Undoing Gender (30 page)

One might be tempted to despair, but I believe that these are among the most interesting and productive unsolved issues at the beginning of this century. The program of feminism is not one in which we might assume a common set of premises and then proceed to build in logical fashion a program from those premises. Instead, this is a movement that moves forward precisely by bringing critical attention to bear on its premises in an effort to become more clear about what it means and to begin to negotiate the conflicting interpretations, the irrepressible democratic cacophony of its identity. As a democratic enterprise, feminism has had to forfeit the presumption that at base we can all agree about some things or, equivalently, to embrace the notion that each of our most treasured values are under contestation and that they will remain contested zones of politics. This may sound as if I am saying that feminism can never build from anything, that it will be lost to reflection upon itself, that it will never move beyond this self-reflective moment toward an active engagement with the world. On the contrary, it is precisely in the course of engaged political practices that these forms of internal dissension emerge. And I would argue emphatically that resisting the desire to resolve this dissension into unity is precisely what keeps the movement alive.

Feminist theory is never fully distinct from feminism as a social movement. Feminist theory would have no content were there no movement, and the movement, in its various directions and forms, has always been involved in the act of theory. Theory is an activity that does not remain restricted to the academy. It takes place every time a possibility is imagined, a collective self-reflection takes place, a dispute over values, priorities, and language emerges. I believe that there is an important value in overcoming the fear of immanent critique and to maintaining the democratic value of producing a movement that can contain, without domesticating, conflicting interpretations on fundamental issues. As a latecomer to the second wave, I approach feminism with the presumption that no undisputed premises are to be agreed upon in the global context. And so, for practical and political reasons, there is no value to be derived in silencing disputes. The questions are: how best to have them, how most productively to stage them, and how to act in ways that acknowledge the irreversible complexity of who we are?

I propose to consider a set of terms in this essay that have come into conflict with one another: sexual difference, gender, and sexuality.

My title suggests perhaps that I am announcing the end to “sexual difference” in its presumed facticity or as a useful theoretical entry into questions of feminism. My title is intended as a citation of a skeptical question, one that is often posed to theorists who work on gender or sexuality, a challenge I wish both to understand and to which I propose a response. My purpose is not to win a debate, but to try to understand why the terms are considered so important to those who use them, and how we might reconcile this set of felt necessities as they come into conflict with one another. I am here as interested in the theoretical reasons proffered for using one framework at the expense of another as the institutional possibilities that the terms alternately open and foreclose in varying contexts.

I do not ask the question about the end of sexual difference in order to make a plea for that end. I do not even propose to enumerate reasons why I think that framework, or that “reality,” depending on your take, is no longer worth pursuing. For many, I think, the structuring reality of sexual difference is not one that one can wish away or argue against, or even make claims about in any reasonable way. It is more like a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world. And those who seek to take issue with it are arguing with the very structure that makes their argument possible.

There is sometimes a laughing and dismissive response to the problem: you think that you might do away with sexual difference, but your very desire to do away with it is only further evidence of its enduring force and efficacy. Defenders of sexual difference make dismissive reference to the famous feminine “protest” elaborated by psychoanalysis, and in this way the protest is defeated before it is articulated. To challenge the notion of femininity is the consummately feminine act, a protest that can be read as evidence for that which it seeks to contest.

Sexual difference—is it to be thought of as a framework by which we are defeated in advance? Anything that might be said against it is oblique proof that it structures what we say. Is it there in a primary sense, haunting the primary differentiations or structural fate by which all signification proceeds?

Irigaray makes clear that sexual difference is not a fact, not a bedrock of any sorts, and not the recalcitrant “real” of Lacanian parlance. On the contrary, it is a question, a question for our times. As a question, it remains unsettled and unresolved, that which is not yet or not ever formulated in terms of an assertion. Its presence does not assume the form of facts and structures but persists as that which makes us wonder, which remains not fully explained and not fully explicable. If it is the question for our time, as she insists in
The Ethics
of Sexual Difference
,
¹
then it is not one question among others, but, rather, a particularly dense moment of irresolution within language, one that marks the contemporary horizon of language as our own.

Like Drucilla Cornell, Irigaray has in mind an ethics which is not one that follows
from
sexual difference but is a question that is posed by the very terms of sexual difference itself: how to cross this otherness?

How to cross it without crossing it, without domesticating its terms?

How to remain attuned to what remains permanently unsettled about the question?

Irigaray then would not argue for or against sexual difference but, rather, offer a way to think about the question that sexual difference poses, or the question that sexual difference
is
, a question whose irresolution forms a certain historical trajectory for us, those who find ourselves asking this question, those of whom this question is posed. The arguments in favor and against would be so many indications of the persistence of this question, a persistence whose status is not eternal, but one, she claims, that belongs to
these times
. It is a question that Irigaray poses of modernity, a question that marks modernity for her.

Thus, it is a question that inaugurates a certain problematic of time, a question whose answer is not forthcoming, a question that opens up a time of irresolution and marks that time of irresolution as our own.

I think for many of us it is a sad time for feminism, perhaps even a defeated time. A friend asked what I would teach in a feminist theory course right now, and I found myself suggesting that feminist theory has no other work than in responding to the places where feminism is under challenge. And by responding to those challenges, I do not mean a defensive shoring up of terms and commitments, a reminding of ourselves of what we already know, but something quite different, something like a submission to the demand for rearticulation, a demand that emerges from crisis. It makes no sense, I would argue, to hold fast to theoretical paradigms and preferred terminologies, to make the case for feminism on the basis of sexual difference, or to defend that notion against the claims of gender, the claims of sexuality, of race, or the umbrella claims of cultural studies. I begin with Irigaray because I think her invocation of sexual difference is something other than foundational. Sexual difference is not a given, not a premise, not a basis on which to build a feminism; it is not that which we have already encountered and come to know; rather, as
a question
that prompts a feminist inquiry, it is something that cannot quite be stated, that troubles the grammar of the statement, and that remains, more or less permanently, to interrogate.

