Gender Trouble: Chapter One

This is not a fun post. This is just a stream-of-conscious style grappling with Judith Butler in real time. I want to make a joke, like "Gender Trouble? More like I'm in trouble!" I know. Ugh.

Theorists to know

Foucault: sex identities are a result of heterosexual hegemony

Beauvoir: "women are the negative men"

Lacan: gender identities are the manifestation of sexual taboos

Irigary: women are an absence/void because identity is formed through phallocentric language

Wittig: the universal is always masculine. gender is not universal. therefore, gender is always feminine.

Key Terms

representational politics

open vs. unified coalition

heterosexual matrix

signifying economy/economy of sexuality

Key Ideas

1. "women" as the subject feminism: by making woman the subject feminism, we close ourselves off to other identities and future identities. we limit what it means to be a woman, but we also tie the female experience solely to the body and in relation to the male

2. biological sex is interpeted through cultural constructs of gender. biological sex signifies a gender only because we already have an idea of gender identities

3. free floating artifice of gender is the idea of gender expressed without a binary

4. women have culturally been defined as "man's lack." feminist critics (beauvoir, wittig, and irigary) trying to shift the gender hierarchy continue to identify women in relation to men. this perpetuates women as subjected rather than subject.

5. unifying women: it is not helpful to create a unified identity because a unified identity still depends on exclusion--even if it is a hypothetical exclusion. there can be no one essentialized or totalizing natural women identity.

6. gender is a deed without a doer; there is no agent (cogito) behind the cultural constructs of gender; we as individuals consciously perform the deed, but we did not construct the deed.

7. gender is an on-going process. gender is a repeated stylization of the body. this stylization is created through a series of repeated acts. these repeated acts conform to and follow cultural expectations. by repeating them, they form our sense of identity and make it seem like an essential and natural identity.

Important Quotes and My Analysis

• "the qualifications for being a subject must first be met before representation can be extended"

1. so the earlier feminist goal of developing a rhetoric to increase and better representation of women socially and political is not possible because it does not address the root problem: woman is not recognized because she is not recognized as subject.

• "But the subjects regulated by such structures, are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures."

1. so by creating a rhetoric to represent women, you create a structure that defines women.

2. because that structure then defines the entire gender, it contains and limits the gender.

3. because it limits the definition of women, it limits the representation of women.

4. because that rhetoric has traditionally defined women by opposing them against men, it follows an especially limiting binary. it defines women through the negative which denies them the freedom to define themselves?

• "It is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of 'women,' the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought."

1. what do we use to categorize women as women?

2. how does the creation of the female identity in turn contain, limit, and oppress women?

• "The performative invocation of a nonhistorical "before" becomes the foundational premise that guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract."

1. because women are defined as women, they behave as women

2. because defined-women behave as women, they are continued to be defined as women.

3. ad infinitum

• "If one 'is' a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive . . . because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities."

1. this seems straight forward enough. women have different experiences. a poor woman experiences gender and life differently than a rich woman. a white woman differently than a black woman. an american woman differently than a french woman or polish woman or japanese woman or kenyan woman or bolivian woman or russian woman or phillippino woman or brazilian woman and so forth. an abled body woman differently than a disabled woman. a heterosexual woman differently than a queer woman. a woman with children differently than a woman without children.

2. gender identity exists simultaneously with other identities that both inform and undermine perceptions of gender

• "The masculine/feminine binary constitutes not only the exclusive framework in which that specificity can be recognized, but in every other way the 'specificity' of the feminine is once again fully decontextualized and separated off analytically and politically from the constitution of class, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power relations that both constitute 'identity' and make the singular notion of identity a misnomer."

• "By conforming to a requirement of representational politics that feminism articulate a stable subject, feminism thus opens itself to charges of gross misrepresentation."

1. by claiming to represent all women, feminism ignores the intersecting identities of most women.

2. by claiming to represent the needs of all women, feminism ignores the needs of most women.

• "To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?"

1. does the current female identity only function when juxtaposed to a male identity?

2. does the current female identity only function when straight?

3. um, the answer to both questions is a resounding yes. i'd also probably add in more questions to which the answer is yes.

• "Perhaps, paradoxically, 'representation' will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of 'women' is nowhere to be presumed."

1. we must recognize the "category of women" excludes many female subjects and refuses them representation socially and politically.

2. it continues to exert systems of dominance upon those excluded from the category in different ways than it oppresses those categorized as women.

3. feminism only works when we realize there is no monolithic gender identitiy

• "the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the casual result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex."

1. gender is an interpretation of sex

2. there are many possible interpretations

3. women in china express their gender identity differently than women in the u.s. express their gender identity.

4. gender is interpreted not through the body, but through cultural meanings: hair, clothing, carriage, and more.

5. a female sexed body could use cultural constructs to signify male gender or a male sexed body could use cultural constructs to signify a female gender

• "And what is 'sex' anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such 'facts' for us?"

