JUDITH
BUTLER "GENDER TROUBLE, FEMINIST THEORY AND PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE
(SYNOPSIS BY ROSEMARY PHILLIPS)
In this essay, Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse, Judith Butler opens by stating that within the terms of feminist theory it has been important to refer to the category of “woman” and to know what it is we mean. She continues by stating:
We tend to agree that women have been written out of the histories of culture and literature that men have written and that women have been silenced or distorted in the texts of philosophy, biology, and physics and that there is a group of embodied beings socially positioned as “women” who now, under the name of feminism, have something quite different to say. ( 324)
Butler notes that the question of being a woman is more complex than it appears since we refer not only to women as a “social category”( 324) but also as “a felt sense of self”( 324) and as a “culturally conditioned or constructed subjective identity”( 324). Butler points out the danger in women accepting the feminist claims made on their behalf ( descriptions of their oppression, their historical situation etc) which will make them discover a “common identity”(324) whether in their “relational attitudes, in their embodied resistance to abstract and objectifying modes of thought and experience, their felt sense of their bodies, their capacity for maternal identification or maternal thinking…”(324). Butler asks a key question “ does feminist theory need to rely on a notion of what it is fundamentally or distinctively to be a “woman”?( 324). Butler states: “The question becomes a crucial one when we try to answer what it is that characterizes the world of women that is marginalized, distorted or negates within various masculinist practices”( 324) . Butler asks another important question, the question whether there is a “specific femininity”(324) or a “specific set of values that have been written out of various histories and descriptions that can be associated with women as a group”(324), and whether the category of women maintains a meaning separate from the conditions of oppression against which it has been formulated. Butler states the danger of creating the category “women” and goes on to write that “When the category is understood as representing a set of values or dispositions, it becomes normative in character, and hence, exclusionary in principle”(325).
Butler points out that this move has created a theoretical and political problem and that :
… a variety of women from various cultural positions have refused to recognise themselves as “women” in the terms articulated by feminist theory with the result that these women fall outside the category and are left to conclude that (1 ) either they are not women as they have perhaps previously assumed or (2) the category reflects the restricted location of its theoreticians and, hence, fails to recognise the intersection of gender with race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and other currents which contribute to the formation of women from hegemonic cultural formations on the one hand and the internal critique of exclusionary effects of the category from within feminist discourse on the other…(325)
To Butler, feminist theorists are now confronted with the problem of either redefining and expanding the category of women itself to become more inclusive. Butler notes that Gayatri Spivak’s approach is to make the category of women universal so as to advance a feminist political program while at the same time acknowledging the shortcomings of this category - “that the multiplicity and discontinuity of the signified rebels against the univocity of the sign”( 325). Butler goes on to say that Julia Kristeva suggests something similar. Butler seeks the answer to whether there is another point of departure for feminist theory starting with a female subject who fails to represent the array of embodied beings culturally positioned as women.
Butler turns her attention to critically examine the formation of gendered identities in psychoanalysis. According to Butler, psychoanalytic theory “has occupied an ambiguous position in the feminist debate whether the category of women has a rightful place within feminist political discourse”(326). Butler notes that “On the one hand, Psychoanalysis has sought to identify the developmental moments in which gendered identity is acquired”(326) ( through the repression of desires in the unconscious), and on the other hand the feminists who come under Jacques Lacan have shown unconscious as having “tenuous ground of any and all claims to identity”(326). Butler states that according to Jacqueline Rose, psychoanalysis gives an account of patriarchal culture as a trans-historical and cross cultural force which therefore confirms to the feminist demand for a theory which can explain women’s subordination across specific cultures and different historical moments. Butler goes on to say “ As much as psychoanalytic theory provided feminist theory with a way to identify and fix gender difference through a metanarrative of shared infantile development, it also helped feminists show how the very notion or the subject is a masculine prerogative within the terms of culture”( 326). Butler notes that the paternal law which Lacanian psychoanalysis takes to be the ground of “all kinship and all cultural relations”(326) not only sanctions male subjects but “ institutes their very possibility through the denial of the feminine”( 326). Butler further explains that the male defines the woman as other, “ a mysterious and unknowable lack”( 326), a “sign of the forbidden and irrecoverable maternal body, or some unsavoury mixture of the above” ( 326).
