Stuart Hall’s Who needs identity? (1997) is a perfect time capsule of the academic trends that devolved into the trans movement. There’s the original Judith Butler, embedded in discussions of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. If you weren’t a humanities nerd, her writing was intimidating. If you were, her whole project was obvious and derivative: take the trendiest authors and apply their work to feminism.
“Deconstruction” was a formulaic way of interpreting literally anything (“There is nothing outside of the text.”). The conclusion was foregone: every interpretation is misinterpretation. Whatever you’re interpreting, it’s unstable and self-undermining and lacks foundations. Something something binary opposition Western metaphysics. This was very exciting and controversial for English professors.
The trans movement is what happens when you put Butler’s jargon on Tumblr memes and leave them to be interpreted by teenagers in search of identity who also don’t read books. This effectively removed the gatekeeping. When Butler was only available through books and academic journals, you had to do background reading to understand her. Citing hard-to-read bullshit was a flex.
Hall’s essay is the perfect introduction for new grad students: 9 pages starting with Freud and ending with Butler. It explains the major themes and how they relate to the tropes of each major author.
The trend was already played out by 1997. Hall’s opening paragraph makes that clear:
There has been a veritable discursive explosion in recent years around the concept of ‘identity’, at the same moment as it has been subjected to a searching critique. How is this paradoxical development to be explained? And where does it leave us with respect to the concept? The deconstruction has been conducted within a variety of disciplinary areas, all of them, in one way or another critical of the notion of an integral, originary and unified identity. The critique of the self-sustaining subject at the centre of post-Cartesian western metaphysics has been comprehensively advanced in philosophy. The question of subjectivity and its unconscious processes of formation has been developed within the discourse of a psychoanalytically influenced feminism and cultural criticism. The endlessly performative self has been advanced in celebratory variants of postmodernism. Within the anti-essentialist critique of ethnic, racial and national conceptions of cultural identity and the ‘politics of location’ some adventurous theoretical conceptions have been sketched in their most grounded forms. What, then, is the need for a further debate about ‘identity’? Who needs it?
The secret is that most of the writing is drivel and you can get by on learning a few key concepts per thinker. With Derrida, a big one was writing “under erasure”:
Unlike those forms of critique which aim to supplant inadequate concepts with ‘truer’ ones, or which aspire to the production of positive knowledge, the deconstructive approach puts key concepts ‘under erasure’. This indicates that they are no longer serviceable – ‘good to think with’ – in their originary and unreconstructed form. But since they have not been superseded dialectically, and there are no other, entirely different concepts with which to replace them, there is nothing to do but to continue to think with them – albeit now in their detotalized or deconstructed forms, and no longer operating within the paradigm in which they were originally generated (d. Hall, 1995). The line which cancels them, paradoxically, permits them to go on being read. Derrida has described this approach as thinking at the limit, as thinking in the interval, a sort of double writing. ‘By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept’, a concept that can no longer be and never could be, included in the previous regime’ (Derrida, 1981). Identity is such a concept – operating ‘under erasure’ in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all.
The formula is obvious: summarize the concept, cite the master, apply the concept. “Under erasure” isn’t actually a bad concept. It’s a recognition that a concept isn’t quite right but we’ll continue using it for lack of an alternative.
This is all related to the problem of free will, or “agency.” Can we be said to initiate political action if we’re products of our environment?
A second kind of answer requires us to note where, in relation to what set of problems, does the irreducibility of the concept, identity, emerge? I think the answer here lies in its centrality to the question of agency and politics. By politics, I mean both the significance in modern forms of political movement of the signifier ‘identity’, its pivotal relationship to a politics of location – but also the manifest difficulties and instabilities which have characteristically affected all contemporary forms of ‘identity politics’. By ‘agency’ I express no desire whatsoever to return to an unmediated and transparent notion of the subject or identity as the centred author of social practice, or to restore an approach which ‘places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity – which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness’ (Foucault, 1970, p. xiv). I agree with Foucault that what we require here is ‘not a theory of the knowing subject, but rather a theory of discursive practice’. However, I believe that what this decentring requires – as the evolution of Foucault’s work clearly shows – is not an abandonment or abolition of ‘the subject’ but a reconceptualization – thinking it in its new, displaced or decentred position within the paradigm. It seems to be in the attempt to rearticulate the relationship between subjects and. discursive practices that the question of identity recurs – or rather, if one prefers to stress the process of subjectification to discursive practices, and the politics of exclusion which all such subjectification appears to entail, the question of identification.
