Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Foucault’s work on power and the repressive hypothesis are important contributors to Butler’s attempts to theorize queer identities without appealing to a body that precedes or emerges after the Law. Looking more closely at his work, Butler nevertheless finds in his theory an “unacknowledged emancipatory ideal that proves increasingly difficult to maintain, even with in the strictures of his own critical apparatus” (127).

Butler compares Foucault’s theory in The History of Sexuality, Volume I to his introduction to a set of journals attributed to Herculine Barbin. Barbin was a French intersex person who was assigned a feminine gender at birth by their parents and legally reassigned to a masculine gender in their early twenties by priests and doctors who concluded their attachment to a young woman required the reassignment.

In the Introduction to Barbin’s journals, Foucault “appears to romanticize [Barbin’s] world of pleasures as the ‘happy limbo of non-identity,’” despite his claim in History that “sexuality is coextensive with power” (128). In History, Foucault describes sex as a historical production, one that “unifies bodily functions and meanings that have no necessary relationship with one another” (130)—the concept of the univocality of sex. Accounts that ignore the regulatory function of sex are prime examples of power hiding its own regulatory functions. Giving up this notion of “univocal” (130) sex should result in a “happy dispersal of what the label ‘sex’ covers over (130), according to Foucault. Despite these insights about power and sex, Foucault engages in what Butler calls “sentimental indulgence” by casting Barbin’s body as one that represents the “overthrow of ‘sex’” that “results in the release of a primary polymorphousness” (131)—“sexual nonidentity” (135).

When Butler examines Barbin’s journals, she finds them to be full of constraints. Barbin represents their life as a tragic one that is full of thwarted love. “Written in a sentimental and melodramatic tone, the journals report a sense of perpetual crisis that culminates in suicide,” according to Butler (133). Barbin tells their life story using autobiographical conventions of Romantic/sentimental fiction, female-female bonding of the type promoted in the convent, where Barbin spent years of their life, and existing language associated with female homosexuality. These influences show the impact of relations of power and social relations on Barbin’s representation of their identity.

Foucault implies that Barbin’s self-representation exposes the possibility of a sexual nonidentity but also later suggests that their identity may well operate in the context of female homosexuality in the convent—a contradiction since sexual nonidentity and female homosexuality are not the same thing. Barbin committed suicide after having been reassigned to a masculine gender. Far from enacting a “‘happy limbo of non-identity’” (144), Barbin “embodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law’s uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will—out of fidelity—defeat themselves” (144).

In a subsection titled “Concluding unscientific postscript,” Butler notes that Foucault’s efforts to write a genealogy of the discourse of sex included his observation that modern ideas about identity appeared just at the moment “sexual sciences, including psychoanalysis” (144) appeared: the end of the 19th century. He later turned to an examination of the Greeks and Romans to find the mechanism for the production of identity.

Butler says that a “contemporary example of this quest for identity” (144) in the realm of cell biology shows that Foucault’s notion of the misleading univocality of sex still applies today. Butler then goes on to recount how Page, a MIT researcher, claimed in 1987 that he had located a genetic determinant for sex. The study was conducted using DNA from people with XY (male) chromosomes but who were designated female by doctors, and others with XX chromosomes but designated as male by doctors. Page posited that he would be able to find in these individuals' genes a misplaced stretch of DNA that had landed on a chromosome other than the Y, and in doing so explain the unusual chromosomes of the study subjects.

When Page looked for this stretch of DNA that determined maleness, it was indistinguishable from the same stretch on the X chromosome that determines femaleness. Rather than admit defeat, Page doubled down “by claiming that perhaps it was not the presence of the gene sequence in male versus its absence in females that was determining, but that it was active in males and passive in females” (146).

