Undoing Gender (32 page)

Although it is clear that gender did become a rallying point for some feminist organizing at the 1995 UN conference, it became most tense as an issue that emerged when a Honduran women’s group objected to the appointment of an ultraconservative Christian delegation to represent the Honduran government at the September conference. Led by Oscar Rodriguez, the president of the Latin American Episcopal conference, the attempt to oppose a kind of feminism labeled as “Western” was opposed by grassroots movements within the country, including the vocal Women’s Rights Centre in Honduras.
¹⁴
The state apparatus thus in conjunction with the church appropriates an anticultural imperialist language in order to disempower women in its own country. Apart from claiming that Beijing was going to represent a feminism that was “a culture of death” and one that viewed “motherhood as slavery,” this still unnamed form of feminism also claimed that the concerns of the Beijing conference represent a false feminism. (The Vatican as well in its letter of apology for its own patriarchalism sought to distinguish between a feminism that remained committed to the essence of the dignity of women, and a feminism that would destroy maternity and destroy sexual difference.) Both Rodriguez and the Vatican took aim at “unnatural genders” as well, homosexuals and transsexuals. The Women’s Rights Centre (CDM) responded by pointing out that it was not interested in destroying maternity but was fighting for mothers to be free of abuse, and that the focus of the Beijing conference was not “unnatural genders,” but “the effects of structural adjustment plans on women’s economic status, and violence against women.”

Significantly, the Christian group representing Honduras was also vocally anti-abortion, drawing clear lines among so-called unnatural genders, the destruction of maternity, and the promotion of abortion rights.

In the platform language, gender was finally allowed to stay, but lesbian had to remain “in brackets.” Indeed, I saw some delegates in San Francisco preparing for the meetings by wearing tee shirts with “lesbian” in brackets. The brackets are, of course, supposed to signal that this is disputed language, that there is no agreement on the appropriate use of this term. Though they are supposed to relieve the word of its power, calling into question its admissability, they offer up the term as a diacritically compounded phrase, one which achieves a kind of hypervisibility by virtue of its questionability.

The term “lesbian” went from this bracketed form to being dropped from the language altogether. But the success of this strategy seemed only to stoke the suspicion that the term was reappearing at other linguistic sites: through the word gender, through the discourse of motherhood, through references to sexual autonomy, and even to the phrase “other status”—understood as a basis on which rights could be violated; “other status”—a status that could not be named directly, but which designated lesbians through the obliquity of the phrase: the status that is “other,” the one that is not speakable here, the one that has been rendered unspeakable here, the status that is not one.

Within the discursive frame of this international meeting, it seems crucial to ask what it is that occasions the linking of the inclusion of lesbian rights with the production of unnatural gender and the destruction of maternity as well as the introduction of a culture of death (presumably antilife, a familiar Rightist translation of what it is to be pro-choice). Clearly, those who would oppose lesbian rights on this basis (and there were others who oppose them on other bases), either assume that lesbians are not mothers or, if they are, they are nevertheless participating in the destruction of maternity. So be it.

Importantly, though, I think we see in this scene a number of issues simultaneously at play that are not easily separable from one another.

The presumption that gender is a code for homosexuality, that the introduction of lesbian is the introduction of a new gender, an unnatural one that will result in the destruction of maternity, and that is linked with feminist struggles for reproductive rights, is irreducibly homophobic and misogynist at once. Moreover, the argument, advanced by a church-state alliance, one that was echoed by the U.S. delegation as well, is that sexual rights are a western imposition was used most forcefully to debunk and contain the claims of the grassroots women’s movement in Latin America to represent women at the conference. Hence, we see an augmentation of church–state ideological power over the women’s movement precisely through the appropriation of an anti-imperialist discourse from such movements.

Over and against a church-state alliance that sought to rehabilitate and defend traditional ethnic purities in an effort to impede claims of sexual autonomy, an alliance emerged at the meetings between feminists seeking language supporting reproductive rights, rights to be free of abuse within marriage, and lesbian rights.

Significantly, the organizing at both conferences on the issue of sexual orientation did not, as the Vatican presumed it would, take cover behind the term “gender”; “sexual orientation,” for all its legal and medical strangeness as a term, and “lesbian” became the language that the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission sought to have included among the bases on which human rights violations against women can take place.