Another key concept from Derrida is differance. Basically, meaning is infinitely deferred. This means identification is never perfect:
In common sense language, identification is constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance established on this foundation. In contrast with the ‘naturalism’ of this definition, the discursive approach sees identification as a construction, a process never completed – always ‘in process’. It is not determined in the sense that it can always be ‘won’ or ‘lost’, sustained or abandoned. Though not without its determinate conditions of existence, including the material and symbolic resources required to sustain it, identification is in the end conditional, lodged in contingency. Once secured, it does not obliterate difference. The total merging it suggests is, in fact, a fantasy of incorporation. (Freud always spoke of it in relation to ‘consuming the other’ as we shall see in a moment.) Identification is, then, a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption. There is always ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ – an over-determination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality. Like all signifying practices, it is subject to the ‘play’, of differance. It obeys the logic of more-than-one. And since as a process it operates across difference, it entails discursive work, the binding and marking of symbolic boundaries, the production of ‘frontier effects’. It requires what is left outside, its constitutive outside, to consolidate the process.
Hall is clear about what deconstruction implies about identity:
The concept of identity deployed here is therefore not an essentialist, but a strategic and positional one. That is to say, directly contrary to what appears to be its settled semantic career, this concept of identity does not signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change; the bit of the self which remains always-already ‘the same’, identical to itself across time. Nor – if we translate this essentializing conception to the stage of cultural identity -is it that ‘collective or true self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves” which a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’ (Hall, 1990) and which can stabilize, fix or guarantee an unchanging ‘oneness’ or cultural belongingness underlying all the other superficial differences. It accepts that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and trans formation. We need to situate the debates about identity within all those historically specific developments and practices which have disturbed the relatively ‘settled’ character of many populations and cultures, above all in relation to the processes of globalization, which I would argue are coterminous with modernity (Hall, 1996) and the processes of forced and ‘free’ migration which have become a global phenomenon of the so-called ‘post-colonial’ world. Though they seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continue to correspond, actually identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. Identities are therefore constituted within, not outside representation. They relate to the invention of tradition as much as to tradition itself, which they oblige us to read not as an endless reiteration but as ‘the changing same’ (Gilroy, 1994): not the so-called return to roots but a coming-to-terms-with our ‘routes’. They arise from the narrativization of the self, but the necessarily fictional nature of this process in no way undermines its discursive, material or political effectivity, even if the belongingness, the ‘suturing into the story’ through which identities arise is, partly, in the imaginary (as well as the symbolic) and therefore, always, partly constructed in fantasy, or at least within a fantasmatic field.
Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally-constituted unity – an ‘identity’ in its traditional meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal differentiation).
Althusser is the bridge between Marxism and psychoanalysis. His concept of “ideological state apparatus” is combined with Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage.”
Some of the difficulties, at least, seemed to arise from accepting too much at face value, and without qualification, Lacan’s somewhat sensationalist proposition that everything constitutive of the subject not only happens through this mechanism of the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, but happens in the same moment. The ‘resolution’ of the Oedipal crisis, in the over-condensed language of the Lacanian hot-gospellers, was identical with, and occurred through the equivalent mechanism as, the submission to the Law of the Father, the consolidation of sexual difference, the entry into language, the formation of the unconscious as well- after Althusser as the recruitment into the patriarchal ideologies of late capitalist western societies! The more complex notion of a subject-in-process is lost in these polemical condensations and hypothetically aligned equivalences. (Is the subject racialized, nationalized and constituted as a late-liberal entrepreneurial subject in this moment too?)