The problem is that the study subjects designated as either male or female had ambiguous anatomy—including genitalia—that upended strict medical binaries about what makes a body male or female. The determination of who counted as male or female was made based on the appearance of genitalia, even when other evidence such as the production of sperm was absent. Rather than accept that the ambiguity of the subjects’ bodies and his findings showed the arbitrary nature of sexing bodies and labeling anything active as masculine, Page insisted on looking for an explanation that fit in with the prevailing “social organization of sexual reproduction” (150). The active/passive binary frequently boils down to a male/female binary, even in medical and scientific discourse, and Page’s study was no different.

Butler returns to de Beauvoir’s maxim that “‘one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one’” (11) as an opportunity to ask some questions about the nature of becoming a human and becoming a gender: “Those bodily figures who do not fit into either gender [male/female on birth] fall outside the human, indeed, constitute the domain of the dehumanized and the abject against which the human itself is constituted” (151).

Butler characterizes de Beauvoir’s statement to mean that “gender is always acquired” (152), and even though de Beauvoir likely believed sex was an unchangeable fact, there was still nothing about her conception of sex that required becoming one of two genders (masculine/feminine) based on apparent sex. Based on this conclusion, “gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort” (152). Butler ponders the new discourse that would be needed to talk about the proliferation of various gendering as a result.

Butler then turns to Wittig’s 1980 article “‘One Is Not Born a Woman,’” in which Wittig argues that the male/female sex binary is only predominant in order to naturalize heterosexuality and serve “the economic needs of heterosexuality” (153)—the heterosexual contract. Wittig also argues that lesbians are not women and have no sex because of their rejection of the heterosexual contract. Butler reformulates Wittig’s idea to say that lesbian is a “category that radically problematizes both sex and gender as stable political categories of description” (153).

Wittig argues that sex “secures the political and cultural operation of compulsory heterosexuality” (154). There isn’t really a binary of male and female, just a universal person that plugs males into the system and just one sex—feminine. What we have been calling sex is really just gender in disguise, since both are constructed politically and socially. “Sex” is produced in discourse, and it oppresses “women, gays, and lesbians” (154). Wittig concludes that the system of compulsory heterosexuality is irredeemable and will never serve to liberate anyone from gender and “‘fictive sex’” (154)—that is, sex masquerading as something other than gender.

According to Butler, Wittig’s project was to create a new discourse to talk about bodies and sexual identities without talking about sex. The existing language used to sex bodies looks objective, but that’s just an effect of bodies “violently shaped into such a datum” (155) by a mechanism that appears nowhere obvious in and around that body. The language we use to talk about bodies—even parts generally taken to be secondary sex traits—have always already assumed arbitrary meanings as a result of the univocality of sex (discussed in the second section of this chapter). Wittig therefore fragments this specious unity of the body as her first move in coming up with a new language for talking about bodies.

Wittig argues that language is a crucial site for intervention because language creates reality and exercises enormous power over who gets to be a subject. The system of compulsory heterosexuality “distribute[s] the rights of full and authoritative speech to males and [denies] them to females” (156). Women have to “assume the position of the authoritative, speaking subject […] and to overthrow both the category of sex and the system of compulsive heterosexuality” (157). The price of the ticket to be allowed to speak for queer people in such a system is to accept “the speaking subject’s own impossibility or unintelligibility” (157), or to not speak at all.

Wittig’s response to this quandary is to assert that overthrowing compulsory heterosexuality can be accomplished by speaking one’s way out of gender. Wittig theorizes that the straight mind is obsessed with binaries and divisions such as gender that inevitably lead to hierarchies that reinforce heterosexuality. Women must enact so many genders that they will eventually reveal the constructed nature of the gender binary. Wittig goes even further by endorsing what Butler calls a problematic “reverse discourse of equal reach and power” (163) when she argues that women must create an equally pervasive and all-powerful lesbianism that can overpower the reality imposed by heterosexual reality.

