Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Butler next takes on the implication of the gender/sex distinction in feminist theory. “Originally intended to dispute the-biology-is-destiny formulation,” the distinction posits that gender is “culturally constructed” and sex is biological (8). The logical implications of the sex/gender divide are that there is no fixed relationship between particular bodies and genders and that our binary conception of sex (men versus women) is therefore also constructed.

Butler asks, “[W]hat is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal?” (8). The scientific language used to describe sex and that talks about sex in terms of a binary of male-versus-female happens in the midst of culture and language, meaning that it is entirely possible that what we apprehend as biology is also constructed. The supposed distinction between sex and gender conceals the role gender plays in the construction of sex. Allowing this concealment to stand makes it hard for us to get at the role gender plays in creating the power dynamics we have been attributing to sex.

Butler drills down even further by asking what we mean when we say gender is “constructed.” How does construction work, exactly? Do people get a say in how their gender is constructed, or is cultural construction outside of our control, a process in which “certain laws generate gender differences on universal axes of sexual difference” onto bodies that are just “passive recipients” bound by that law (11)? 

French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argues that “‘one is not born a woman, but rather, becomes one’” (11). De Beauvoir assumes that there is some agency (self-directed will or choice) in this becoming—that women can either choose to be free or they can accept that their identities are constrained by their bodies.

Feminist theorist Luce Irigaray critiques this mind/body divide by arguing that women have no identity of their own. Irigaray argues that “woman” as “the feminine ‘sex’” is just an “illusion of masculinist discourse” (14) or what she calls “the phallogocentric signifying economy” (13). Masculinist discourse has no ability to name women linguistically other than to say they are the negation of men. There is just a closed system of meaning that always circles back around to men. Instead of a feminine identity, there is just an absence.

Butler admits that distinguishing among the ways theorists define identity is tricky and that there are many more ways of thinking about women’s identity than those referenced in de Beauvoir and Irigaray. In fact, there are so many disagreements about this fundamental issue of women’s identity that Butler contends it’s time to come up with some other ways of thinking about gender, to address the “metaphysics of substance” (14) in discourse about the body.

The discourse about gender/sex is circular. As soon as one examines how this divide is defined, one always come back around to bodies, and bodies marked as male are almost always privileged over bodies that are marked as female, a “gender asymmetry” that constantly brings feminist theory to an impasse (15). Butler speculates that this male-female divide may be just another substitute for the master-slave divide; within masculinist language, women are effectively “‘cancelled,’ but not preserved” (17). De Beauvoir’s efforts to get around this possibility by arguing that women’s bodies can serve as the departure point for their freedom, instead of the root of their oppression, does nothing to address the issue.

De Beauvoir and Irigaray disagree over how gender asymmetry is produced. De Beauvoir credits “failed reciprocity” in the dialogue between the parts of the male-female divide, while Irigaray undercuts the entire idea of a dialogue by arguing that universally, the only articulated identity is the male side (18). Butler sees value in Irigaray’s perspective on the matter, but she also notes that the “globalizing reach” (18) of Irigaray’s theory is problematic, as it tends to swallow up cultural and historical differences in how gender oppression and masculinist discourse work.

The debate about whether there is some essential feminine identity is an urgent one because it has an impact on women's abilities to organize themselves into coalitions. Efforts to define some essential feminine identity are problematic because they serve to reinforce already existing inequalities related to class and race. In response to this issue, some have attempted to create a "coalitional politics" (19) that does not depend upon defining a particular identity for women.

The coalition instead emerges through a series of "dialogic encounters" (19) among people with separate identities. The danger there is that any insistence on unity threatens to insert the idea of solidarity as the "prerequisite for political action" (20). Members of a coalition may have unequal power or divergent ideas about what constitutes unity and dialogue. Butler suggests, instead, that unity may not even be necessary for political action and that acceptance of certain forms of fragmentation and disunity may allow for a more efficient, quicker start to organizing for action. There is ultimately no need to have recourse to a stable identity to act politically.

Butler next questions what identity—most particularly gender identity—is. It's complicated because our common conceptions of identity are both shaped by and shape what we mean when we call someone an identity. According to Butler, "[i]ntelligible genders are those which is some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire" (23).

This intelligibility is largely bound in a vision of desire that is heterosexual in nature and thus requires that "certain kinds of 'identities' cannot 'exist'" (24). Evidence of the power of culture to regulate which identities are intelligible can be seen in that genders that are not based on sexed bodies are dismissed as "developmental failures or logical impossibilities" (24). It therefore behooves gender theorists to turn a critical eye on "the matrix of intelligibility" (24) itself.

