My self-understanding has evolved with the theory I’ve read and the therapy I’ve done. I was exposed to CRT and Judith Butler in high school. I’ve written a little bit about my experience with Gender Trouble here.
When trans issues became more prominent I started bickering about them with my ex, who spent a lot of time on Tumblr. I was baffled, because I’d read Gender Trouble, and I didn’t think the trans movement made any sense. My intuition matched “TERFs”, where my understanding was that gender norms are constructed as part of an oppressive system, so we should deconstruct and get rid of them, perhaps replacing masculinity and femininity with gender-neutral virtues that anyone can aspire to.
As part of therapy in my 30s, I read new things, including Frantz Fanon, mixed-race studies, and Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin became an instant favorite. I didn’t really see her as conflicting with the idea of gender as performance, because she emphasized the “sex class system.” The political goal is to stop eroticizing dominance, submission, and objectification. The third wave refocusing on gender…was kinda backing away from the core of things.
Therefore, if masculinity and femininity are defined by the patriarchy to regulate reproduction, and the meanings inherently include notions of violence and inferiority, then it makes no sense that IDENTIFYING with them is the way forward.
But the trans movement claims Judith Butler as one of its most ardent supporters. My knowledge of Butler stops with Gender Trouble, which I read 20 years ago, and whatever criticisms Mari Ruti has made in her books. I recently saw this interview:
CW: What, if anything, would you like trans people to take from your work?
JB: Gender Trouble was written about 24 years ago, and at that time I did not think well enough about trans issues. Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person’s felt sense of gender was therefore “unreal.” That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported. I did not mean to argue that gender is fluid and changeable (mine certainly is not). I only meant to say that we should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world.
In other words, she’s respecting the party line and doesn’t want to dispute anyone’s “born in the wrong body, I know my inner gender so I need to transition” narratives.
So what did Gender Trouble actually say? Well…I thought about re-reading it, and it’s just too tedious and annoying. What I DID have patience for is re-reading the preface to the 1999 edition and the conclusion, to compare to the modern trans movement. What do I think of it now, as an adult?
In 1989 I was most concerned to criticize a pervasive heterosexual assumption in feminist literary theory. I sought to counter those views that made presumptions about the limits and propriety of gender and restricted the meaning of gender to received notions of masculinity and femininity. It was and remains my view that any feminist theory that restricts the meaning of gender in the presuppositions of its own practice sets up exclusionary gender norms within feminism, often with homophobic consequences. It seemed to me, and continues to seem, that feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion. In particular, I opposed those regimes of truth that stipulated that certain kinds of gendered expressions were found to be false or derivative, and others, true and original. The point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text. Rather, the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized. One might wonder what use “opening up possibilities” finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is “impossible,” illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.
The goal is basically sensible: people should be free to behave in nonstandard ways if they feel like it. Today, I see that she’s making an assumption that we NEED “gender identity”, that it has purpose and necessity beyond the patriarchy. She takes it as given, rather than seeing it as a concept derived from patriarchy. Do we need to build gender on top of sex?
The idea that sexual practice has the power to destabilize gender emerged from my reading of Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and sought to establish that normative sexuality fortifies normative gender. Briefly, one is a woman, according to this framework, to the extent that one functions as one within the dominant heterosexual frame and to call the frame into question is perhaps to lose something of one’s sense of place in gender. I take it that this is the first formulation of “gender trouble” in this text. I sought to understand some of the terror and anxiety that some people suffer in “becoming gay,” the fear of losing one’s place in gender or of not knowing who one will be if one sleeps with someone of the ostensibly “same” gender.This constitutes a certain crisis in ontology experienced at the level of both sexuality and language. This issue has become more acute as we consider various new forms of gendering that have emerged in light of transgenderism and transsexuality, lesbian and gay parenting, new butch and femme identities. When and why, for instance, do some butch lesbians who become parents become “dads” and others become “moms”?
Times have changed!
Today, I think if someone is gay…they’re just gay, and everyone knows what that is, and there’s gay marriage now. In 1999, a butch dad was still a lesbian, and there was a distinction between transgender and transsexual. Certainly, “trans women are women” wasn’t a thing yet:
What about the notion, suggested by Kate Bornstein, that a transsexual cannot be described by the noun of “woman” or “man,” but must be approached through active verbs that attest to the constant transformation which “is” the new identity or, indeed, the “in-betweenness” that puts the being of gendered identity into question? Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with “being a man,” others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.
Butler quotes MacKinnon, radfem:
Stopped as an attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women.
It makes sense to me. Butler’s commentary does not:
In this view, sexual hierarchy produces and consolidates gender. It is not heterosexual normativity that produces and consolidates gender, but the gender hierarchy that is said to underwrite heterosexual relations. If gender hierarchy produces and consolidates gender, and if gender hierarchy presupposes an operative notion of gender, then gender is what causes gender, and the formulation culminates in tautology. It may be that MacKinnon wants merely to outline the self-reproducing mechanism of gender hierarchy, but this is not what she has said.
