Notes on Judith Butler's Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

• Opening quotes:
  • Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one."
  • Julia Kristeva: "Strictly speaking, 'women' cannot be said to exist."
  • Luce Irigaray: "Woman does not have a sex."
  • Michel Foucault: "The deployment of sexuality … established this notion of sex."
  • Monique Wittig: "The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual."

"Women" as the Subject of Feminism

• Feminist theory often assumes a pre-existing identity of "women" as the foundation for feminist interests, goals, and political representation.
• Representation is understood both as a political process to grant visibility and legitimacy to women and as a linguistic function to reveal or accurately depict the category of women.
• The development of a language to fully represent women has been seen as crucial for fostering their political visibility, especially given historical misrepresentation or lack of representation.
• However, this conception faces challenges from within feminist discourse, questioning the stability and viability of "the subject" and the agreement on what constitutes the category of women.
• Domains of political and linguistic representation predefine the criteria for subject formation, limiting representation to what is acknowledged as a subject; qualifications must be met before representation is extended.
• Foucault argues that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they later represent, regulating political life through limitation, prohibition, and control.
• Subjects regulated by these structures are formed, defined, and reproduced according to the structures' requirements.
• The feminist subject can be discursively constituted by the same political system meant to emancipate it, creating issues if the system produces gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination or presumes masculinity.
• The question of "the subject" is critical because juridical subjects are produced through exclusionary practices not always visible once the political structure is established.
• The political construction of the subject includes legitimating and exclusionary aims, concealed by political analyses that take juridical structures as foundational.
• Juridical power both produces and conceals the notion of "a subject before the law" to legitimize its regulatory hegemony.
• Feminist critique should understand how the category of "women" is produced and restrained by the very power structures through which emancipation is sought.
• The subject and the notion of a temporal "before" may be constituted by the law as a fictive foundation for its legitimacy.
• The idea of the ontological integrity of the subject before the law echoes the state of nature hypothesis, a foundational fable of classical liberalism's juridical structures.
• The performative invocation of a nonhistorical "before" becomes the foundational premise guaranteeing a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed, legitimizing the social contract.
• Feminism encounters a political problem in assuming a common identity denoted by "women," which has become a site of contest and anxiety.
• Denise Riley's question, "Am I That Name?", is prompted by the name's multiple significations; being a woman is not exhaustive because gender is not consistently constituted across historical contexts.
• Gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities, making it impossible to separate "gender" from political and cultural intersections.
• The political idea of a universal basis for feminism, found in a cross-cultural identity, often accompanies the notion of a singular form of women's oppression discernible in patriarchy or masculine domination.
• The notion of a universal patriarchy is criticized for failing to account for gender oppression in concrete cultural contexts.
• Consulting various contexts often leads to using "examples" or "illustrations" of a pre-assumed universal principle.
• Feminist theorizing has been criticized for colonizing non-Western cultures to support Western notions of oppression, constructing a "Third World" or "Orient" where gender oppression is viewed as symptomatic of non-Western barbarism.
• Feminism's urgency to establish a universal status for patriarchy to strengthen its representative claims occasionally motivates a shortcut to a categorial or fictive universality of the domination structure producing women's subjugated experience.
• While the claim of universal patriarchy has lost credibility, the notion of a shared conception of "women" remains difficult to displace.
• Debates include whether commonality among women preexists oppression, whether women are bonded solely by oppression, whether women's cultures are independent of masculinist cultures, and whether the specificity of women's practices is specified against a dominant cultural formation.
• The masculine/feminine binary constitutes the exclusive framework for recognizing the specificity of the feminine, which is then decontextualized and separated from class, race, ethnicity, and other power axes constituting "identity."
• The presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is undermined by the constraints of representational discourse, and the insistence on a stable subject generates refusals to accept the category.
• Exclusionary consequences of this construction are coercive and regulatory, even if elaborated for emancipatory purposes, and fragmentation within feminism and opposition from women suggest the limits of identity politics.
• Seeking wider representation for a self-constructed subject risks failure by ignoring the constitutive powers of representational claims, where exclusion can be an unintended yet consequential meaning.
• Conforming to representational politics by articulating a stable subject opens feminism to charges of misrepresentation.
• The political task is not to refuse representational politics but to formulate a critique of identity categories engendered, naturalized, and immobilized by contemporary juridical structures.
• Radical rethinking of ontological constructions of identity appears necessary to formulate a representational politics that might revive feminism, by potentially freeing feminist theory from constructing a single ground invariably contested by excluded identity positions.
• Exclusionary practices grounding feminist theory in a notion of "women" as subject may undercut feminist goals to extend claims to "representation."
• Constructing "women" as a coherent, stable subject can unwittingly regulate and reify gender relations, contrary to feminist aims, and this category achieves stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix.
• If a stable notion of gender ceases to be the foundational premise of feminist politics, a new feminist politics may be desired to contest the reifications of gender and identity, taking the variable construction of identity as methodological.
• Tracing political operations that produce and conceal what qualifies as the juridical subject of feminism is the task of a feminist genealogy of the category of women.
• Questioning "women" as the subject of feminism may preclude feminism as a representational politics since extending representation to subjects constructed through exclusion sustains relations of domination.
• The identity of the feminist subject should not be the foundation of feminist politics if subject formation occurs within a power field buried beneath that foundation.
• Paradoxically, representation may only make sense for feminism when the subject of "women" is nowhere presumed.