French feminists and poststructuralists have posited various theories to explain how power produces gender identity, and behind those theories are different theories on how identity in general is produced. Regardless of the differences in how these theories approach identity, they are all based on the idea that sex is somehow a substance, a "self-identical being" (25).

The concept of sex as a self-identical being is just a trick of language, one that covers over the truth that it is impossible that a singular thing that is gender or sex exists outside of the purely artificial binary between man and woman. The truth is that there is a "subversive multiplicity" of sexualities, which, in turn, disrupts the totalizing power of the dominant discourse (26).

Butler next examines several theorists' approaches to the issue of sexuality. Monique Wittig, for example, argues that the sexual binary serves a regime of "compulsory heterosexuality"(26). Wittig calls for the "destruction of 'sex' so that women can assume the status of the universal subject" (27) and thus become free.

Accepting the existence of a universal subject that predates gender and discourse is yet another trick that hides the same old problem with the metaphysics of substance, namely that it reproduces the power relations that produce gender and sex. One cannot "be" a sex or gender. According to Butler, "the act of differentiating the two oppositional moments of the binary results in a consolidation of each term, the respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire” (31).

Theorists of gender and sex also sometimes accept as a given that categories of man/woman emerge from the binary itself. Butler rejects this argument. There is no metaphysical substance—a doer—who has gender as an attribute and who either conforms to or fails to conform to the terms of the gender binary. Butler concludes that "gender is not a noun"(34) and that "[t]here is no gender identity behind expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constructed 

Butlers opens this section by noting that many theorists of gender assume that there is some subject (doer) behind gender; they do so under the assumption that without a doer, there is no possibility of liberating people from compulsory heterosexuality. Wittig, for example, argues that homosexual desire exists outside of that regime and thus holds out hope of liberation from that regime by engaging in practices that counter the male/female binary.

Language, from this perspective, is a tool that the doer can use to liberate or use to reinforce the masculinist meaning-making machine; there is no such thing as a separate feminine language (like that argued for by Irigaray) that must be created to counter this masculinist discourse because its existence would recreate a male/female binary all over again. Butler traces Wittig's argument back to her sense of language as one of many practices that doers engage in within the context of specific institutions, cultures, and places (this is a shorthand definition of materialism).

In The Lesbian Body, Wittig offers a materialist re-reading of Freud's theory of gender as a developmental process by which a person moves from "less restricted and more diffuse infantile sexuality" (37) to a supposedly-superior sexuality that is bound up in the genitals. According to Butler, Wittig's celebration of a sexuality that is more diffuse—like that of an infant in Freud—is just an inversion of Freud. This inversion, in the end, reinforces the oppressive developmental model that is associated with compulsive heterosexuality.

Butler then examines the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on sexual difference. The masculine doer is an effect that emerges when the doer accepts the Father's prohibition against incest and displaces that desire for the mother with desire for others who are not kin. For the feminine doer (also an effect), sexual difference emerges when the doer acknowledges the prohibition of desire for both the mother and father and accepts the maternal role of perpetuating "the rules of kinship" (38). The gender of these doers both seemingly emerge from prohibitions, but the desire that has been repressed lives on in the unconscious.

Such an account of sexual difference is inherently unstable, and at any moment, the repressed desires can and do emerge to undercut the law of the Father. When materialists and Lacanians argue about sexual difference and gender, it frequently comes down to whether one believes that there is some "subversive sexuality that flourishes prior to the imposition of the law, after its overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge to its authority" (40).

Michel Foucault theorizes that there really is no getting outside of the power relations within which sexuality emerges; when sexualities that exceed the intelligible matrix of gender are apparent, our notions of what is an intelligible gender are expanded.

The doer, sex, gender, and sexuality are all constructed in the context of power relations, and since there is no getting out of those relations, feminist theorists would be wise to pay attention to how the variability of those constructions might be used. Accepting this state of affairs, Butler cautions, is in no way to argue that gender is not a real thing that can become an object of analysis. Gender is an "effect" (45), something that can be studied and that has a history. De Beauvoir's argument that one becomes a woman is useful if one realizes that "woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end" (45), even when gender congeals into style and acts that take on the appearance of something entirely natural that we accept without a thought. The task of feminist theorists is to engage in cultural criticism— that is, make "gender trouble" (46)— that both takes apart this naturalization of gender and thinks through what is foreclosed by the congealment of gender.