Undoing Gender (37 page)

Here we can see that norms, which orient action toward the common good, and which belong to an “ideal” sphere, are not precisely social in Ewald’s sense. They do not belong to variable social orders, and they are not, in Foucault’s sense, a set of “regulatory ideals” and, hence, part of the ideal life of social power. On the contrary, they function as part of a reasoning process that conditions any and every social order, and which gives that order its coherence. We know, though, that Habermas would not accept the “ordered” characteristic of any social order as a necessary good. Some orders clearly ought to be disrupted, and for good reason. Indeed, the order of gender intelligibility may well qualify as one such order. But do we have a way to distinguish here between the function of the norm as socially integrative and the value of “integration” under oppressive social conditions? In other words, is there not an inherently conservative function of the norm when it is said to preserve order? What if the very order is exclusionary or violent? We might respond, with Habermas, and say that violence goes against the normative idealizations found functioning, implicitly, in everyday language. But if the norm is socially integrative, then how will the norm actually work to break up a social order whose “order” is purchased and maintained through violent means? Is the norm part of such a social order, or is it “social” only in a hypothetical sense, part of an “order” that is not instantiated in the social world as it is lived and negotiated?

If the Habermasian point is that we cannot hope to live in consensus or in common orientation without assuming such norms, is the “common” in this instance then not instituted precisely through the production of what is uncommon, through what is outside the common, or what disrupts it from within, or what poses a challenge to its integrity? What is the value of the “common”? Do we need to know that, despite our differences, we are all oriented toward the same conception of rational deliberation and justification? Or do we need precisely to know that the “common” is no longer there for us, if it ever was, and that the capacious and self-limiting approach to difference is not only the task of cultural translation in this day of multiculturalism but the most important way to nonviolence?

The point is not to apply social norms to lived social instances or to order and define them (as Foucault has criticized) nor is it to find justificatory mechanisms for the grounding of social norms that are extrasocial (even as they operate under the name of the “social”).

There are times when both of these activities do and must take place We level judgments against criminals for illegal acts and so subject them to a normalizing procedure; we consider our grounds for action in collective contexts and try to find modes of deliberation and reflection about which we can agree. But neither of these is all we do with norms. Through recourse to norms, the sphere of the humanly intelligible is circumscribed, and this circumscription is consequential for any ethics and any conception of social transformation. We might say, “we must know the fundamentals of the human in order to act in such a way that we preserve and promote human life as we know it.” But what if the very categories of the human have excluded those who should be operating within its terms, who do not accept the modes of reasoning and justifying “validity claims” that have been proffered by western forms of rationalism? Have we ever yet known the “human”?

What might it take to approach that knowing? Should we be wary of knowing it too soon? Should we be wary of any final or definitive knowing? If we take the field of the human for granted, then we fail to think critically—and ethically—about the consequential ways that the human is being produced, reproduced, deproduced. This latter inquiry does not exhaust the field of ethics, but I cannot imagine a “responsible” ethics or theory of social transformation operating without it.

Let me suggest here as a way of offering a closing discussion to this essay that the necessity of keeping our notion of the “human” open to a future articulation is essential to the project of a critical international human rights discourse and politics. We see this time and again when the very notion of the “human” is presupposed; it is defined in advance, and in terms that are distinctively western, very often American, and therefore parochial. The paradox emerges that the “human” at issue in human rights is already known, already defined, and yet it is supposed to be the ground for a set of rights and obligations that are international. How we move from the local to the international is a major question for international politics, but it takes a specific form for international feminism. And I would suggest to you that an antiimperialist or, minimally, nonimperialist conception of international human rights must call into question what is meant by the human, and learn from the various ways and means by which it is defined across cultural venues. This means that local conceptions of what is “human” or, indeed, of what the basic conditions and needs of human life are, must be subjected to reinterpretation, since there are historical and cultural circumstances in which the “human” is defined differently or resignified, and its basic needs and, hence, basic entitlements are also defined differently.

Resignification as Politics

Does “resignification” constitute a political practice, or does it constitute one part of political transformation? One might well say that politicians on the Right and the Left can use these strategies. We can surely see how “multiculturalism” has its right-wing and left-wing variants, how “globalization” has its right-wing and left-wing variants.

In the United States, the word “compassionate” has been linked to “conservative” and this struck many of us as an abomination of “resignification.” One can point out, with full justification, that National Socialism was a resignification of “socialism.” And that would be right. So it seems clear that resignification alone is not a politics, is not sufficient for a politics, is not enough. One can argue that the Nazis appropriated power by taking the language and concerns of democracy against itself, or that Haitian revolutionaries appropriated power by using the terms of democracy against those who would deny it. And so appropriation can be used by the Right and the Left, and there are no necessarily salutary ethical consequences for “appropriation.” There is the queer appropriation of “queer” and, in the United States, a rap appropriation of racist discourse, and the left-wing appropriation of “no big government” and on and on. So appropriation by itself leads to myriad consequences, some of which we might embrace, and some of which we might abhor. But if it does work in the service of a radical democratic politics, how might it work?