What does seem noteworthy, though, is that the UN conference did achieve consensus on language. The language is rhetorically important because it represents the prevailing international consensus on the issue and can be used by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies in various countries to advance policies that are consistent with the wording of paragraph 96 of the conference’s Platform for Action:

The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence. Equal relationships between women and men in matters of sexual relations and reproduction, including full respect for the integrity of the person, require mutual respect, consent and shared responsibility for sexual behavior and its consequences.

Lastly, it seems important to ask after the status of the UN language itself, a language that is supposed to be wrought of international consensus, not unanimity, one that is supposed to represent the consensus on what are universally acceptable claims, universally presumed rights. That what is permitted within the term “universal” is understood to be dependent on a “consensus” appears to undercut some of the force of universality itself, but perhaps not. The process presumes that what will and will not be included within the language of universal entitlement is not settled once and for all, that its future shape cannot be fully anticipated at this time. The UN deliberations became the site for the public ritual that articulates and rearticulates this consensus on what will be the limits of universality.

The meaning of “the universal” proves to be culturally variable, and the specific cultural articulations of “the universal” work against its claim to a transcultural status. This is not to say that there ought to be no reference to the universal or that it has become, for us, an impossibility. The bracketing of the universal only means that there are cultural conditions for its articulation that are not always the same, and that the term gains its meaning for us precisely through the decidedly less than universal cultural conditions of its articulation. This is a paradox that any injunction to adopt a universal attitude will encounter. For it may be that in one culture a set of rights are considered to be universally endowed, and that in another those very rights mark the limit to universalizability, that is, “if we grant those rights to those people we will be undercutting the foundations of the universal as we know it.” This has become especially clear to me in the field of lesbian and gay human rights where “the universal” is a contested term, and where various governments and various mainstream human rights groups voice doubt over whether lesbian and gay humans ought properly to be included in “the human,” and whether their putative rights fit within the existing conventions governing the scope of rights considered universal.

It is for me no surprise that the Vatican refers to the possible inclusion of lesbian rights as “anti-human.” Perhaps that is true. To admit the lesbian into the realm of the universal might be to undo the human, at least in its present form, but it might also be to imagine the human beyond its conventional limits.

Here the notion of universality is not a foundation upon which to build nor is it a presumption that allows us to proceed; it is a term that has become scandalous, threatening to include in the human the very “other” against which the human was defined. In this sense, in this more radical usage, “universality” works against and destroys the foundations that have become conventionally accepted as foundations. “Universality” becomes an antifoundationalism. To claim a set of rights as universal even when existing conventions governing the scope of universality preclude precisely such a claim is both to destroy a concept of the universal and to admit what has been its “constitutive outside,” in so doing performing the reverse of any act of assimilation to an
existing
norm. I would insist that such a claim runs the productive risk of provoking and demanding a radical rearticulation of universality itself, forcing the universal into brackets, as it were, into an important sense of unknowingness about what it is and what it might include in a future not fully determined in advance.

To be excluded from the universal, and yet to make a claim within its terms, is to utter a performative contradiction of a certain kind.

One might seem foolish and self-defeating, as if such a claim can only be met with derision; or the wager might work the other way, revising and elaborating historical standards of universality proper to the futural movement of democracy itself. To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the “not yet” is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains “unrealized” by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its
existing
formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the “who,” but who, nevertheless, demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. The excluded, in this sense, constitutes the contingent limit of universalization. This time around, the brackets fell from “lesbian” only to be consigned to “other status,” the status of what remains other to language as we speak it. It is this otherness by which the speakable is instituted, that haunts its boundaries, and that threatens to enter the speakable through substitutions that cannot always be detected. Although gender was not the means by which homosexuality entered the official UN language, sexual freedom did become such a term, a rubric that brought lesbians and heterosexual women together for a time, one which gave value to autonomy and refused a return to any notion of fated biology. That the sexual freedom of the female subject challenged the humanism that underwrites universality suggests that we might consider the social forms, such as the patriarchal heterosexual family, that still underwrite our “formal” conceptions of universality. The human, it seems, must become strange to itself, even monstrous, to reachieve the human on another plane. This human will not be “one,” indeed, will have no ultimate form, but it will be one that is constantly negotiating sexual difference in a way that has no natural or necessary consequences for the social organization of sexuality. By insisting that this will be a persistent and open question, I mean to suggest that we make no decision on what sexual difference is but leave that question open, troubling, unresolved, propitious.