To me, this reads like Butler simply doesn’t understand the concepts of patriarchy or the distinction between gender and sex. Obviously, you can establish a hierarchy of the sexes and invent cultural norms to preserve that hierarchy. It’s easier to control the women if they think they’re born submissive and reject their own anger. Is this really so complicated that Judith Butler couldn’t understand it and had to use the word “tautology?”
To what extent is the whole trans movement a reflection of Judith Butler’s personal difficulty keeping the concepts of sex and gender distinct? She backslides into using them interchangeably.
Katherine Franke, a contemporary legal theorist, makes innovative use of both feminist and queer perspectives to note that by assuming the primacy of gender hierarchy to the production of gender, MacKinnon also accepts a presumptively heterosexual model for thinking about sexuality. Franke offers an alternative model of gender discrimination to MacKinnon’s, effectively arguing that sexual harassment is the paradigmatic allegory for the production of gender. Not all discrimination can be understood as harassment. The act of harassment may be one in which a person is “made” into a certain gender. But there are others ways of enforcing gender as well. Thus, for Franke, it is important to make a provisional distinction between gender and sexual discrimination. Gay people, for instance, may be discriminated against in positions of employment because they fail to “appear” in accordance with accepted gendered norms. And the sexual harassment of gay people may well take place not in the service of shoring up gender hierarchy, but in promoting gender normativity.
Whereas MacKinnon offers a powerful critique of sexual harassment, she institutes a regulation of another kind: to have a gender means to have entered already into a heterosexual relationship of subordination. At an analytic level, she makes an equation that resonates with some dominant forms of homophobic argument. One such view prescribes and condones the sexual ordering of gender, maintaining that men who are men will be straight, women who are women will be straight.There is another set of views, Franke’s included, which offers a critique precisely of this form of gender regulation. There is thus a difference between sexist and feminist views on the relation between gender and sexuality: the sexist claims that a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure (an essence emanates and is confirmed in the sexualized subordination of women); a feminist view argues that gender should be overthrown, eliminated, or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely because it is always a sign of subordination for women. The latter accepts the power of the former’s orthodox description, accepts that the former’s description already operates as powerful ideology, but seeks to oppose it.
Butler seems to assume that there MUST be strong gender norms, even in the absence of patriarchy, but she doesn’t establish this from first principles (at least not here).
MacKinnon is merely describing how the patriarchy works. It’s not complicated that people behaving in accordance with gender norms will produce a gender hierarchy, when that is how the norms are designed. Butler wants there to be a firm distinction between “norms” and “hierarchy” where there isn’t one. And yes, the patriarchy is heteronormative.
People have sex as an expression of their personalities, with or without our society’s ideas about gender. If “womanhood” is a restrictive construct, it seems we could just…stop constructing it. People already construct the meaning of sex acts in the privacy of their own relationships. There’s no requirement to do what the patriarchy is doing. Butler is just SO far up in the heights of abstraction that she probably forgets that sex is a simple bodily act, in addition to a complex psychological melodrama of role play.
This next passage seems frankly incompatible with the “I knew I was born in the wrong body” narrative. On this view, trans identity would be “hallucinatory”, a construction and a performance:
I originally took my clue on how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s “Before the Law.” There the one who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits. The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object. I wondered whether we do not labor under a similar expectation concerning gender, that it operates as an interior essence that might be disclosed, an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates. In the first instance, then, the performativity of gender revolves around this metalepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself. Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.
Several important questions have been posed to this doctrine, and one seems especially noteworthy to mention here.The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body. In this way, it showed that what we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures. Does this mean that everything that is understood as “internal” about the psyche is therefore evacuated, and that internality is a false metaphor?
Then she goes on to dither about psychoanalysis and the subject. But on that account, the “gender identity” trans people find is a product of their search to find it. Believing there is such a thing wills it into existence.
She does write about the body, but the level of abstraction is bizarre. She seems to wonder about a lot of things I’m not sure anybody asked, like whether there’s a distinction between the linguistic and the theatrical, and then lo!, she resolves the dilemma: it takes her so many words to say that we talk with our mouths. Genius!
Moreover, my theory sometimes waffles between understanding performativity as linguistic and casting it as theatrical. I have come to think that the two are invariably related, chiasmically so, and that a reconsideration of the speech act as an instance of power invariably draws attention to both its theatrical and linguistic dimensions. In Excitable Speech, I sought to show that the speech act is at once performed (and thus theatrical, presented to an audience, subject to interpretation), and linguistic, inducing a set of effects through its implied relation to linguistic conventions. If one wonders how a linguistic theory of the speech act relates to bodily gestures, one need only consider that speech itself is a bodily act with specific linguistic consequences. Thus speech belongs exclusively neither to corporeal presentation nor to language, and its status as word and deed is necessarily ambiguous. This ambiguity has consequences for the practice of coming out, for the insurrectionary power of the speech act, for language as a condition of both bodily seduction and the threat of injury.
Notably, Gender Trouble did NOT directly account for trans people (or race) in its analysis:
If I were to rewrite this book under present circumstances, I would include a discussion of transgender and intersexuality, the way that ideal gender dimorphism works in both sorts of discourses, the different relations to surgical intervention that these related concerns sustain. I would also include a discussion on racialized sexuality and, in particular, how taboos against miscegenation (and the romanticization of cross racial sexual exchange) are essential to the naturalized and denaturalized forms that gender takes.
I continue to hope for a coalition of sexual minorities that will transcend the simple categories of identity, that will refuse the erasure of bisexuality, that will counter and dissipate the violence imposed by restrictive bodily norms. I would hope that such a coalition would be based on the irreducible complexity of sexuality and its implication in various dynamics of discursive and institutional power, and that no one will be too quick to reduce power to hierarchy and to refuse its productive political dimensions. Even as I think that gaining recognition for one’s status as a sexual minority is a difficult task within reigning discourses of law, politics, and language, I continue to consider it a necessity for survival.
The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes. That is no reason not to use, and be used, by identity.There is no political position purified of power, and perhaps that impurity is what produces agency as the potential interruption and reversal of regulatory regimes. Those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital instability is produced by that performative surprise. This book is written then as part of the cultural life of a collective struggle that has had, and will continue to have, some success in increasing the possibilities for a livable life for those who live, or try to live, on the sexual margins.
I think it’s interesting that she concedes racism is inherent to gender norms (Afropessimism agrees!), while at the same time embracing the use of “power”, including the state, to enforce recognition of new identity categories. In 1999, the debate about revising racial categories in the census would’ve just been resolved.
Now let’s turn to the conclusion: “From parody to politics.” How indeed does finding one’s (constructed!) gender identity change power relations?
It has to be said: Judith Butler was off in la-la land. Does feminism need the concept of “women?” You think?
I began with the speculative question of whether feminist politics could do without a “subject” in the category of women. At stake is not whether it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make representational claims in their behalf. The feminist “we” is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. The tenuous or phantasmatic status of the “we,” however, is not cause for despair or, at least, it is not only cause for despair. The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself.
Compare with Andrea Dworkin in Right Wing Women (1983), the simplicity of understanding that “woman” refers to sex:
One other discipline is essential both to the practice of feminism and to its theoretical integrity: the firm, unsentimental, continuous recognition that women are a class having a common condition. This is not some psychological process of identification with women because women are wonderful; nor is it the insupportable assertion that there are no substantive, treacherous differences among women. This is not a liberal mandate to ignore what is cruel, despicable, or stupid in women, nor is it a mandate to ignore dangerous political ideas or allegiances of women. This does not mean women first, women best, women only. It does mean that the fate of every individual woman–no matter what her politics, character, values, qualities–is tied to the fate of all women whether she likes it or not. On one level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women she dislikes personally. On another level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors. For instance, it means that rape jeopardizes communist and fascist women, liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican women, white women and black women, Nazi women and Jewish women, homophobic women and homosexual women. The crimes committed against women because they are women articulate the condition of women.
Isn’t it really evident from the tone that Dworkin is serious about stopping violence in the world, and Butler is lost in thought? Can Butler take us from parody to a politics half as useful as what Dworkin wrote there? This was supposed to be an improvement, the founding of a new and better way. How interesting that Dworkin had none of Butler’s conceptual problems with “exclusion of some part of the constituency.” It was a solved problem 7 years earlier, if not from the beginning. Feminism: the movement for women.
Butler is really concerned about the philosophical problem of how we have free will if our selves are constructed using symbols we acquired from the outside world.
The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a “doer behind the deed,” but that the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed. This is not a return to anexistential theory of the self as constituted through its acts, for the existential theory maintains a prediscursive structure for both the self and its acts. It is precisely the discursively variable construction of each in and through the other that has interested me here.
It’s an interesting problem, but notice how she frames “identity politics” and its “foundationalist reasoning” as the culprits. She doesn’t even connect the term to its origins, the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977).
Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever consIdered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, Indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.
“Identity politics” was developed to address the erasure of black women, where the concept of “black women” originates with slavery. Blackness, too, is an identity imposed from the outside.
Fanon: “The black soul is a construction by white folk.”
Everybody was ignoring black women, but they didn’t have to invent themselves through some kind of behavioral process of repetition. It was about a demand for recognition, but not recognition of an inner identity as black women.
The phrase “foundationalist reasoning of identity politics” is doing a LOT of work for her there, and it’s misleading.
The theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed “etc.” at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated “etc.” that so often occurs at the end of such lines? This is a sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself. It is the supplément, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all. This illimitable et cetera, however, offers itself as a new departure for feminist political theorizing.
She’s “embarrassed”, “exhausted,” and “exasperated” by the fact that oppression takes so many forms.
It seems to me that she doesn’t understand that oppression is happening at the oppressor’s initiative, probably for specific material reasons. The way she writes, it’s like each new social movement invents itself from nothing, as a linguistic process that has something to do with Derrida. It’s all so tedious, having to ceremonially pretend to care about all these groups…
Here she is, doubting that sex is more “real” than gender and making LONG parenthetic apologies for using the word “I”. What IS this shit?
What constitutes a subversive repetition within signifying practices of gender? I have argued (“I” deploy the grammar that governs the genre of the philosophical conclusion, but note that it is the grammar itself that deploys and enables this “I,” even as the “I” that insists itself here repeats, redeploys, and—as the critics will determine—contests the philosophical grammar by which it is both enabled and restricted) that, for instance, within the sex/gender distinction, sex poses as “the real” and the “factic,” the material or corporeal ground upon which gender operates as an act of cultural inscription. And yet gender is not written on the body as the torturing instrument of writing in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” inscribes itself unintelligibly on the flesh of the accused.The question is not: what meaning does that inscription carry within it, but what cultural apparatus arranges this meeting between instrument and body, what interventions into this ritualistic repetition are possible? The “real” and the “sexually factic” are phantasmatic constructions—illusions of substance—that bodies are compelled to approximate, but never can.
Nowadays, Zizek gets shit for saying that “gender dysphoria” is a universal experience, not unique to trans people. Butler said it first:
And yet this failure to become “real” and to embody “the natural” is, I would argue, a constitutive failure of all gender enactments for the very reason that these ontological locales are fundamentally uninhabitable. Hence, there is a subversive laughter in the pastiche-effect of parodic practices in which the original, the authentic, and the real are them selves constituted as effects. The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: “man” and “woman.” The parodic repetition of gender exposes as well the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an “act,” as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status.
Instead of just…giving up the constructs, I think Judith Butler has too much fun playing with them and going to drag shows.
But wow, she really just comes right out and says it: There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics!
There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics, for gender ontologies always operate within established political contexts as normative injunctions, determining what qualifies as intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality, setting the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility. Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground.
That’s QUITE different than the trans movement, whose politics IS to insist everybody around them change their thoughts on the ontology of sex and gender.
What she’s really calling for is for people’s already-existing “spontaneous” behavior to be allowed:
The task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible. If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old. Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness. What other local strategies for engaging the “unnatural” might lead to the denaturalization of gender as such?
She wants to denaturalize gender as such. I emphasize that “gender abolition” is the position of the much-vilified gender-critical TERFs. Butler said the same thing, although her justifications had more to do with disliking normalizing pressure than resisting the patriarchy per se.
And there you have it: my reaction to the trans movement was “Huh?” Judith Butler knew better and jumped on the bandwagon anyway. Giving credit where it’s due, Butler correctly predicted that “trans identity” would become its own role that people would feel pressure to conform to, which is true.
Mari Ruti writes MUCH more clearly than Judith Butler, about the same issues:
But I believe that it is useful to recognize the distinction between the formative experience of being subjected to a preexisting structure of meanings on the one hand, and our subsequent capacity to participate in the shaping of that order on the other. The fact that we begin our lives in a position of helplessness with regard to the symbolic Other should not be taken to mean that we will never be able to gain agency in relation to it. That is why I have sought to demonstrate that even if our initial encounter with the signifier is devastating in that it causes lack and alienation, the signifier at the same time grants us access to structures of meaning-production that we can subsequently use to cope with this alienation…
Psychoanalysis could be argued to be a practice of negotiating the inevitable tension between being a subject (being subjected to the symbolic order) and being a unique individual (having a singular identity that somehow surpasses the parameters of that order). We are of course always both at once, but it is only as individuals that we feel fully engaged in our lives…Strangely enough, although the Other does not possess answers to our life-defining questions, the significatory resources that the Other makes available to us enable us to devise the kinds of answers that we can–always tentatively and provisionally–live with. One could in fact say that the process of becoming a person, from a distinctively Lacanian point of view, is first and foremost a matter of knowing that even though the question of the “sovereign good” is from the outset closed, questions that sustain us as singular creatures–questions pertaining to desire, creativity, and the passion of self-actualization, for example–are ones that can only be closed by our own (non)actions.—A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living