Butler notes that according to Luce Irigary, the very construct of an autonomous subject is “a masculine cultural prerogative from which women have been excluded”( 326). Irigary goes on to say that the “subject” is always masculine which requires a “refusal of dependency”( 326) on the mother, the repression of its early and true helplessness, need and sexual desire for the mother and hence, the repudiation of the feminine. Irigary notes the construct of the subjects necessitates relations of hierarchy, exclusion and domination. She further states that “there can be no subject without an Other”( 326).
Butler points out that “ The destabilizing of the subject within the feminist criticism becomes a tactic in the exposure of masculine power and, in some French feminist contexts, the death of the subject spells the release or emancipation of the suppressed feminine sphere”(327).
In order to answer this option of the “death of the subject” Butler asks an important question: ”What constitutes the “who”, the subject , for whom feminism seeks emancipation? If there is no subject, who is left to emancipate?”
To Butler, we need to answer a more important question “whether oppression should be defined in terms of fragmentation of identity and whether fragmentation per se is oppressive”( 327). Butler examines the notion of the oppressed :
If oppression is to be defined in terms of a loss of autonomy by the oppressed, as well as a fragmentation or alienation within the psyche of the oppressed, then a theory which insists upon the inevitable fragmentation of the subject appears to reproduce and valorise the very oppression that must be overcome. ( 327)
Butler notes that clearly the category of woman is fragmented by class, colour, age, ethnic lines and that it is important to honour the diversity of this category “woman” rather than to reify it.
Butler goes on to say that “whether one begins with Freud’s postulation of primary bisexuality ( Juliet Mitchel and Jacqueline Rose) or with the primacy of object-relations( Chodorow, Benjamin), one tells a story that constructs a discrete gender identity and discursive location which remains relatively fixed.
Butler states: “ By grounding the metanarratives in a myth of the origin, the psychoanalytic description of gender confers a false sense of legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific and, in some contexts culturally oppressive version of gender identity” (329).
Within Object-Relations, according to Butler, there is a girl-mother identification which is called “founding” identification and the girl-brother and girl-father identifications are assimilated under the already firmly established gender identification with women. However, to Butler this cannot be a fixed definition since “Gender identities emerge and sexual desires shift and vary so that different “identifications” come into play depending upon the availability of legitimating cultural norms and opportunities” ( 331).
For Butler psychoanalysis used in the study of literature as feminist metatheory “reproduces that false coherence in the form of a story line about infantile development where it ought to investigate genealogically the exclusionary practices which condition that particular narrative of identity formation”( 332).
In psychoanalytic theory gender identity and sexual orientation are accomplished at once. According to Butler, the sexual development is quite complicated and quite different for the girl than the boy but there is an operative disjunction which remains stable throughout “ one identifies with one sex and in so doing, desires the other, that desire being the elaboration of that identity, the mode by which it creates its opposite and defines itself in that opposition” ( 332).
Butler looks at the notion of primary bisexuality mentioned by Freud which she believes is more of a “bi-sexedness of libidinal dispositions”( 332). She goes on to explain that there are male and female libidinal dispositions in every psyche which are directed heterosexually toward the opposite sexes. To Butler, bisexuality, after being relieved of its basis in the drive theory, finally reduces to two heterosexual desires so that, according to Butler “the desire can issue only from a male identification to a female object, and a female –identified to a male object” ( 333) . Butler notes that however it may be a woman, male identified, who desires another woman, or a man, female-identified, who desires another man, and it may also be a woman, male identified who desires a man, female identified (or similarly man, female identified who desires a woman, male identified). To Butler : “One either identifies with a sex or desires it, but only those two relations are possible” ( 333)
Butler points out that there is another set of possibilities which emerge within the psychoanalytic theory – not simply that identifications exist in a “mutually exclusive binary matrix conditioned by the cultural necessity of occupying one position to the exclusion of the other” (333). Butler further explains that “in fantasy, a variety of positions can be entertained even though they may not constitute culturally intelligible possibilities”( 333). Butler also notes that “The tenuousness of all identity is exposed through the proliferation of fantasies that exceed and contest the “identity” that forms the conscious sense of self” ( 333). Butler questions whether identity and fantasy are mutually exclusive especially taking into consideration the claim made by psychoanalytic theory that “identifications and, hence identity, are in fact constituted by fantasy”( 333) .
Butler goes on to point out that identification ( i.e. The girl to the mother ) is never simply mimetic but involves a strategy of wish fulfilment “one identifies not with an empirical person but with a fantasy, “the mother one wishes one had, the father one thought one had but didn’t” ( 334).
Butler notes that “fantasies condition and construct the specificity of the gendered subject…theses fantasies are themselves disciplinary productions of grounding cultural sanctions and taboos ”( 334). She notes that: “ If gender is constituted by identification and identification is invariably a fantasy within a fantasy, a double figuration, then gender is precisely the fantasy enacted by and through the corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations”( 334). Butler turns her attention to the importance of “the body” and notes that Foucault challenges the language of internalisation as it operates in the service of the repressive hypothesis.
Butler goes on to say “clearly Freud points to the incest taboo and the prior taboo against homosexuality”( 335) as “the generative moments of gender identity” ( 335). She notes that the moments in which gender becomes fixed and the disciplinary production of gender effects a “false stabalization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality” ( 335). In other words “the acquisition of gender identity is thus simultaneous with the accomplishment of coherent heterosexuality”( 335). Butler notes that “ The taboo against incest which presupposes and includes the taboo against homosexuality, works to sanction and produce identity at the same time that it is said to repress the very identity it produces”( 335).
Butler emphasises that this disciplinary production of gender effects a “false stabalization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality”(335). Butler goes on the say: “That the model seeks to produce and sustain coherent identities that it requires a heterosexual construction of sexuality in no way implies that practicing heterosexuals embody or exemplify this model with any kind of regularity”( 335) .
Butler emphasises the shortcomings of the feminist appropriation of psychoanalysis by suggesting that “the localization of identity in an interior psychic space… implies a an expressive model of gender whereby identity is first fixed internally and only subsequently manifest in some exterior way”( 336). However, she points out that “When gender identity is understood as causally or mimetically related to sex, then the order of appearance that governs gendered subjectivity is understood as one in which sex conditions gender, and gender determines sexuality and desire”( 336). Butler further exemplifies this by saying:
Acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organising principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence of identity that they otherwise purport to express becomes a fabrication manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. ( 336)
Butler adds that if the gendered body is “performative”( 336) this suggests that “it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitutes its reality”( 336). Butler goes on to say that “if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is a function of a decidedly public and social discourse”( 336) Butler calls it “ the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body”( 336). Butler goes on to say that “acts and gestures articulate and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organising gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purpose of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality”( 336-337).
Butler uses the example of drag which “fully subverts the distinction between “inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity”( 337) . Butler takes points from anthropologist Esther Newton who in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America , states “( drag) is a double inversion that says ‘appearance is an illusion’( 337). Newton goes on to say that drag says: “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine but my essence ‘inside’ ( the body ) is masculine” . This to Newton at the same times symbolises the opposite inversion : “my appearance ‘outside’ ( my body, my gender) is masculine but my essence inside is feminine”( 337). Butler notes that both claims to truth “contradict one another “( 337). To Butler, the notion of an “original”( 337) or “primary” gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practises of drag, cross-dressing and the sexual stylisation of butch/femme identities. [ butch ( masculine in appearance or behaviour, often aggressively or ostentatiously so) femme( a lesbian who takes a traditionally feminine sexual role) ]. Butler notes that within feminist theories such parodic identities have been regarded as either degrading to women ( as with the drag and cross-dressing , or “uncritical appropriation” ( 337) of sex-role stereotyping within the practice of heterosexuality particularly in the case of butch/femme lesbian identities. Butler finds that the relation between “imitation” and the “original” is “more complicated than the critique generally allows”( 337). Butler believes that these parodies give a clue to the way in which the relationship between primary identification, that is, the original meanings accorded to gender, and subsequent gender experience might be reframed. She notes that the performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. Butler states that we are actually in the presence of “three separate dimensions of significant corporeality: “anatomical sex, gender identity and gender performance”( 338). Butler gives an example of how these three dimensions undermine the “essential” gender by highlighting that it is a social construct :
If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct form the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance but between sex and gender and gender and performance. As much as drag creates a unified picture of “ woman” ( what its critics often oppose) it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself ( 338)
Butler continues by saying “In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalised by means of performance which avows their distinctness and dramatises the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity”( 338). Butler notes that “As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself”( 338). She states that in the place of an “original identification”( 338) which she says “serves as a determining
cause” ( 338), gender identity might be reconceived as:
a personal / cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations, and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or which parody the mechanism of that construction. ( 338)
Butler goes on to point out that if the construct of women presupposes a specificity and coherence that differentiates it from that of men, the categories of gender appear as an unproblematic point of departure for feminist politics. Butler goes on to point out the critique of Monique Witting who states that “sex” itself is a category produced in the interests of the heterosexual contract” ( 338). Butler notes that if we consider Foucualt’s suggestion that sex designates an artificial unity that works to maintain and amplify the regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain.
Butler emphasises the importance of understanding the “interests”( 339) that a given cultural identity has and more importantly the “interests and the power relations that establish that identity in its reified mode to begin with”( 339) Butler ends by stating
The fixity of gender
identification, its presumed cultural invariance, its status as an interior and
hidden cause may well serve the goals of the feminist project to establish
transhistorical commonality between us, but the “us” who gets joined through
such narration is a construction built upon the denial of a decidedly more
complex cultural identity…The psychological language which purports to
describe the interior fixity of our identities as men or women, works to enforce
a certain coherence and to foreclose convergences of gender identity in all
manner of dissonance- or where that exists, to relegate it to the early stages
of development, and hence normative history…it seems crucial to resist the
myth of interior origins, understood either as naturalized or culturally fixed.
Only then, gender coherence might be understood as the regulatory fiction it is-
rather than the common point of our liberation. ( 339)
Judith Butler:
An American theorist of gender identity. Butler interweaves postructuralism, feminism and queer theory in her work to argue that “heterosexuality” is a constructed political “fiction” and she calls for a new definition of gender. Butler draws on Foucault to describe how individuals are affected by ‘regimes’ of knowledge and how these sexual regimes are constructed around binary oppositions. ( Over against this repression, Butler suggests new possibilities: ‘performances’ of multiple gender representation which Butler does not describe as isolated ‘acts’ but as cultural phenomenon).
(dictionary of feminist theory) Maggie Humm
Jacques Lacan
French psychoanalyst whose contribution to feminist theory lies in: his idea that Freud’s hypotheses must be interpreted symbolically; his claim is that language structures the social subject; and his concept of the ‘mirror-phase’ . This latter concept replaces the ‘penis envy’ as a source of female identity with the idea that a subject knows itself when it perceives itself in a mirror. But in Lacan’s theory difference is foundational. The unconscious, like language, signifies by means of binary oppositions but difference in the guise of the Other controls the mind
Object Relations theory
A crucial paradigm of object relations theory is the primary attachment of infants and mothers. This paradigm, with its heavy stress on the value of the maternal, is attractive to feminist theory. Feminist psychoanalysis uses object relations theory to help it develop a causal account of gender difference. Gender differences originate in infantile developmental processes. Male and female infants have different struggles to separate from the mother. As a result men become objectifying personalities and women become relational because women are closer to their mothers.
