Undoing Gender (35 page)

In the first instance: feminist theory. What did I understand its heterosexism to be, and how do I now understand it? At the time, I understood the theory of sexual difference to be a theory of heterosexuality.

And I also understood French feminism, with the exception of Monique Wittig, to understand cultural intelligibility not only to assume the fundamental difference between masculine and feminine, but to reproduce it. The theory was derived from Lévi-Strauss, from Lacan, from Saussure, and there were various breaks with those masters that one could trace. After all, it was Julia Kristeva who said that Lacan made no room for the semiotic and insisted on offering that domain not only as a supplement to the symbolic, but as a way of undoing it. And it was Cixous, for instance, who saw feminine writing as a way of making the sign travel in ways that Lévi-Strauss could not imagine at the end of
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
. And it was Irigaray who imagined the goods getting together, and even implicitly theorized a certain kind of homoerotic love between women when those lips were entangled to the extent that one couldn’t tell the difference between the one and the other (and where not being able to tell the difference was not equivalent to “being the same”). The “high” at the time was to see that these French feminists had entered into a region considered fundamental to language and to culture to make an assertion that language came into being through sexual difference. The speaking subject was, accordingly, one who emerged in relation to the duality of the sexes, and that culture, as outlined by Lévi-Strauss, was defined through the exchange of women, and that the difference between men and women was instituted at the level of elementary exchange, an exchange which forms the possibility of communication itself.

To understand the exhilaration of this theory for those who were working within it, and for those who still do, one has to understand the sea-change that took place when feminist studies turned from being the analysis of “images” of women in this or that discipline or sphere of life to being an analysis of sexual difference at the foundation of cultural and human communicability. Suddenly, we were fundamental.

Suddenly, no human science could proceed without us.

And not only were we fundamental, we were changing that foundation. There was a new writing, a new form of communicability, a challenge to the kinds of communicability that were fully constrained by a patriarchal symbolic. And there were also new ways for women as the gifts to be getting together, new modes, poetic modes, of alliance and cultural production. We had as it were the outlines of the theory of patriarchy before us, and we were also intervening in it, to produce new forms of intimacy, alliance, and communicability that were outside of its terms, but were also contesting its inevitability, its totalizing claim.

So it sounded rather good, but it did produce some problems for many of us. In the first place, it seemed that the model of culture, both in its patriarchal and feminist mode, assumed the constancy of sexual difference, and there were those of us for whom gender trouble was the contestation of sexual difference itself. There were many who asked whether they were women, and some asked it in order to become included in the category, and some asked it in order to find out whether there were alternatives to being in the category. In
“Am I That Name?”

Denise Riley wrote that she did not want to be exhausted by the category, but Cherríe Moraga and others were also beginning to theorize butch–femme categories, which called into question whether the kinds of masculinities at stake for a butch were always determined by an already operative sexual difference, or whether they were calling sexual difference into question.
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Femmes posed an important question: was this a femininity defined in relation to a masculinity already operative in the culture, part of a normative structure that could not be changed, or was this the challenge to that normative structure, a challenge from within its most cherished terms? What happens when terms such as butch and femme emerge not as simple copies of heterosexual masculinity and heterosexuality femininity, but as expropriations that expose the nonnecessary status of their assumed meanings? Indeed, the widely cited point that
Gender Trouble
made was the following: that categories like butch and femme were not copies of a more originary heterosexuality, but they showed how the so-called originals, men and women within the heterosexual frame, are similarly constructed, performatively established. So the ostensible copy is not explained through reference to an origin, but the origin is understood to be as performative as the copy.

Through performativity, dominant and nondominant gender norms are equalized. But some of those performative accomplishments claim the place of nature or claim the place of symbolic necessity, and they do this only by occluding the ways in which they are performatively established.

I’ll return to the theory of performativity, but for now, let me explain how my account of this particular rift between high structuralist feminist theory and poststructuralist gender trouble has become reformulated for me.

In the first instance, at work in my exposition of this transition from sexual difference to gender trouble, or indeed, from sexual difference to queer theory (which is not the same, since “gender trouble” is but a moment of queer theory), there is a slippage between sexual difference as a category that conditions the emergence into language and culture, and gender as a sociological concept, figured as a norm.