Butler’s problem with this approach is that it ignores the possibility of a person consciously choosing heterosexuality and re-instates a binary—straight and gay—that’s the very same oppressive flaw Wittig claims is the hallmark of the binary-loving straight mind. Butler furthermore believes Wittig’s work ignores the influence of other power structures aside from compulsory heterosexuality on sexuality and the spectrum of behaviors that cross the straight/gay binary within relationships and individuals. If one really thinks about how heterosexuality functions, Butler argues, one will eventually conclude that the impossibility of fulfilling the norms of heterosexuality completely makes heterosexuality “a parody of itself” (166). Wittig’s account of heterosexuality is reductive, in short.

Butler notes that gay and lesbian communities have re-appropriated identities and descriptions of gender such as “queens, femmes, girls, even the parodic reappropriation of dyke, queer, and fag [to] redeploy and destabilize the categories of sex and the originally derogatory categories for homosexual identity” (166). These re-appropriative actions highlight how arbitrary the connections between the feminine/masculine and bodies sexed as stereotypically feminine/masculine are.

Butler believes that Wittig’s perspective on power as something that one can escape or overthrow is a misguided one. There is no such thing as a willed escape from power relations, since even the idea of having a will has always already been conditioned by those power relations. According to Butler, “power can be neither withdrawn nor refused, but only redeployed" (169), and parodic redeployment has the most potential to subvert a system of compulsory heterosexuality.

Butler next examines Wittig’s novels, which she describes as being filled with scenes of bodily disintegration and violence perpetrated against women by other women. Wittig’s emphasis on destroying the sexed body is actually deployed to expose it as a construct of compulsory heterosexuality. Butler wonders if it is possible to reconstitute a body or an identity after such disintegration, and she eventually concludes that a process of “complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever shifting, indeed, where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated, and recirculated only within the context of a dynamic field of cultural relations” might be a real possibility(173).

Butler finds in Wittig’s argument the notion that one can become a lesbian in order to refuse gendering/sexing as a woman to be problematic as well. Within such an identification, lesbianism could eventually become as equally compulsory as heterosexuality and dependent on exclusionary practices that motivated the overthrow of compulsory heterosexuality to begin with. If lesbian identification is dependent on saying it is being not-heterosexual, lesbian identity paradoxically becomes dependent on heterosexuality having some stable, completely oppressive form in order to serve as lesbianism’s Other.

In this section, Butler examines the status of the body in accounts of gender/identity formation. Butler reviews the perspectives of Wittig, de Beauvoir, and Foucault on the body and suggests that it is possible to come up with a genealogy that accounts for the marking of the body as “the result of a diffuse and active restructuring of the social field” (178), instead of relying upon a prediscursive body.

Butler recounts that in Purity and Danger, theorist Mary Douglas posits that “‘ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main functions to impose [a] system on an inherently untidy experience’” (178; Douglas qtd. in Butler). Butler extends the idea of unruliness and untidiness to culture and societies as well. A person excluded or marginalized from the dominant order for violation of taboos such as homosexuality is figured as a “‘polluted person’” (179), according to Douglas. Polluted persons are essential parts of the boundary-marking practices of social systems.

Butler then briefly reviews the “media’s hysterical and homophobic response” (179) to the early AIDS epidemic as an example of this notion of polluting persons and their analogs in the body. The margins of the body—mouths and genitals, for example—are dangerous and vulnerable to pollution—and thus subject to rigid policing. Any “unregulated permeability” (180)—sexual intercourse between men, for example—has the potential to disrupt the “construction of stable bodily contours” (180) upon which compulsory heterosexuality and the heterosexual matrix depend. Such disruptions upend what it means to be a body, in fact. Butler therefore concludes that if we want to find a genealogy of how the body is marked without relying upon the fantasy of a body before discourse takes hold, we need to focus on “the regulatory practices within which bodily contours are constructed” (181).