Response to Rosi Braidotti’s
Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses
is Braidotti’s third large book in feminist theory, following
Patterns of Dissonance
and
Nomadic Subjects
. It is the first of two volumes, the second of which is forthcoming from Polity Press.

Before we enter the details of the book, let us consider what this work seeks to accomplish. It essays to bring together a Deleuzian perspective on the body and becoming, with a feminist perspective on sexual difference and the becoming of Woman; it undertakes a sustained work in the philosophical and cultural criticism of film and, in particular, the ways in which bodies, machines, and animals become intermixed under specific social conditions of production and consumption. It is, as well, not only a sustained defense of Irigaray, but a pedagogical effort to get readers of Irigaray to read her otherwise. The text also makes use, despite some Deleuzian protestations against a psychoanalytic perspective, of a psychoanalytic account of the subject that emphasizes the noncoincidence of the subject to its own psychic constitution, the persistence of the unconscious wish, and the cultural and social structuring of unconscious aims. The text also bespeaks a faith in the continuing use of psychoanalysis as a cure for certain orders of psychic suffering. If we thought before reading this text that bringing Deleuze and Lacan together would be difficult, or that subjecting both authors to a feminist reading that insists upon the primacy of sexual difference might be taxing, or that all this high theory would be difficult to bring together with a culturally savvy analysis of a number of popular films, we were doubtless right. But the text does achieve a certain syncretism of views, and this syncretic accomplishment is mobilized in the service of a theory of affirmation, one that not only seeks to counter the logics of negativity associated with Hegel, but that implies the possibility of an activism that does not rely upon a liberal ontology for the subject.

The text also offers a complex and knowing critique of technology, refusing recourse to a pretechnological past. Braidotti believes instead that a philosophical approach to the origin of life in sexual difference has concrete ethical implications for technological interventions in bodily and reproductive life. While embracing the breakdown among distinctions that humanism has supported among animal, human, and machine, Braidotti cautions us against thinking that we might produce and transform the body in
any and all
directions. Whereas transformation is the stated task of her text, and we might say that it is the event of this text, it would be wrong to think that nomadology, as Braidotti conceives it, or that the work of metamorphosis, of literally changing shape, is an infinite task, one that can take place without any limits. There are modes of transformation that work with and through the body, but there are others, in her view, that seek to overcome bodily life or exceed the parameters of bodily difference. These latter Braidotti opposes on ethical and political grounds. It suits the aims of phallogocentrism, for instance, to construe “transformation” as the overcoming of sexual difference, to use it as the occasion to reinstall masculinist forms of mastery and autonomy, and so to obliterate sexual difference and the specific symbolic domain—the specific symbolic future—of the feminine. Similarly, she opposes any capitulation to a technological remaking of the body that colludes with somatophobia, an effort to escape from bodily life altogether. (Difference and the body remain, for Braidotti, not only conditions of transformation, but the very vehicle and instrument of transformation, that without which transformation in the normative sense cannot take place.) Braidotti’s view of transformation not only establishes a relation to a certain philosophical inheritance but also constitutes one of the most significant dimensions of her own philosophical contribution. At once a theory of activism, or an activist theory, her account of embodiment works philosophically and politically at once, construing transformation in both of these ways at once. Whereas some critics of poststructuralism have maintained that there can be no “agency” without a located and unitary subject, Braidotti shows that activity, affirmation, and the very capacity to transform conditions are derived from a subject multiply constituted and moving in several directions. The line from Spinoza through Deleuze that Braidotti follows, which includes a certain reading of psychoanalysis and might also share some affinities with Nietzsche, argues that the will to live, the affirmation of life takes place through the play of multiplicity. The dynamic interaction of multiple effects brings forth transformation itself. For those who claim that a multiply constituted agent is diffuse or scattered, it should be said that for Braidotti multiplicity is a way of understanding the play of forces that work upon one another and that generate new possibilities of life.