Sexual difference is not the same as the categories of women and men.

Women and men exist, we might say, as social norms, and they are, according to the perspective of sexual difference, ways in which sexual difference has assumed content. Many Lacanians, for instance, argued with me that sexual difference has only a formal character, that nothing follows about the social roles or meanings that gender might have from the concept of sexual difference itself. Indeed, some of them evacuate sexual difference of every possible semantic meaning, allying it with the structural possibility for semantics, but having no proper or necessary semantic content. Indeed, they even argue that the possibility of critique emerges when one comes to understand how sexual difference has not only become concretized in certain cultural and social instances, but how it has become reduced to its instance, since this constitutes a fundamental mistake, a way of foreclosing the fundamental openness of the distinction itself.

So this is one way of answering me, and it comes from the formalist Lacanians: Joan Copjec and Charles Shepherdson, but also Slavoj Zˇizˇek. But there is a stronger feminist argument that implicitly or explicitly takes issue with the trajectory I have laid out. It is articulated most buoyantly, most persuasively, perhaps by Rosi Braidotti whose most recent work I consider as part of the chapter, “The End of Sexual Difference?” in this book.
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I think the argument goes something like this: we must maintain the framework of sexual difference because it brings to the fore the continuing cultural and political reality of patriarchal domination, because it reminds us that whatever permutations of gender take place, they do not fully challenge the framework within which they take place, for that framework persists at a symbolic level that is more difficult to intervene upon. Critics such as Carol Anne Tyler argued, for instance, that it will always be different for a woman to enter into transgressive gender norms than it will be for a man, and that
Gender Trouble
does not distinguish strongly enough between these very different positions of power within society.

Others suggest that the problem has to do with psychoanalysis, and with the place and meaning of oedipalization. The child enters desire through triangulation, and whether or not there is a heterosexual pair who are functioning as the parents, the child will still locate a paternal and maternal point of departure. This heterosexual dyad will have symbolic significance for the child and become the structure through which desire is given form.

In a sense, there are important alternatives to be thought together here. I am not suggesting that they can or should be reconciled. It may be that they stand in a necessary tension to one another, and that this necessary tension now structures the field of feminist and queer theory, producing their inevitable tension and necessitating the contentious dialogue between them. It is important to distinguish among theorists of sexual difference who argue on biological grounds that the distinction between the sexes is necessary (Barbara Duden, the German feminist, tends to do this
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), and those who argue that sexual difference is a fundamental nexus through which language and culture emerge (the structuralists and the non-gender-troubled poststructuralists do this). But then there is a further distinction. There are those who only find the structuralist paradigm useful because it charts the continuing power differential between men and women in language and society and gives us a way of understanding how deeply it functions in establishing the symbolic order in which we live. Among the latter, I think, there is a difference still between those who consider that symbolic order inevitable, and so ratify patriarchy as an inevitable structure of culture, and those who think that sexual difference is inevitable and fundamental, but that its form as patriarchal is contestable. Rosi Braidotti belongs to the latter. One can see why I have had such useful conversations with her.

The problem arises when we try to understand whether sexual difference is necessarily heterosexist. Is it? Again, it depends on which version you accept. If you claim that oedipalization presupposes heterosexual parenting or a heterosexual symbolic that exceeds whatever parenting arrangement—if there is one at work—then the matter is pretty much closed. If you think that oedipalization produces heterosexual desire, and that sexual difference is a function of oedipalization, then it seems that the matter is closed again. And there are those, such as Juliet Mitchell, who are presently troubled by this issue, even though she is the one who, in
Psycho-analysis and Feminism
, declared the patriarchal symbolic order not to be a changeable set of rules but to be “primordial law” (370).

