On Judith Butler's Gender Politics

Kigan Chang
Content Editor, AE Extra

n her Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler has set the tone of her debate on (homo)sexuality by raising the question at the outset: "When one asks whether or not sexual identities are constructed, a more or less tacit set of questions is implicitly raised: Is sexuality so highly constrained from the start that it ought to be conceived as fixed? If sexuality is so contrained from the start, does it not constitute a kind of essentialism at the level of identity?" Essentially, it is Butler's main contention in this essay that, employing a Foucauldian discourse, the assumption that sexual difference is irreducible should be challenged when it rejects the idea that "sex" is either primary, univocal or essentialist. The materiality of the gendered body is significant only insofar as it is genealogically invested in historically specific ways.

If we accept the Foucauldian contention, as Butler does in her essay, that there is a genealogical conincidence between "sexuality" and "identity" is the effect of a modern Western regime of power which implicates our bodies in and as the sites of its discursive reproduction, then how are we to understand the consequences of a politics that grounds itself in a "sexual identity"? Or, in other words, to the extent that "sexuality" and "identity" are both predicated on a constellation of power relations that naturalize their own historical contingency by making themselves knowable as fixed qualities of body differentiation, what limitations do the political articulations of "sexual identity" import?

In her provocative but excruciatingly tortuous work, Butler entertains questions such as these in order to challenge the assumption that feminism's status as an "identity politics" is grounded on the stability of the self-evidently differential category called "woman." Framed by the attempts within feminism to interrupt the painful exclusions experienced by "different" women, Butler's analysis seeks to elucidate why the political interventions of "woman" seem to have systematically engendered not identity but dissent.

For Butler, part of the problem lies in the recognition that, by essentializing sexuality and gender, the totalizing sameness within a group will simultaneously condition a totalizing sameness within the individual (be it a gay or a straight). By circumscribing people (specifically women) within gender categories, the political invocations of sexual identity, says Butler, mask the complex and often contradictory processes of social differentiation that produce "gender" as a naturally distinguishing signifier of human "identity."

Rather than imagining "gender" as the social and historical significance derived from a pre-given, unchanging, anatomical "sex," Butler, in line with Foucault, suggests that we need to begin to rethink gender as the cumulative effects of specific cultural and discursive practices that give differential meaning to individual bodies: "The 'performative' dimension of [gender] construction is precisely the forced reiteration of norms... I would suggest that performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject." (p.94-95) In offering this "performative" interpretation of gender as a "regularized repetition of norms," she believes that she can "describe the complexity of what is at stake in any effort to take account of the conditions under which sex and sexuality are assumed." (p.94)

Thus, instead of presupposing an "essential" (biological) differences as the ground for a (political) "sexual identity" which then must subsequently come to terms with the significant differences among those who have already been defined a "essentially" the same, Butler's analysis suggests that it is more effectively politically to understand qualitative differences -- whether "essential" or not -- as social and historical formations and to devise political practices that affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them. Such local interventions would presumably be better able to address the complex relations between as well as within individuals who are engendered by the multiple, overlapping, and frequently contradictory effects of socially generated differentials and nuances precisely because they would take these effects as both the entry points and processes of political intervention.

She writes: "The contemporary political demand on thinking is to map out the interrelationships that connect, without simplistically uniting, a variety of dynamic and relational positionalities within the political field. Further, it will be crucial to find a way both to occupy such sites and to subject them to a democratizing contestation in which the exclusionary conditions of their production are perpetually reworked (even though they can never be fully overcome) in the direction of a more complex coalitional frame." (p.114-5).

Having some familiarity with Foucault myself, much of Butler's analysis seems congenial to me. To imagine genders as sets of performative effects shifts the focus of one's political and personal concerns away from the mechanism that institute socially imposed categorizations to the practices that organize the processes of social differentiation and identification. In so doing, this conceptualization foregrounds the recognition that power relations are not monolithically imposed from "outside" but locally circulated everywhere, thereby opening the possibility for thinking change not as sporadic and hence temporally distant but rather as omnipresent and hence ongoing.

This Foucauldian insight articulated by Butler could not be any more true in a multicultural polity where one can constantly, on an everyday basis, bear witness to different complex interpenetrations of gender, race, class and sexual orientations in its highly pluralistic gender landscape. If the ways genders get conceptualized can displaced from "inside" bodies onto those practices that organize how specific individuals move through, apprehend, and change their life-contexts, then gender politics will entail the organization and reproduction of critical interventions that can at once subvert those processes through which the differentiating forms of "difference" are essentialized.

There is, however, also a two-fold problem with Butler's politically motivated account of the complex practices and processes that engender these culturally and historically specific forms. On the one hand, in its attempt to rethink the notion of "agency" so that it is "constituted" in terms of "construction," it has disregarded any concern with what brings individuals together in the first place to effect changes in the social organization or imagination of their shared communities, thus implicitly portraying collective social action as "simply" voluntaristic. On the other hand, in its focus on rethinking the subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself, it fails to explore how the juxtapositions of local strategies of subversive repetition can crystallize into new constellations of relationship and position, i.e., how they can cohere, in an act of solidarity, as collective social movement(s) of some sort.

On a more profound level, both of these are indeed symptomatic of the same problem, namely the problem of what the theory defines as the ground of the "same." For, while Butler rejects any recourse to an essentialist model of gender that is predicated on the ontological or metaphysical priority of the body, she does so precisely by invoking a parallel metaphysical idealization: "...the 'I' draws what is called its 'agency' in part through being implicated in the very relations of power that it seeks to oppose. To be implicated in the relations of power, indeed, enabled by the relations of power that the 'I' opposes is not, as a consequence, to be reducible to their existing forms. You will note that in the making of this formulation, I bracket this 'I' in quotation marks, but I am still here. And I should add that this is an 'I' that I produce here for you in response to a certain suspicion that this theoretical project has lost the person, the author, the life; over and against this claim, or rather, in response to having been called the site of such an evaluation, I write that this kind of bracketing of the 'I' may well be crucial to the thinking through of the constitutive ambivalence being socially constituted, where 'constitution' carries both the enabling and violating sense of 'subjection.'" (p.122-3)

By attempting to move gender out of the metaphysically essentialist "depth" of bodies, Butler has collapsed bodies onto the "agency" of a subject thereby reiterating the classic Cartesian mapping of mind over the body that inscribes each individual with an "identity." As a consequence, while her endeavor to de-essentialize the "biological" ground of sexual sameness aspires to open up possibilities for exploring the complexity of how genders are embodied, it also unfortunately forecloses this exploration by evacuating somatic practices, rendering the "body" as a more or less conceptual problem.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York, NY: Routledge.

Butler, Judith (1994). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." Radical Philosophy, 67 (Summer). 32-39.

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