Basically, there’s an internal, psychological aspect, which is generally explained with Lacan. But there’s also a social, political aspect that’s explained with Foucault. Foucault himself rejected psychoanalysis, though, leaving a contradiction to be resolved:
Ruthlessly attacking ‘the great myth of interiority’, and driven both by his critque of humanism and the philosophy of consciousness, and by his negative reading of psychoanalysis, Foucault also undertakes a radical historicization of the category of the subject. The subject is produced ‘as an effect’ through and within discourse, within specific discursive formations, and has no existence, and certainly no transcendental continuity or identity from one subject position to another. In his ‘archaeological’ work (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge), discourses construct subject positions through their rules of formation and ‘modalities of enunciation’. Powerfully compelling and original as these works are, the criticism levelled against them in this respect at least seems justified. They offer a formal account of the construction of subject positions within discourse while revealing little about why it is that certain individuals occupy some subject positions rather than others. By neglecting to analyse how the social positions of individuals interact with the construction of certain ’empty’ discursive subject positions, Foucault reinscribes an antinomy between subject positions and the individuals who occupy them. Thus his archaeology provides a critical, but one-dimensional, formal account of the subject of discourse.
Having ritually acknowledged early Foucault, we also have to acknowledge late Foucault, i.e., The History of Sexuality:
One implication of the new conceptions of power elaborated in this body of work is the radical ‘deconstruction’ of the body, the last residue or hiding place of ‘Man’, and its ‘reconstruction’ in terms of its historical, genealogical and discursive formations. The body is constructed by, shaped and reshaped by the intersection of a series of disciplinary discursive practices. Genealogy’s task, Foucault proclaims, ‘is to expose the body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history’s destruction of the body’ (1984: 63). While we can accept this, with its radically ‘constructivist’ implications (the body be comes infinitely malleable and contingent) I am not sure we can or ought to go as far as his proposition that ‘Nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for under standing other men.’…
This is not the place to trace through the many productive insights which flow from Foucault’s analysis of the truth-games, the elaboration of ethical work, of the regimes of self-regulation and self-fashioning, of the “technologies of the self” involved in the constitution of the desiring subject. There is certainly no single switch to “agency”, to intention and volition here (though there are, very centrally, the practices of freedom which prevent this subject from ever being simply a docile sexualized body).
But there is the production of the self as an object in the world, the practices of self-constitution, recognition and reflection, the relation to the rule, alongside the scrupulous attention to normative regulation, and the constraints of the rules without which no “subjectification” is produced. This is a significant advance, since it addresses for the first time in Foucault’s major work the existence of some interior landscape of the subject, some interior mechanisms of assent to the rule, as well as its objectively disciplining force, which saves the account from the “behaviorism” and objectivism which threatens certain parts of Discipline and Punish. Often, in this work, the ethics and practices of the self are most fully described by Foucault as an “aesthetics of existence”, a deliberate stylization of daily life; and its technologies are most effectively demonstrated in the practices of self-production, in specific modes of conduct, in what we have come from later work to recognize as a kind of performativity.
Enter Judith Butler. Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida were the trendiest thinkers of the day, so somebody had to try and reconcile them.
This centering of the question of identification, together iwth the problematic of the subject which “assumes a sex”, opens up a critical and reflexive dialogue in Butler’s work between Foucault and psychoanalysis which is enormously productive. It is true that Butler does not provide an elaborate theoretical meta-argument for the way the two perspectives, or teh relation between the discursive and the psychic, are “thought” together in her text beyond a suggestive indication: “There may be a way to subject psychoanalysis to a Foucauldian redescription even as Foucault himself refused that possibility.” At any rate,
this text accepts as a point of departure Foucault’s notion that regulatory power produces the subjects it controls, that power is not only imposed externally but works as the regulatory and normative means by which subjects are formed. The return to psychoanalysis, then, is guided by the question of how certain regulatory norms form a “sexed” subject in terms that establish the indistinguishability of psychic and bodily formation. (1993:23)
It’s important to emphasize that Butler was a deconstructionist and therefore skeptical of all identities from first principles:
Here Butler makes a powerful case that all identities operate through exclusion, through the discursive construction of a constitutive outside and the production of abjected and marginalized subjects, apparently outside the field of the symbolic, the representable – ‘the production of an “outside”, a domain of intelligible effects’ (1993: 22) – which then returns to trouble and unsettle the foreclosures which we prematurely call ‘identities’.
