Undoing Gender (21 page)

This symbolic importance of the child’s origin in heterosexuality is understood to be essential to culture for the following reason. If the child enters culture through the process of assuming a symbolic position, and if these symbolic positions are differentiated by virtue of Oedipalization, then the child presumably will become gendered on the occasion that the child takes up a position in relation to parental positions that are prohibited as overt sexual objects for the child. The boy will become a boy to the extent that he recognizes that he cannot have his mother, that he must find a substitute woman for her; the girl will become a girl to the extent that she recognizes she cannot have her mother, substitutes for that loss through identification with the mother, and then recognizes she cannot have the father and substitutes a male object for him. According to this fairly rigid schematic of Oedipalization, gender is achieved through the accomplishment of heterosexual desire.

This structure, which is already much more rigidly put forward here, in the effort to reconstruct Agacinski’s position, than one would find in Freud (i.e., in either
The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
or
The Ego and the Id
), is then deprived of its status as a developmental phase and asserted as the very means by which an individuated subject within language is established. To become part of culture means to have passed through the gender-differentiating mechanism of this taboo and to accomplish both normative heterosexuality and discrete gender identity at once.

There are many reasons to reject this particular rendition of Oedipalization as the precondition of language and cultural intelligibility.

And there are many versions of psychoanalysis that would reject this schema, allowing for various ways of rearticulating the Oedipal but also limiting its function in relation to the pre-Oedipal. Moreover, some forms of structural anthropology sought to elevate the exchange of women into a precondition of culture and to identify that mandate for exogamy with the incest taboo operating within the Oedipal drama. In the meantime, other theories of culture have come to take its place and call that structuralist account into question. Indeed, the failure of structuralism to take into account kinship systems that do not conform to its model was made clear by anthropologists such David Schneider, Sylvia Yanagisako, Sarah Franklin, Clifford Geertz, and Marilyn Strathern.
²⁵
These theories emphasize modes of exchange different from those presumed by structuralism, and they also call into question the universality of structuralism’s claims. Sociologists of kinship such as Judith Stacey and Carol Stack, as well as anthropologist Kath Weston, have also underscored a variety of kin relations that work, and work according to rules that are not always or only traceable to the incest taboo.
²⁶

So why would the structuralist account of sexual difference, conceived according to the exchange of women, make a “comeback” in the context of the present debates in France? Why would various intellectuals, some of them feminist, proclaim that sexual difference is not only fundamental to culture but to its transmissibility, that reproduction must remain the prerogative of heterosexual marriage, and that limits must be set on viable and recognizable forms of non-heterosexual parenting arrangements?

To understand the resurgence of a largely anachronistic structuralism in this context, it is important to consider that the incest taboo functions in Lévi-Strauss not only to secure the exogamous reproduction of children but also to maintain a unity to the “clan” through compulsory exogamy, as it is articulated through compulsory heterosexuality.

The woman from elsewhere makes sure that the men from here will reproduce their own kind. She secures the reproduction of cultural identity in this way. The ambiguous “clan” designates a “primitive” group for Lévi-Strauss in 1949, but it comes to function ideologically for the cultural unity of the nation in 1999–2000, in the context of a Europe beset with opening borders and new immigrants. The incest taboo thus comes to function in tandem with a racialist project to reproduce culture and, in the French context, to reproduce the implicit identification of French culture with universality. It is a “law” that works in the service of the “as if,” securing a fantasy of the nation that is already, and irreversibly, under siege. In this sense, the invocation of the symbolic law defends against the threat to French cultural purity that has taken place, and is taking place, through new patterns of immigration, increased instances of miscegenation, and the blurring of national boundaries. Indeed, even in Lévi-Strauss, whose earlier theory of clan formation is redescribed in his short text,
Race and History,
we see that the reproducibility of racial identity is linked to the reproduction of culture.
²⁷
Is there a link between the account of the reproduction of culture in Lévi-Strauss’s early work and his later reflections on cultural identity and the reproduction of race? Is there a connection between these texts that might help us read the cultural link that takes place in France now between fears about immigration and desires to regulate non-heterosexual kinship? The incest taboo might be seen as working in conjunction with the taboo against miscegenation, especially in the contemporary French context, insofar as the defense of culture that takes place through mandating the family as heterosexual is at once an extension of new forms of European racism.

We see something of this link prefigured in Lévi-Strauss, which explains in part why we see the resurrection of his theory in the context of the present debate. When Lévi-Strauss makes the argument that the incest taboo is the basis of culture and that it mandates exogamy, or marriage outside the clan, is “the clan” being read in terms of race or, more specifically, in terms of a racial presupposition of culture that maintains its purity through regulating its transmissibility? Marriage must take place outside the clan. There must be exogamy. But there must also be a limit to exogamy; that is, marriage must be outside the clan, but not outside a certain racial self-understanding or racial commonality. So the incest taboo mandates exogamy, but the taboo against miscegenation limits the exogamy that the incest taboo mandates. Cornered then between a compulsory heterosexuality and a prohibited miscegenation, something called culture, saturated with the anxiety and identity of dominant European whiteness, reproduces itself in and as universality itself.

There are, of course, many other ways of contesting the Lévi-Straussian model that have emerged in recent years, and its strange resurgence in the recent political debate will no doubt strike anthropologists as the spectral appearance of an anachronism. Arguments have been made that other kinds of kinship arrangements are possible in a culture.