1. here, she goes on to just ask a series of questions. i think they are important questions, but overall this passage is just lazy. there are specific 'facts' to which she could point to contest sex as a clearly defined and permanent category. for example, intersexed bodies or hormonal imbalances, etc.

2. but in the end, she argues that, currently, "sex itself is a gendered category"

3. we are interpreting an interpretation

• "When the relevant 'culture' that 'constructs' gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny. On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that 'one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.' For Beauvoir, gender is 'constructed,' but implied in her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender.

1. so gender is a cultural construct

2. but are cultural constructs something over which we have no control? we simply unintentionally conform to, adapt to, and perpetuate them as a part of the culture?

3. or are cultural constructs gradually and intentionally learned as part of a process? and if so, how much agency does that give us? can we learn different gender identities? can we learn to resist a gender identity?

4. who gets to decided the cultural meaning of the body: culture or the individual?

• "In these 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."

1. the identity of woman always depends on the existence of another identity (i.e. masculine identity).

• "A humanist feminist position might understand gender as an attribute of a person wh is characterized essentially as a pregendered substance or 'core,' called the person, denoting a universal capacity for reason, moral deliberation, or language. The universal conception of the person, however, is displaced as a point of departure for a social theory of gender by those historical and anthropolgical positions that understand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts."

1. an ungendered human being is a being with reason, a morality, and a language.

2. they are then further defined by a series of relational identities

3. a gender is not a complete identity

4. so is gender an essential or a secondary characteristic?

• "Through what act of negation and disavowal does the masculine pose as a disembodied universality and the feminine get constructed as a disavowed corporeality?"

1. YAS. YAS. YAS. THIS ANSWER IS ALL ABOUT MOTHERHOOD, I THINK. JUDY B. WILL TOTALLY DISAGREE WITH ME BECAUSE SHE IS NOT ABOUT "THE CARTESIAN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FREEDOM AND THE BODY" OR MIND/BODY DUALISM BUT I DO NOT CARE. IT IS WHAT WE ARE WORKING WITH, PEOPLE.

2. the feminine is a body because she is a reproductive body

3. the reproductive body produces an essential body: mother

4. mother than demands further identity markers and cultural expectations

5. the masculine becomes a "non-reproductive" body

6. so the masculine has no body identity within this context

7. the masculine then becomes the disembodied identity

8. the disembodied identity becomes constructed as a soul or spirit

9. the spirit becomes the identity which, in turn, is universal in its need to transcend the physical

• "[T]he insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of 'women' are constructed. . . Clearly, the value of coalitional politics is not to be underestimated, but the very form of coalition, of an emerging and unpredictable assemblage of positions, cannot be figured in advance."

1. so how do you create a political identity with common goals without inherently excluding identities?

2. how do you unify/include without exclusion?

3. how do you imagine a hypothetical identity?

4. dialogue has essential power dynamics at work.

5. subject-speaker, subject-listener

6. can there ever be a unified speaker? unified listener?

7. is unity even necessary? or does the idea of unity perpetuate exclusionary identities?

8. we need to make sure that we have an "open coalition" rather than a "unified coalition"

9. an open coalition allows an infinite number of growing and shifting identities.

• "To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person? To what extent is "identity" a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience?"

1. so expressions of gender are not expressions of an identity. expressions of gender are the identity themselves.

2. these expressions are an affirmation or a rejection of the normative ideal

3. you cannot "be" a gender. you can only express or represent a gender.

4. to represent women as feminine continues to identify women by their bodies rather than "the internal coherence"

5. that is, it continues the "mind/body" dualism with women as the body

• "Gender can denote a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire, only when sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate gender--where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self--and desire--where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires."

1. a woman is a feminine subject that sexually desires a male subject

2. a man is a masculine subject that sexually desires a female subject

3. so what about a female subject that sexually desires a female subject or a masculine subject that desires no subject?

4. these identities undermine the historical understanding of gender

5. Foucault's Herculine: sexuality can be experienced without a gender

• "If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to coform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility."

1. if there are physical markers beyond the heteronormative physical markers, the heteronormative binary is a construct.

2. if it is a construct, we can deconstruct it to allow other identities.

3. how can we "deregulate" attributes so they are not gendered? in other words, how can we express identities without gendered attributes?

4. "the deed is everything" so gender identity is just a series of deeds. it is the expression and the words we use to describe the expression

• "Power, rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently generative) functions of different relations. Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power relations is not a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The production swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of 'subjects' that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible."

• "The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy."

1. i need more from butler on this. like, why is this the case? what supports this? i don't necessarily not agree; i just don't think she gives enough to support her case here.

2. i think if i just bring in baudrillaird's simulacra and simulation myself, it becomes more persuasive. i wonder why she doesn't just reference him outright.

• gender is a process

#judithbutler #genderidentity #gendertrouble #bodymind #femalebody #reproduction #heteronormative