She’s also a Lacanian. Quoting Butler (1993) directly:
In this sense, identifications belong to the imaginary; they are phantasmatic efforts of alignment, loyalty, ambiguous and cross-corporeal cohabitations, they unsettle the I; they are the sedimentation of the “we” in the constitution of any I, the structuring present of alterity in the very formulation of the I. Identifications are never fully and finally made; they are incessantly reconstituted, and, as such, are subject to the volatile logic of iterability. They are that which is constantly marshalled, consolidated, retrenched, contested, and, on occasion, compelled to give way.
If you think about these ideas for just a few minutes, it’s immediately obvious that they’re incompatible with the trans movement. As a representative example, consider this article by Masha Gessen in the New York Times, on the occasion of oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti.
Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.
“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.
An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.
Gessen clearly thinks “nonbinary” refers to a specific group of people meeting certain norms, rather than a fundamental problem with classification itself. There’s a political demand to replace sex with “gender identity” in all areas of life, where people can simply introspect and see “who they really are deep down.” This clearly has something to do with Foucault’s arguments about the social construction of the body, but Gessen is also clearly not a social constructionist with any consistency:
Trans and gender-nonconforming people have existed as long as humans have used gender to organize themselves — think Joan of Arc; think Yentl; think many, many real and fictional people in-between — but in Western culture, it’s only in the last half-century that trans people have asserted ourselves as a group. It was only when we became more visible that the onslaught of new discriminatory laws began.
There have always been people who are essentially trans. Where Foucault criticized the repressive hypothesis, the idea that a preexisting sexuality is repressed and needs liberating. Rather, the practices and the taboos coemerge. A Foucauldian would emphasize the historical contingency of all things.
Tennessee passed its law, known as S.B.1, in March 2023. The American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups sued on behalf of three Tennessee adolescents — two trans boys and one trans girl — and their families and one doctor. The kids had been benefiting from gender-affirming care; each had reportedly gained confidence, overcome distress and become much happier. Then the state banned their treatment.
It’s also noteworthy that “biopower” was a major theme of Foucault’s. He was intensely critical of doctors and psychiatry, institutional power in general. The trans movement is clearly interested in using the state to spread its ideology and pay for its surgeries, though. It’s just…not in the spirit of Foucault. But Gessen openly appeals to medical authority:
Tennessee also claims that science is on its side, and that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case. Dozens of mainstream medical societies, including the leading associations of pediatricians, filed amici briefs arguing against S.B.1. Apparently trying to find their footing, conservative justices asked about new regulations in the United Kingdom and Sweden. But those regulations were written by medical — not legislative — authorities, and they come nowhere near a total ban.
Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as “pseudoscience,” while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology.
Foucault was hardly someone who believed in “genuine expertise.” He’s the one who wrote about “subjugated knowledges.” It would’ve made sense for trans people to invoke Foucault before they had the full support of the Democrats and the (outgoing) President.
Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 and in similar laws. Another is the government’s intrusion into private lives — in this case, the shameless assumption that legislators can make decisions that rightfully belong with families and their physicians.
Foucault would question the illusion of separation between health care authorities and the state.
Returning to Butler and Gender Trouble, she wrote directly that:
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.
What’s Gessen doing if not making ontology the foundation of politics? There ARE trans people and therefore…
So the trans movement benefits from the perception that it’s based on some deep critical theory insights, and Butler jumped on board the train, but it actually flies in the face of the ideas it emerged from.