When Irigaray refers to the question of sexual difference as a question for our times, she appears to refer to modernity. I confess to not knowing what modernity is, but I do know that many intellectuals are very worked up about the term, defending it or decrying it. Those who are considered at odds with modernity, or are considered postmodern, get characterized in the following way: one who “calls into question or debunks terms like reason, the subject, authenticity, universality, the progressive view of history.” What always strikes me about these kinds of generalizations is that “calling into question” is assumed to mean “debunk” (rather than, say, “revitalize”) and the status of the question itself is never given much intellectual play. If one calls such terms into question, does that mean that they cannot be used anymore? Does it mean that one is now prohibited from such a term by the superego of theoretical postmodernism or that they are proclaimed as exhausted and finished? Or is it simply that the terms do not function in quite the same way as they once did?

A few years ago, I had the occasion to discuss Leo Bersani’s book,
Homos
. I realized that he was no longer sure whether he could say that lesbians were women, and I found myself reassuring him that no one had issued a prohibition on the use of the word. I certainly have no qualms about using such terms and will reflect later in this essay on how one might continue
at the same time
to interrogate and to use the terms of universality. If the notion of the subject, for instance, is no longer given, no longer presumed, that does not mean that it has no meaning for us, that it ought no longer to be uttered. On the contrary, it means only that the term is not simply a building block on which we rely, an uninterrogated premise for political argument. On the contrary, the term has become an object of theoretical attention, something for which we are compelled to give an account. I suppose that this places me on the divide of the modern/postmodern in which such terms remain in play, but no longer in a foundational mode.

Others have argued that all the key terms of modernity are premised on the exclusion of women, of people of color, that they are wrought along class lines and with strong colonial interests. But it would also be important to add, following Paul Gilroy in
The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
, that the struggle against those exclusions very often ends up reappropriating those very terms from modernity, appropriating them precisely to initiate an entrance into modernity as well as the transformation of modernity’s parameters. Freedom comes to signify what it never signified before; justice comes to embrace precisely what could not be contained under its prior description.
²

In the same way that the terms of an exclusionary modernity have been appropriated for progressive uses, progressive terms can be appropriated for regressive aims. The terms that we use in the course of political movements which have been appropriated by the Right or for misogynist purposes are not, for that reason, strategically out of bounds. These terms are never finally and fully tethered to a single use.

The task of reappropriation is to illustrate the vulnerability of these often compromised terms to an unexpected progressive possibility; such terms belong to no one in particular; they assume a life and a purpose that exceed the uses to which they have been consciously put.

They are not to be seen as merely tainted goods, too bound up with the history of oppression, but neither are they to be regarded as having a pure meaning that might be distilled from their various usages in political contexts. The task, it seems, is to compel the terms of modernity to embrace those they have traditionally excluded, where the embrace does not work to domesticate and neutralize the newly avowed term; such terms should remain problematic for the existing notion of the polity, should expose the limits of its claim to universality, and compel a radical rethinking of its parameters. For a term to be made part of a polity that has been conventionally excluded is for it to emerge as a threat to the coherence of the polity, and for the polity to survive that threat without annihilating the term. The term would then open up a different temporality for the polity, establishing for that polity an unknown future, provoking anxiety in those who seek to patrol its conventional boundaries. If there can be a modernity without foundationalism, then it will be one in which the key terms of its operation are not fully secured in advance, one that assumes a futural form for politics that cannot be fully anticipated, a politics of hope and anxiety.

The desire to foreclose an open future can be a strong one, threatening one with loss, loss of a sense of certainty about how things are (and must be). It is important, however, not to underestimate the force of the desire to foreclose futurity and the political potential of anxiety.
³

This is one reason that asking certain questions is considered dangerous. Imagine the situation of reading a book and thinking, I cannot ask the questions that are posed here because to ask them is to introduce doubt into my political convictions, and to introduce doubt into my political convictions could lead to the dissolution of those convictions. At such a moment, the fear of thinking, indeed, the fear of the question, becomes moralized as the defense of politics. And politics becomes that which requires a certain anti-intellectualism. To remain unwilling to rethink one’s politics on the basis of questions posed is to opt for a dogmatic stand at the cost of both life and thought.

To question a term, a term like feminism, is to ask how it plays, what investments it bears, what aims it achieves, what alterations it undergoes. The changeable life of that term does not preclude its use.

If a term becomes questionable, does that mean it cannot be used any longer, and that we can only use terms that we
already know how to
master
? Why is it that posing a question about a term is considered the same as effecting a prohibition against its use? Why is it that we sometimes feel that if a term is dislodged from its foundational place, we will not be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves? What kind of guarantee does the foundational fix exercise, and what sort of terror does it forestall? Is it that in the foundational mode, terms are assumed, terms like the subject and universality, and the sense in which they “must” be assumed is a
moral
one, taking the form of an imperative, and like some moral interdictions, a defense against what terrifies us most? Are we not paralyzed by a kind of moral compulsion that keeps us from interrogating the terms, taking the risk of living the terms that we keep in question?
⁴