There are also other ways of explaining the ordering practices that kinship sometimes exemplified. These debates, however, remain internal to a study of kinship that assumes the primary place of kinship within a culture, and assumes for the most part that a culture is a unitary and discrete totality. Pierre Clastres made this point most polemically several years ago in the French context, arguing that it is not possible to treat the rules of kinship as supplying the rules of intelligibility for any society, and that culture is a not a self-standing notion but must be regarded as fundamentally imbued by power relations, power relations that are not reducible to rules.
²⁸
But if we begin to understand that cultures are not self-standing entities or unities, that the exchanges between them, their very modes of delimiting themselves in distinction constitute their provisional ontology and are, as a result, fraught with power, then we are compelled to rethink the problem of exchange altogether: no longer as the gift of women, which assumes and produces the self-identity of the patrilineal clan, but as a set of potentially unpredictable and contested practices of self-definition that are not reducible to a primary and culture-founding heterosexuality. Indeed, if one were to elaborate on this point, the task would be to take up David Schneider’s suggestion that kinship is a kind of
doing,
one that does not reflect a prior structure, but that can only be understood as an enacted practice. This would help us, I believe, move away from the situation in which a hypostatized structure of relations lurks behind any actual social arrangement and permit us to consider how modes of patterned and performative doing bring kinship categories into operation and become the means by which they undergo transformation and displacement.

The hypostatized heterosexuality, construed by some to be symbolic rather than social, and so to operate as a structure which founds the field of kinship itself—and informs social arrangements no matter how they appear, no matter what they do—has been the basis of the claim that kinship is always already heterosexual. According to its precept, those who enter kinship terms as non-heterosexual will only make sense if they assume the position of mother or father. The social variability of kinship has little or no efficacy in rewriting the founding and pervasive symbolic law. The postulate of a founding heterosexuality must also be read as part of the operation of power—and I would add fantasy— such that we can begin to ask how the invocation of such a foundation works in the building of a certain fantasy of state and nation. The relations of exchange that constitute culture as a series of transactions or translations are not only or primarily sexual, but they do take sexuality as their issue, as it were, when the question of cultural transmission and reproduction is at stake. I do not mean to say that cultural reproduction takes place solely or exclusively or fundamentally through the child. I mean only to suggest that the figure of the child is one eroticized site in the reproduction of culture, one that implicitly raises the question of whether there will be a sure transmission of culture through heterosexual procreation—not only whether heterosexuality will serve the purposes of transmitting culture faithfully, but whether culture will be defined, in part, as the prerogative of heterosexuality itself.

Indeed, to call this entire theoretical apparatus into question is not only to question the founding norms of heterosexuality but also to wonder whether “culture” can be talked about at all as a self-sufficient kind of field or terrain. Though I do it, manifesting or symptomatizing a struggle to work through this position in an act of public thinking, I am aware that I am using a term that no longer signifies in the way that it once could. It is a placeholder for a past position, one I must use to make that position and its limits clear, but one that I also suspend in the using. The relation between heterosexuality and the unity and, implicitly, the purity of culture, is not a functional one. Although we may be tempted to say that heterosexuality secures the reproduction of culture and that patrilineality secures the reproduction of culture in the form of a whole that is reproducible in its identity through time, it is equally true that the conceit of a culture as a self-sustaining and self-replicating totality supports the naturalization of heterosexuality, and that the entirety of the structuralist approach to sexual difference emblematizes this movement to secure heterosexuality through the thematics of culture. But is there a way to break out of this circle whereby heterosexuality institutes monolithic culture and monolithic culture reinstitutes and renaturalizes heterosexuality?

Efforts within anthropology no longer situate kinship as the basis of culture, but conceive it as one cultural phenomenon complexly inter-linked with other phenomena, cultural, social, political, and economic.

Anthropologists Franklin and McKinnon write, for instance, that kinship has become linked to “the political formations of national and transnational identities, the economic movements of labor and capital, the cosmologies of religion, the hierarchies of race, gender, and species taxonomies, and the epistemologies of science, medicine, and technology.”

As a result, they argue, the very ethnographic study of kinship has changed such that it now “include[s] topics such as diasporic cultures, the dynamics of global political economy, or changes occurring in the contexts of biotechnology and biomedicine.”
²⁹
Indeed, in the French debate, Eric Fassin argues that one must understand the invocation of the “symbolic order” that links marriage to filiation in a necessary and foundational way as a compensatory response to the historical breakup of marriage as a hegemonic institution, the name for which in French is
démariage.
³⁰
In this sense, the opposition to the PACS is an effort to make the state sustain a certain fantasy of marriage and nation whose hegemony is already, and irreversibly, challenged at the level of social practice.

Similarly, Franklin and McKinnon understand kinship to be a site where certain displacements are already at work, where anxieties about biotechnology and transnational migrations become focused and disavowed. This seems clearly at work in Agacinski’s position in at least two ways: the fear she bespeaks about the “Americanization” of sexual and gender relations in France attests to a desire to keep those relations organized in a specifically French form, and the appeal to the universality of the symbolic order is, of course, a trope of the French effort to identify its own nationalist project with a universalist one. Similarly, her fear that lesbians and gay men will start to fabricate human beings, exaggerating the biotechnology of reproduction, suggests that these “unnatural” practices will eventuate in a wholesale social engineering of the human, linking, once again, homosexuality with the potential resurgence of fascism. One might well wonder what technological forces at work in the global economy, or indeed, what consequences of the human genome project raise these kinds of anxieties in contemporary cultural life. But it seems a displacement, if not a hallucination, to identify the source of this social threat, if it is a threat, with lesbians who excavate sperm from dry ice on a cold winter day in Iowa when one of them is ovulating.