic may well be the governing principle of the semiotic itself, with the result that what passes as “maternal instinct” may well be a culturally constructed desire which is interpreted through a naturalistic vocabulary.

The maternal body would no longer be understood as the hidden ground of all signification, the tacit cause of all culture.

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.

Indeed, he appears to romanticize h/er world of pleasures as the “happy limbo of a non-identity” (xiii), a world that exceeds the categories of sex and of identity.

The sexual world in which Herculine resides, according to Foucault, is one in which bodily pleasures do not immediately signify “sex” as their primary cause and ultimate meaning; it is a world, he claims, in which “grins hung about without the cat” (xiii).

The temptation to romanticize Herculine’s sexuality as the utopian play of pleasures prior to the imposition and restrictions of “sex” surely ought to be refused.

In the place of univocity, we fail to discover multiplicity, as Foucault would have us do; instead, we confront a fatal ambivalence, produced by the prohibitive law, which for all its effects of happy dispersal nevertheless culminates in Herculine’s suicide.

Herculine’s anatomy does not fall outside the categories of sex, but confuses and redistributes the constitutive elements of those categories.

“That would be the inverse of Plutarch,” he writes, “lives at parallel points that nothing can bring back together” (my translation).

“All I can do is explode with laughter.”

“The sight of the tomb reconciles me to life,” she writes. “It makes me feel an indefinable tenderness for the one whose bones are lying there beneath my feet [là à mes pieds]” (109).

S/he is “outside” the law, but the law maintains this “outside” within itself.

Exactly the same stretch of DNA said to determine male-ness was, in fact, found to be present on the X chromosomes of females.

As absent or passive, it is definitionally disqualified as an object of study.

Only from a self-consciously denaturalized position can we see how the appearance of naturalness is itself constituted.

Those bodily figures who do not fit into either gender fall outside the human, indeed, constitute the domain of the dehumanized and the abject against which the human itself is constituted.

a lesbian is not a woman.

Hence, “sex” is the reality-effect of a violent process that is concealed by that very effect.

“There is nothing abstract about the power that sciences and theories have to act materially and actually upon our bodies and minds, even if the discourse that produces it is abstract.”

no woman can say I without being for herself a total subject—that is, ungendered, universal, whole.

Domination occurs through a language which, in its plastic social action, creates a second-order, artificial ontology, an illusion of difference, disparity, and, consequently, hierarchy that becomes social reality.

“The goal of this approach,” she writes, “is not to feminize the world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language.”

So we are dealing with an object both imaginary and real.

Indeed, I would offer this insight into heterosexuality as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative gay/lesbian perspective.

Neither can lay claim to “the real,” although either can qualify as an object of belief, depending on the dynamic of the sexual exchange.

The very shape and form of bodies, their unifying principle, their composite parts, are always figured by a language imbued with political interests. For Wittig, the political challenge is to seize language as the means of representation and production.

The violence of the text has the identity and coherence of the category of sex as its target, a lifeless construct, a construct out to deaden the body.

The force of Wittig’s fiction, its linguistic challenge, is to offer an experience beyond the categories of identity, an erotic struggle to create new categories from the ruins of the old, new ways of being a body within the cultural field, and whole new languages of description.

How resplendent seems the art of acting! It is all impersonation, whether the sex underneath is true or not.

“As a volume in perpetual disintegration” (148), the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history.

A polluting person is always in the wrong. He [sic] has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone.

In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.

The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself as a signifying lack.

acts and gestures, articulated 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.

In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.

The loss of the sense of “the normal,” however, can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when “the normal,” “the original” is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.

Indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.

Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.

This is a sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself. It is the supplément, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all.

The substantive “I” only appears as such through a signifying practice that seeks to conceal its own workings and to naturalize its effects.

There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very “taking up” is enabled by the tool lying there.

Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible.

The task is not whether to repeat, 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.

Gender Trouble in its closing pages seems to forget or disavow the loss it has just articulated.

“the stable political identities that found political movements may invariably become threatened by the very instability that the foundationalist move creates.”

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

“I call ‘politics as such’ the prohibition of marginality that is implicit in the production of any explanation.”

“You make me feel like a metaphor of the natural,” and without “you,” some denaturalized ground would be revealed.

“The unconscious constantly reveals the ‘failure’ of identity”

The origins cannot be recovered, and the map that might lead to the origins has become unreadable through time. Those to whom it might be explained do not speak the same language and have no recourse to translation.

Women are poetic “objects of exchange” in the sense that they mediate the relationship of un-acknowledged desire between men as the explicit and ostensible object of discourse.

Obviously, they can shift through time and are open to cultural reformulations that are in no sense univocal.

For Kristeva, melancholy is a “voluptuous sadness” that seems tied to the sublimated production of art. The highest form of that sublimation seems to center on the suffering that is its origin.

“Incorporation is merely a fantasy that reassures the ego.”

“In Lacan’s adaptation of Lévi-Strauss, which transforms the latter’s multiple ‘symbolic systems’ into a single symbolic order, [the] neglect of the possibilities of systems of meaning promoting or masking relations of force remains”

Because discourse is not restricted to writing or speaking, but is also social action, even violent social action, we ought also to understand rape, sexual violence, “queer-bashing” as the category of sex in action.

“the paradise of the social contract exists only in literature, where the tropisms, by their violence, are able to counter any reduction of the ‘I’ to a common denominator, to tear open the closely woven material of the commonplaces, and to continually prevent their organization into a system of compulsory meaning”

“Defilement is what is jettisoned from the symbolic system. It is what escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based, which then becomes differentiated from a temporary agglomeration of individuals and, in short, constitutes a classification system or a structure”

“incorporation” of identity, 86–91, 171–74

pleasures, proliferation of, 35–36

women: as “being” the Phallus, 55–60, 70–71

The life of the text has exceeded my intentions, and that is surely in part the result of the changing context of its reception.

The anticipation conjures its object.

The effort to name the criterion for subversiveness will always fail, and ought to.

Those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital instability is produced by that performative surprise.

“The feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation.”

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.

Perhaps a coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact.

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.

It offers the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement.

Far from foundational, these dispositions are the result of a process whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy.

The maternal body would no longer be understood as the hidden ground of all signification, the tacit cause of all culture.

Only from a self-consciously denaturalized position can we see how the appearance of naturalness is itself constituted.

In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.

Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible.