Undoing Gender (34 page)

Mimesis

Braidotti reports her pleasure at finding at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London a work of art that contains the phrase, “ironic mimesis is not a critique.” I wonder whether the statement is true. Is the kind of critical mimesis that Luce Irigaray performs in
The
Speculum of the Other Woman
included under such a view? Does Braidotti want to dispense with the part of Irigaray that enters into the language of philosophy as its shadow, to infiltrate its terms, to manifest the occluded feminine, and to provide a disruptive writing that casts the self-grounding authority of masculinist philosophy into question? Why would not this kind of mimesis be critical? I think we make a mistake if we think that this kind of mimesis results only in a slave morality, accepting and fortifying the terms of authority. Irigaray does something else with those terms. She turns them; she derives a place for women when there was no place; she exposes the exclusions by which certain discourses proceed; and she shows that those sites of absence can be mobilized. The voice that emerges “echoes” the master discourse, but this echo nevertheless establishes that there is a voice, that some articulatory power has not been obliterated, and that it is mirroring the words by which its own obliteration was to have taken place.

Something is persisting and surviving, and the words of the master sound different when they are spoken by one who is, in the speaking, in the recitation, undermining the obliterating effects of his claim.

Anglo-European Divide

Braidotti argues that feminist theory in Europe has been subject to the hegemony of U.S. feminism, and I presume she is referring to white women’s theory as well. For her, it is important to defend a European feminism in order to engage with key issues, including immigration, new European racisms, the ethics of reproductive technology, and the politics of the environment, to name a few. It is notoriously difficult for U.S. feminists and theorists more generally to take account of their first-world privilege in ways that do not resolve into self-aggrandizing guilt or histrionic efforts at self-effacement. Theory emerges from location, and location itself is under crisis in Europe, since the boundaries of Europe are precisely what is being contested in quarrels over who belongs to the European Union and who does not, on rules regarding immigration (especially in Belgium, France, the Netherlands), the cultural effects of Islamic communities, of Arab and North African populations. I am an American, but I am trained in European philosophy.

Only decades ago, I was part of a family that understood itself as European Jews, and I grew up with older adults speaking several languages I did not understand and English in heavy accents. When I went to Germany to study German Idealism, my grandmother considered that I was “returning” to where I belonged, and that this was a good and proper thing. Her brothers were schooled in Prague, and she knew there was a German-Jewish intellectual heritage. I still spend too many Sundays reading Benjamin and Scholem, and it may be that this inheritance (one that can be traced through Derrida) is more important to me than American sociology and anthropology. I listen to Braidotti speak in English, knowing that Italian was her first language (even though she lived in Australia for many years), and I am aware that her English is quicker than mine. When I reflect upon it, I would wager she has more friends in the American feminist community than I do.

My German is not too bad, and I spend more time arguing with Habermasians than most people would believe. There is a transatlantic exchange at work between us: we both cross over. Braidotti has helped to show us what this process is, and how the multiple locations that we inhabit produce new sites for transformation. Can we then return to the bipolar distinction between European and American with ease?

The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have clearly produced a longing for the European Left among many progressive Americans, even though this longing in its naïve form tends to forget the resurgence of national sovereignty and the pervasive institutional racism against new immigrants that mire Europe at this time. Doubtless, however, one needs the distinction between European and American in order to mark the hegemonic functioning of the American scene within feminism. But it is perhaps more important at this time to consider the feminisms that are left out of that picture, those that emerge from subaltern localities, from “developing” countries, the southern hemisphere, Asia, and from new immigrant communities within the United States and Europe alike.

If American feminism signals a preoccupation with gender, then it would seem that “American” is allied with the sociological, the theory of social construction, and that the doctrine of difference risks losing its salience. But perhaps the most important task is to think through the debates on the body, since it may or may not be true that cultural construction effaces both sexual difference and bodily process.

If the “drive” is the convergence of culture and biology, then it would seem that the “drive” holds out the possibility for a productive exchange between those who speak in the name of the body and those who speak in the name of culture. And if difference is not code for heterosexual normativity, then surely it needs to be articulated so that difference is understood as that which disrupts the coherence of any postulation of identity. If the new gender politics argues against the idealization of dimorphism, then does it argue against the primacy of sexual difference itself? And if technologies of the body (surgical, hormonal, athletic) generate new forms of gender, is this precisely in the service of inhabiting a body more fully or does it constitute a perilous effacement? It seems crucial to keep these questions open so that we might work theoretically and politically in broad coalitions. The lines we draw are invitations to cross over and that crossing over, as any nomadic subject knows, constitutes who we are.

10. The Question of Social Transformation

Feminism is about the social transformation of gender relations.

Probably we could all agree on that, even if “gender” is not the preferred word for some. And yet the question of the relationship between feminism and social transformation opens up onto a difficult terrain. It should be obvious, one would think, but something makes it obscure. Those of us to whom this question is posed are asked to make clear what we already assume, but which is not at all to be taken for granted. We may imagine social transformation differently. We may have an idea of the world as it would be, or should be, transformed by feminism. We may have very different ideas of what social transformation is, or what qualifies as a transformative exercise. But we must also have an idea of how theory relates to the process of transformation, whether theory is itself transformative work that has transformation as one of its effects.

In what follows, I will argue that theory is itself transformative, so I will state that in advance. But one must also understand that I do not think theory is sufficient for social and political transformation.

Something besides theory must take place, such as interventions at social and political levels that involve actions, sustained labor, and institutionalized practice, which are not quite the same as the exercise of theory. I would add, however, that in all of these practices, theory is presupposed. We are all, in the very act of social transformation, lay philosophers, presupposing a vision of the world, of what is right, of what is just, of what is abhorrent, of what human action is and can be, of what constitutes the necessary and sufficient conditions of life.

There are many questions that form the various foci of feminist research, and I would not want to identify any one of them as the essential or defining focus. I would say, however, that the question of life is in some ways at the center of much feminist theory and, in particular, feminist philosophy. The question about life might be posed in various ways: What is the good life? How has the good life been conceived such that women’s lives have not been included in its conceptualization? What would the good life be for women? But perhaps there is, prior to these questions, all of which are important questions, another question: the question of survival itself. When we consider what feminist thought might be in relation to survival, a different set of questions emerges: Whose life is counted as a life? Whose prerogative is it to live? How do we decide when life begins and ends, and how do we think life against life? Under what conditions should life come into being, and through what means? Who cares for life as it emerges?

Who tends for the life of the child? Who cares for life as it wanes? Who cares for the life of the mother, and of what value is it ultimately? And to what extent does gender, coherent gender, secure a life as livable?

What threat of death is delivered to those who do not live gender according to its accepted norms?

That feminism has always thought about questions of life and death means that feminism has always, to some extent and in some way, been philosophical. That it asks how we organize life, how we accord it value, how we safeguard it against violence, how we compel the world, and its institutions, to inhabit new values, means that its philosophical pursuits are in some sense at one with the aim of social transformation.

It would be easier if I could lay out what I think the ideal relation between genders should be, what gender, as a norm and as an experience, should be like, in what equality and justice would consist. It would be easier. You would then know the norms that guide my thinking, and you could judge whether or not I have achieved the aims that I have set out for myself. But matters are not so easy for me. My difficulty will emerge not out of stubbornness or a will to be obscure. It emerges simply out of the doubled truth that although we need norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us and which, for reasons of social justice, we must oppose. There is perhaps a confusion here, since many will say that the opposition to violence must take place
in the name
of the norm
, a norm of nonviolence, a norm of respect, a norm that governs or compels the respect for life itself. But consider that normativity has this double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the aims and aspirations that guide us, the precepts by which we are compelled to act or speak to one another, the commonly held presuppositions by which we are oriented, and which give direction to our actions. On the other hand, normativity refers to the process of normalization, the way that certain norms, ideas and ideals hold sway over embodied life, provide coercive criteria for normal “men” and “women.” And in this second sense, we see that norms are what govern “intelligible” life, “real” men and “real” women. And that when we defy these norms, it is unclear whether we are still living, or ought to be, whether our lives are valuable, or can be made to be, whether our genders are real, or ever can be regarded as such.

A good Enlightenment thinker will simply shake her head and say that if one objects to normalization, it is in the name of a different norm that one objects. But that critic would also have to consider what the relationship is between normalization and normativity. Since it may be that when we talk about what binds us humans, and what forms of speech or thinking we seek in an effort to find a common bond, that we are, inevitably, seeking recourse to socially instituted relations, ones that have been formed over time, and which give us a sense of the “common” only by excluding those lives which do not fit the norm.

In this sense, we see the “norm” as that which binds us, but we also see that the “norm” creates unity only through a strategy of exclusion.

It will be necessary for us to think through this problem, this doubleness of the norm. But in this essay, I would like to start first by asking about the kind of norms that govern gender, and to ask, in particular, how they constrain and enable life, how they designate in advance what will and will not be a livable existence.

I would like to proceed with this first task through a review of
Gender Trouble
, the text in which I originally offered my theory of gender. I would like to consider this theory of gender explicitly in terms of the questions of violence, and the possible transformation of the scene of gender violence into a future of social survival. Second, I would like to consider this double nature of the norms, showing how we cannot do without them, and how we do not have to assume that their form is given or fixed. Indeed, even if we cannot do without them, it will be seen that we also cannot accept them as they are.

I would like to pursue this paradox toward the end of my remarks in order to elucidate what I take to be the political stakes of feminist theory.

Gender Trouble
and the Question of Survival

When I wrote this text, I was several years younger than I am today, and I was without a secure position in the academy. I wrote it for a few friends of mine, and I imagined maybe one or two hundred people might read it. I had two aims at the time: the first was to expose what I took to be a pervasive heterosexism in feminist theory; the second was to try to imagine a world in which those who live at some distance from gender norms, who live in the confusion of gender norms, might still understand themselves not only as living livable lives, but as deserving a certain kind of recognition. But let me be more honest than that. I wanted something of gender trouble to be understood and accorded dignity, according to some humanist ideal, but I also wanted it to disturb—fundamentally—the way in which feminist and social theory think gender, and to find it exciting, to understand something of the desire that gender trouble is, the desire it solicits, the desire it conveys.

So let me consider these two points again, since they have both changed in my mind, and as a result, they compel me to rethink the question of change.