I take the point that the sociological concepts of gender, understood as women and men, cannot be reducible to sexual difference. But I worry still, actively, about understanding sexual difference as operating as a symbolic order. What does it mean for such an order to be symbolic rather than social?
⁴
And what happens to the task of feminist theory to think social transformation if we accept that sexual difference is orchestrated and constrained at a symbolic level? If it is symbolic, is it changeable? I ask Lacanians this question, and they usually tell me that changes in the symbolic take a long, long time. I wonder how long I will have to wait. Or they show me a few passages in what is called the Rome Discourse, and I wonder if these passages are the ones to which we are supposed to cling for hope that things might eventually change. Moreover, I’m compelled to ask, is it really true that sexual difference at the symbolic level is without semantic content? Can it ever be? And what if we have indeed done nothing more than abstracted the social meaning of sexual difference and exalted it as a symbolic and, hence, presocial structure? Is that a way of making sure that sexual difference is beyond social contestation?

One might wonder after all of this why I want to contest sexual difference at all, but the abiding assumption of my earlier gender theory was that gender is complexly produced through identificatory and performative practices, and that gender is not as clear or as univocal as we are sometimes led to believe. My effort was to combat forms of essentialism which claimed that gender is a truth that is somehow there, interior to the body, as a core or as an internal essence, something that we cannot deny, something which, natural or not, is treated as given. The theory of sexual difference makes none of the claims that natural essentialism does. At least one version of sexual difference argued that it was the “difference” in every identity that precludes the possibility of a unified category of identity. There were, in this regard, at least two different kinds of challenges that
Gender Trouble
needed to meet, and I see now that I needed to separate the issues and hope that I have begun to do that in my subsequent work. Nevertheless, I still worry that the frameworks we commit ourselves to because they describe patriarchal domination well and may well recommit us to seeing that very domination as inevitable or as primary, more primary in fact than other operations of differential power. Is the symbolic eligible for social intervention? Does sexual difference really remain other to its instituted form, the dominant one being heterosexuality itself?

What was it I imagined? And how has the question of social transformation and politics changed in the interim?

Gender Trouble
ends with a discussion of drag, and the final chapter is in fact called “From Parody to Politics.” A number of critics have scrutinized that chapter in order to resolve the transition: how do we get from parody to politics? There are those who think that the text has belittled politics and reduced politics to parody; some claim that drag becomes a model for resistance or for political intervention and participation more generally. So let us reconsider this controversial closure, a text I probably wrote too quickly, a text whose future I did not anticipate at the time.

Why drag? Well, there are biographical reasons, and you might as well know that in the United States the only way to describe me in my younger years was as a bar dyke who spent her days reading Hegel and her evenings, well, at the gay bar, which occasionally became a drag bar. And I had some relatives who were, as it were, in the life, and there was some important identification with those “boys.” So I was there, undergoing a cultural moment in the midst of a social and political struggle. But I also experienced in that moment a certain implicit theorization of gender: it quickly dawned on me that some of these so-called men could do femininity much better than I ever could, ever wanted to, ever would. And so I was confronted by what can only be called the transferability of the attribute. Femininity, which I understood never to have belonged to me anyway, was clearing belonging elsewhere, and I was happier to be the audience to it, have always been very happier to be its audience than I ever was or would be being the embodiment of it. (This does not mean, by the way, that I am therefore disembodied, as some rather mean-spirited critics have said or implied.) Indeed, whether we follow the framework of sexual difference or that of gender trouble, I would hope that we would all remain committed to the ideal that no one should be forcibly compelled to occupy a gender norm that is undergone, experientially, as an unlivable violation. We might argue theoretically about whether social categories, imposed from elsewhere, are always “violations” in the sense that they are, at first and by necessity, unchosen. But that does not mean that we have lost the capacity to distinction between enabling violations and disabling ones. When gender norms operate as violations, they function as an interpellation that one refuses only by agreeing to pay the consequences: losing one’s job, home, the prospects for desire, or for life. There is also a set of laws, criminal and psychiatric codes for which, still, imprisonment and incarcertion are possible consequences. Gender dysphoria can be used in many countries still to deny employment or to take away one’s child. The consequences can be severe. It won’t do to call this merely play or fun, even if those constitute significant moments. I don’t mean to say that gender is not sometimes play, pleasure, fun, and fantasy; it surely is. I only mean to say that we continue to live in a world in which one can risk serious disenfranchisement and physical violence for the pleasure one seeks, the fantasy one embodies, the gender one performs.