Although critical of some principles of Freudian analysis, feminist psychoanalysis now uses object relations theory in relation Freudian theory to encourage women clients to better express their emotional demands.
Psychoanalysis
A term invented by Freud ( 1897) to refer to his theory of the psyche and the methods and techniques applied to understanding it. Second wave feminists challenged the content and definitions of psychoanalysis. They argued that psychoanalysis was inherently sexist because it implies biology over social relations and takes masculine characteristics as a psychoanalytic norm.
Postrucuralism
The French
postructuralist Michel Foucault was the leasing exponent in this kind of of
discourse analysis. His histories of the discourse of madness, medicine prisons
and sexuality have greatly influenced feminist theory. Feminist postructuralists
similarly attack the notion of fixed and unitary cultural identities, by
recovering, for example, hitherto underrepresented forms of the feminine(
Kristeva 1980, Iragaray 1977)
Dear Richard is the theme of the text Gender Trouble by ( Judith Butler)
all about her pointing out the importance of not stopping at the fact of the subconscious but the importance of socialisation and culture in the analysis of gender shaping ?
Richard does the statement below highlight the fact that even the psychoanalytical discourse on gender identity is part of a political discourse rather than dealing with the true feelings of the individual
“ The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “ core” precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity . It the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity ( 337)
can you please help me to understand this paragraph Please explain : (end of page 334)
Butler talks about Foucault
*( in the context of the prisoners ) the strategy has not been to enforce a repression of their desires but to compel their bodies to signify the prohibitive law as their ownmost essence, style necessity. That law is not internalised, but incorporates, with the consequence that bodies are produces which signify that law as the essence of their selves, the meaning of their soul, their conscience the law of their desire. In effect the law is at once fully manifest and fully latent, for it never appears as external to the bodies it subjects and subjectivates.
Please help me to understand this statement
For Foucault the soul is not imprisoned by the body, as some Christian imagery would suggest , but “ the body becomes a prisoner of the soul”( 335)
I cannot for the life of me understand this statement:
“ If gender is constituted by identification and identification is invariably a fantasy within a fantasy, a double figuration, then gender is precisely the fantasy enacted by and through the corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations( 334)
Please explain ( 335) at the bottom “indeed I would argue that in principle no one can embody this regulatory ideal at the same time that the compulsion to embody the fiction , to figure the body in accord with its requirements, is everywhere.
Please explain the meaning of topographical discourse (end of p. 333)
( Richard does the statement below highlight the fact that gender identity is part of a political discourse rather than dealing with the true feelings of the individual )
“ The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “ core” precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity. If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity ( 337)
Butler notes that
this very fantasy internal psychic space is essentially conditioned and mediated by language that regularly figures interior psychic locations of various kinds, a language, in other words, that not only produces that fantasy but then redescribes that figuration within an uncritically accepted topographical discourse. ( 333)
***Butler notes that the shortcomings of Lacanian theory is that it remains unclear what the changes the unconscious can provide and the rules constituting and regulating sexual difference with Lacanian ***terms reveal an immutability which “seriously challenges their usefulness for any theory of social and cultural transformation”( 329).
Foucault quote
( in the context of the prisoners ) the strategy has not been to enforce a repression of their desires but to compel their bodies to signify the prohibitive law as their ownmost essence. Butler points out that to *****Foucault The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, that lack produces the body as its other and its means of expression. In this sense the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such. ( 335)
Butler further exemplifies this point by stating, that according to Foucault the soul is not imprisoned by the body, as some Christian imagery would suggest , but “ the body becomes a prisoner of the soul”( 335)
Kristeva “the semiotic designates precisely those set of unconscious fantasies and wishes that exceed the legitimating bounds of paternally organised culture; the semiotic domain, the body’s subversive eruption into language
Butler notes:
The redescription of intrapsychic processes in terms of the surface politics of the body implies a corollary redescription of gender as the disciplinary production of the figures of gender fantasy through the play of presence and absence in the body’s surface, the construction of the gendered body through a series of exclusions and denials, signifying absences ( 335)