Does resignification work as a politics? I want to suggest here that as we extend the realm of universality, become more knowing about what justice implies, provide for greater possibilities of life—and “life” itself is a contested term, one which has its reactionary and progressive followers—we need to assume that our already established conventions regarding what is human, what is universal, what the meaning and substance of international politics might be, are not sufficient. For the purposes of a radical democratic transformation, we need to know that our fundamental categories can and must be expanded to become more inclusive and more responsive to the full range of cultural populations.

This does not mean that a social engineer plots at a distance how best to include everyone in his or her category. It means that the category itself must be subjected to a reworking from myriad directions, that it must emerge anew as a result of the cultural translations it undergoes.

What moves me politically, and that for which I want to make room, is the moment in which a subject—a person, a collective—asserts a right or entitlement to a livable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place.

One might hesitate and say, but there are fascists who invoke rights for which there are no prior entitlements. It cannot be a good thing to invoke rights or entitlements to what one considers a “livable life” if that very life is based on racism or misogyny or violence or exclusion. And I would, of course, agree with the latter. For example, prior to the overthrow of apartheid, some black South Africans arrived at the polling booths, ready to vote. There was at that time no prior authorization for their vote. They simply arrived. They performatively invoked the right to vote even when there was no prior authorization, no enabling convention in place. On the other hand, we might say that Hitler also invoked rights to a certain kind of life for which there was no constitutional or legal precedent, local or international. But there is a distinction between these two invocations, and it is crucial to my argument.

In both of these cases, the subjects in question invoked rights to which they were not entitled by existing law, though in both cases “existing law” had international and local versions that were not fully compatible with one another. Those who opposed apartheid were not restricted to existing convention (although they were, clearly, invoking and citing international convention against local convention in this case). The emergence of fascism in Germany, as well as the subsequent emergence of constitutional government in postwar Germany, was also not limited to existing convention. So both of those political phenomena involved innovation. But that does not answer the question: which action is right to pursue, which innovation has value, and which does not? The norms that we would consult to answer this question cannot themselves be derived from resignification. They have to be derived from a radical democratic theory and practice; thus, resignification has to be contextualized in that way. One must make substantive decisions about what will be a less violent future, what will be a more inclusive population, what will help to fulfill, in substantive terms, the claims of universality and justice that we seek to understand in their cultural specificity and social meaning. When we come to deciding right and wrong courses of action in that context, it is crucial to ask: what forms of community have been created, and through what violences and exclusions have they been created? Hitler sought to intensify the violence of exclusion; the anti-apartheid movement sought to counter the violence of racism and exclusion. That is the basis on which I would condemn the one, and condone the other. What resources must we have in order to bring into the human community those humans who have not been considered part of the recognizably human?

That is the task of a radical democratic theory and practice that seeks to extend the norms that sustain viable life to previously disenfranchised communities.

So I have concluded it seems with a call to extend the norms that sustain viable life; so let me consider the relation between norms and life, since that has been crucial to my inquiry thus far. The question of life is a political one, although perhaps not exclusively political. The question of the “right to life” has affected the debates on the legalization of abortion. Feminists who are in favor of such rights have been called “anti-life,” and they have responded by asking, “whose life?” And when does “life” begin? I think that if you were to canvas feminists internationally on the question of what life is or, perhaps more simply, when does life begin, you would have many different views. And that is why, considered internationally, not all women’s movements are united on this question. There is the question of when “life” begins, and then the question of when “human” life begins, when the “human” begins; who knows, who is equipped or entitled to know, whose knowledge holds sway here, whose knowledge functions as power here? Feminists have argued that the life of the mother should be equally important. Thus, it is a question of one life versus another. Feminists have argued that every child should be wanted, should have a chance at a livable life, and that there are conditions for life, which must first be met. The mother must be well; there must be a good chance of feeding the child; there must be some chance of a future, a viable and enduring future, since a human life with no futurity loses its humanness and stands a chance of losing its life as well.

We see the term “life” functioning within feminism, and between feminism and its opponents, as a site of contest, an unsettled term, one whose meanings are being proliferated and debated in different ways in the context of different nation-states with different religious and philosophical conceptions of the problem. Indeed, some of my opponents may well argue that if one takes as a paramount value the “extension of norms that support viable life,” it might follow, depending on your definitions, that the “unborn child” should be valued above all. This is not my view, and not my conclusion.

My argument against this conclusion has to do with the very use of “life” as if we know what it means, what it requires, what it demands. When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life. And so there are at least two senses of life, the one, which refers to the minimum biological form of living, and another, which intervenes at the start, which establishes minimum conditions for a livable life with regard to human life.
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And this does not imply that we can disregard the merely living in favor of the “livable life,” but that we must ask, as we asked about gender violence, what humans require in order to maintain and reproduce the conditions of their own livability. And what are our politics such that we are in whatever way possible, both conceptualizing the possibility of the livable life and arranging for its institutional support? There will always be disagreement about what this means, and those who claim that a single political direction is necessitated by virtue of this commitment will be mistaken.

But this is only because to live is to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future. But to assume responsibility for a future is not to know its direction fully in advance, since the future, especially the future with and for others, requires a certain openness and unknowingness. It also implies that a certain agonism and contestation will and must be in play. They must be in play for politics to become democratic.