Butler begins this project with Kristeva’s discussion of abjection, the process by which boundaries are constituted by excluding and transforming a part of the body/society to become a debased Other. This act of exclusion creates a fictive inside and outside, but there must be some means by which the “Others who become shit” (182) are expelled. An absolutely sealed boundary between inside and outside would lead to an explosion of pollution that would destroy the supposed boundary, so the boundary and the metaphorical inside/outside binary it creates are “a set of fantasies, feared and desired” (182) that create a stability and coherence upon which identity differentiation depends. When the identity founded upon that binary is challenged with transgressions of the binary, “the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement” (182). Butler wonders why these inside/outside binaries have been internalized.

In the last subsection, “From interiority to gender performatives,” Butler once again turns to Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) is Foucault’s examination of the “disciplinary regime of the subjection and subjectivation of criminals” (183). Butler reads the work as “Foucault’s effort to rewrite Frederick Nietzsche’s doctrine of internalization […] on the model of inscription” (183). Caught up within an all-encompassing prison system, prisoners become subject to societal prohibitions not by repression of desires by that system but, instead, by being compelled to incorporate the prohibitions in and on their bodies, until its workings have the appearance of their “very essence, style, and necessity,” “the essence of their selves, the meaning of their soul” (183).

This inscription of the soul on the body operates invisibly, so much so that the “soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself as the signifying lack” (184) and that “lack signifies the soul as that which cannot show” (184). One imagines that there is a soul waiting to be grasped if only it were not stuck inside the body, but really, there is no soul there, just the outside surface of a body that is stuck inside of that supposed soul. This circle of absence and presence “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” (184).

Butler contends gender works the same way, with the “gender as the disciplinary production of the figures of fantasy through the play of absence and presence on the body’s surface, the construction of the gendered body through a series of exclusions and denials, signifying absences” (184). One thinks that there is a sex inside of there, just waiting to be expressed as gender, but that state of affairs is deceptive. Compulsory heterosexuality and the prohibitions against incest and homosexuality regulate genders and bodies, giving them the appearance of stability and coherence when there is really nothing stable about either of them. When genders proliferate and the univocality of sex is disrupted by the appearance of bodies that do not abide by the heterosexual gender binary, that apparent coherence folds.

People like coherence, however, and they use “words, acts, gestures, and desire” to “produce the effect of an internal core or substance” (185) on the surface of the body that suggests but can never make present that which is absent (true sex). Such a state of affairs means that the gendered body is an effect of a performance in which bodily signs and discourse are the means by which gender is fabricated. What is called an interior essence in the gendered body is also a fantasy constructed by “gender border control that differentiates inner from outer” (186). Stashing this fabricated core in the psychological interior means one need never take a close, critical look at the social relations of power that are actually at work. There is, in short, no such thing as an essence inside that we express on the outside with gender.

The obviousness of this point becomes clear as soon as one looks at gender impersonation, or drag. When one looks at a person in drag, it “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 identity” (186). While some feminists have critiqued drag, cross-dressing, and butch/femme gender presentation as “degrading to women” or as “uncritical appropriation” (187) of sexual stereotypes, Butler contends that this reading is overly simplistic.

When observing any of these identities, Butler argues, we are actually seeing “three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance” (187). These sometimes incommensurate dimensions unravel any notion of univocal sex, and—more important— “drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (187). All gendering—even heterosexual cisgendering (when the gender identity matches the gender assigned at birth)—is about imitating and mashing up other received performances of gender because one can never grasp an original.

Behind every copy is yet another copy, “styles of the flesh” (190) that have a history that constrains the kinds of styles available to subjects. There are even steep costs to those “who fail to do their gender right” (190). The “sedimentation” (191) of certain sanctioned styles makes the male/female gender binary look natural when it is really nothing more than a set of ritualized, collective, public acts that are designed to bolster the fiction of a stable, substantial subject (doer).

Once we realize that arbitrary association of certain acts with certain genders is a fantasy, the next step is to recognize that the assembling of a particular set of gestures, styles, or actions is a person’s identity instead of that person’s essential inner gender identity being expressed through that performance. In the end, there is no essential gender, which means that the “proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality” provide an opening for changing gender reality as we know it (193).