The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire

• The unity of "women" is often invoked to construct identity solidarity, but the sex/gender distinction introduces a split in the feminist subject.
• The distinction aimed to dispute biology-is-destiny, arguing that gender is culturally constructed and not a causal result of sex.
• Gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as fixed gender is a multiple interpretation of sex.
• The sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders: given binary sex, "men" need not accrue solely to male bodies, nor "women" to female bodies; genders need not remain binary either.
• The presumption of a binary gender system retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it.
• When gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, it becomes a free-floating artifice; man and masculine might signify a female body, and woman and feminine a male body.
• This radical splitting poses issues about referring to a "given" sex or gender without inquiring how each is given and what "sex" actually is.
• Is sex natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal? How should a feminist critic assess scientific discourses that establish these "facts"?
• Does sex have a history, and do the sexes have different histories? Is there a genealogy exposing the binary options as a variable construction?
• Are the purportedly natural facts of sex discursively produced by scientific discourses serving other political and social interests?
• If the immutable character of sex is contested, then perhaps "sex" is as culturally constructed as gender, and there is no distinction at all.
• It would make no sense to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex if sex is a gendered category, culture is influenced by gender; gender must designate the apparatus of production whereby the sexes are established.
• Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is the discursive/cultural means by which "sexed nature" or "a natural sex" is produced and established as prediscursive.
• The construction of "sex" as radically unconstructed secures the internal stability and binary frame for sex by casting sex in a prediscursive domain; this is an effect of the cultural construction of gender.
• Gender must be reformulated to encompass power relations producing the effect of prediscursive sex and concealing that operation of discursive production.

Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate

• Is gender something persons are said to have or an essential attribute they are said to be?
• When theorists claim gender is the cultural interpretation of sex, what is the mechanism of this construction? Is gender constructed differently, or does this construction imply social determinism, foreclosing agency and transformation?
• Does "construction" suggest laws generating gender differences along universal axes of sexual difference?
• What sense can we make of a construction that cannot assume a human constructor beforehand?
• The notion that gender is constructed can suggest a determinism where gender meanings are inscribed on anatomically differentiated bodies understood as passive recipients of cultural law, making culture destiny rather than biology.
• Simone de Beauvoir suggested that "one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one," implying an agent cogito taking on gender and potentially taking on another gender; is gender this variable and volitional?
• Beauvoir makes clear that one "becomes" a woman under cultural compulsion, not sex; there is nothing in her account that guarantees that the "one" who becomes a woman is necessarily female.
• If the body is a situation, then sex cannot qualify as a prediscursive facticity, as the body has always already been interpreted by cultural meanings, so sex will be shown to have been gender all along.
• The construction controversy founders on the polarity between free will and determinism, where "the body" appears as a passive medium or instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines cultural meaning.
• In either case, the body is figured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural meanings are only externally related.
• Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse that seeks to set limits to analysis or to safeguard tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any analysis of gender.
• Constraint is built into what that language constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender.
• Although social scientists refer to gender as a "factor" or "dimension" of an analysis, it is also applied to embodied persons as "a mark" of biological, linguistic, and/or cultural difference.
• In the latter cases, gender can be understood as a signification that an (already) sexually differentiated body assumes, but even then that signification exists only in relation to another, opposing signification.
• Some feminist theorists claim that gender is "a relation," indeed, a set of relations, and not an individual attribute.
• Others, following Beauvoir, would argue that only the feminine gender is marked, that the universal person and the masculine gender are conflated, thereby defining women in terms of their sex and extolling men as the bearers of a body-transcendent universal personhood.
• Luce Irigaray suggests that women constitute a paradox within the discourse of identity itself: women are "the sex" that is not "one"
• Women represent the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence, and opacity; within a language based on univocal signification, the female sex is unconstrainable and undesignatable.
• Women are multiple rather than the Other; Irigaray argues that both the subject and the Other are masculine mainstays of a closed phallogocentric signifying economy that excludes the feminine altogether.
• Women are not the negative of men but point out representation's inadequacy; the sex which is not one provides a departure for criticizing hegemonic Western representation and the metaphysics of substance.
• The metaphysics of substance informs thinking about sex categories; humanist conceptions assume a substantive person bearing essential and nonessential attributes.
• A humanist feminist understands gender as an attribute of a person characterized by a pregendered substance or "core", denoting reason or language.
• The universal conception of the person is displaced by historical and anthropological views understanding gender as relations among socially constituted subjects.
• Gender does not denote a substantive being but a point of convergence among culturally and historically specific relations.
• Irigaray maintains that the feminine sex is an absence, exposing substance as an illusion of masculinist discourse; this absence is unmarked within the masculine signifying economy.
• The female sex is not a lack defining masculinity; it eludes representation requirements, remaining relative to the Sartrian subject immanent to the phallogocentric scheme.
• Hence, the feminine could never be the mark of a subject but is not theorized in determinate relations between genders within discourse; discourses are modalities of phallogocentric language.
• The female sex is thus also the subject that is not one, and the relation between masculine and feminine cannot be represented when the masculine constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified.
• Beauvoir prefigured this impossibility when she argued that men could not settle the question of women because they would then be acting as both judge and party to the case.
• The interpretive possibilities of gender are not exhausted by suggested alternatives due to the problematic circularity of feminist inquiry into gender.
• The sharp disagreements about gender necessitate rethinking identity categories within gender asymmetry.
• For Beauvoir, the subject within the existential analytic of misogyny is a masculine universal that differentiates itself from a feminine Other, embodied and condemned to immanence; she critiques this disembodiment.
• The masculine poses as a disembodied universality by negating and disavowing its embodiment, projecting it onto the feminine, renaming the body as female.
• Beauvoir implicitly asks through what negation the masculine poses as disembodied and the feminine as corporeal; the master-slave dialectic prefigures Irigaray's masculine signifying economy.
• Beauvoir proposes that the female body should be a situation and instrumentality of freedom, not a defining essence limited by the Cartesian freedom/body distinction.
• The reproduction of the mind/body dualism is symptomatic of phallogocentrism in that philosophy associates mind with masculinity and body with femininity; this distinction produces gender hierarchy.
• The discursive construction of "the body" and its separation from "freedom" in Beauvoir fails to mark gender asymmetry along the axis of gender.
• Unofficially, Beauvoir contends that the female body is marked within masculinist discourse, where the masculine body, in its conflation with the universal, remains unmarked, that both marker and marked are maintained within a masculinist mode of signification.