Troubling Gender: linguistic and bodily solutions at the end of an epic narrative

Section 3, chapter iii: Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex

Butler begins the second half of her “Subversive Bodily Acts” section with a discussion of Monique Wittig’s “bodily disintegration and fictive sex” (151). She compares Wittig’s claims with those of Simone de Beauvoir: according to Butler, Wittig’s claim that “the category of sex is neither invariant nor natural, but is a specifically political use of the category of nature that serves the purpose of reproductive sexuality” (153) is congruent with Beauvoir’s insistence that women are made, not born. However, Wittig’s claim that “woman […] only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation [later defined as heterosexuality] to a man” (153) opposes (or perhaps takes further) Beauvoir’s claims about the existence of sex as a category. According to Wittig’s second claim, a lesbian would not be defined as a woman, because she exists not in oppositional relation to a man, but in, as Butler says, “a category that radically problematizes both sex and gender as stable political categories of description” (153). To Wittig, the category of sex is “discursively produced” (154) and relies heavily on language. She claims that the language of sex (the category) “forms perception by forcibly shaping the interrelationships through which physical bodies are perceived” (155). Even in naming parts of the body, says Wittig, we restrict them; we are reducing our bodies to fragmented sexual parts instead of a whole.

Butler continues to discuss Wittig’s views on language and compulsory heterosexuality. According to Wittig, there are two levels of reality, the “discursively constituted reality” and a “pre-social ontology.” Although Wittig doesn’t adhere to the concept of ontology in the traditional structuralist sense (i.e. that something original existed and we just put our cultural scripts onto it—at least that’s how I’m understanding it), she does acknowledge a pre-social ontology in order to emphasize how strong a force this discursively constituted reality actually is. In fact, she goes so far as to say that this force—specifically through the linguistic act of “naming” sex—is “an act of domination and compulsion, an institutionalized performative that both creates and legislates social reality” (157). Additionally, the “straight mind” (compulsory heterosexuality) oppresses lesbians, women and gay men by assuming that heterosexuality=subjectivity in discourse (in other words, if you are straight, you are a person, recognized as legitimate and able to have subjectivity in language—just because of the linguistic constructions that exist). Wittig also proposes the idea that there may be not two but many sexes, an idea that Butler expands in her next section on bodily inscriptions and performative subversions. According to Wittig, a “reverse discourse of equal reach and power” (163) is necessary—instead of letting linguistic realities be imposed on us (especially as women, lesbians and gay men, who do not benefit from the heterosexual imperative of subjectivity in language), we can impose our realities on language.

Butler takes some issue with Wittig’s exploration of lesbianism, or at least with her binarism between gay and straight. She says this kind of separation “replicates the kind of disjunctive binarism that [Wittig] herself characterizes as the divisive philosophical gesture of the straight mind” (165), and maintains that homosexual relations do not exist in a vacuum—they are “embedded in the larger structures of heterosexuality” (165). Butler does not want to transcend heterosexuality, but rather advocates for the “subversive and parodic redeployment of power” (169) that she discusses in the last chapter of this section. Additionally, she says that even lesbianism as a refusal to adhere to compulsory heterosexuality still maintains “a radical dependence on the very terms that lesbianism purports to transcend” (169). Lesbian sex is still constructed, Butler says, and ends her chapter by saying:

What a tragic mistake, then, to construct a gay/lesbian identity through the same exclusionary means, as if the excluded were not, precisely through its exclusion, always presupposed and, indeed, required for the construction of that identity.

As usual, Butler refuses to accept a new rigid system of categories as a solution to dismantling the gender binary. But what does she advocate? She actually gives some insight into this in the next chapter and more extensively in her conclusion.

Section 3, chapter iv: Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions

This (much shorter) chapter introduces the concept that Butler is famous for: performative gender. Butler puts many of her philosophical ideas to practice by applying them to the concept of “the body.” Just as gender is created, sex is too—whereas we see the hegemonic concept of the body as completely normal, Butler once again questions the genealogy of such an idea: “How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender significations are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?” (176). She draws on Foucault’s idea of “expos[ing] a body totally imprinted by history” (qtd. in Butler 176), but dismantles this concept of an imprinted body even further. She states that we have created boundaries and norms even within the way we see our bodies: “If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability [i.e. oral and anal sex, as she says later] constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment” (180). I found this statement particularly interesting in light of what we had “gut reactions” to when reading CAKE. How socially informed were these so-called “intrinsic” reactions?

Butler explores gender performativity in light of drag—especially emphasizing the concept of fabrication. She states that drag “implicity reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well its contingency” (187) and says that gender is not a stable construction. Rather, she describes it as “instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (191). I got particularly excited when she talked about this repetition as forming gender—I’m really interested in the cognitive patterns that form our everyday lives, especially those that we see as inherent or natural but that are really just there because we have repeated them time after time. I’m also curious about what acts we can dismantle and repattern, and where our impetus would be for doing so would be rooted.

Conclusion: From Parody to Politics

In her conclusion, Butler restates many of the points she made in Gender Trouble and, surprisingly, brings them to a level of practical application. Her goal is to open up and destabilize categories and identities that we have always taken for granted as stable, and she starts (just as she began the book) with the feminist “we.” She counters the traditional identity politics of feminism by saying that “there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but rather that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed” (195). This theory maintains that these deeds are “discursively variable construction” (165) and in changing, they create new and constantly changing identities. The process of becoming a subject (especially in language) works the same way—she uses the example of our usual and “exasperated” lists of predicates—“color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness [that] invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’ at the end of the list”—to indicate the potential for an “illimitable process of signification itself” (198).

She closes with the idea that I got so excited about—“repetitive signifying.” After having stated that no “original” concept of gender or identity ever existed and that we constantly reconstruct our gender through changing discourse, she states the same for patterning actions: “there is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there” (199). She talks about practices of parody and light-heartedness as a way to dismantle hegemonic oppressive systems, saying that inhabiting “ontological locales that are fundamentally uninhabitable” has potential for “depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (200). Ontology is always normative, she says, based on constantly-changing discourses. In order to “redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which still exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible,” (203), Butler says we must inhabit those spaces. In doing so, we can dismantle our assumptions and sufficiently trouble gender.

I’m curious about what inhabiting these extra-discursive (to apply Hollway’s term here) spaces actually looks like, especially in terms of behavior patterning. Can you identify situations in your life or others’ lives where this happens? What are the cultural implications involved, especially on a local (social) level?