The Inner and Outer Bounds of Gender Identity

Judith  Butler sets up an interesting analysis of  the body and what possible gender constructs define it; She is all the while really questioning if it is in fact,  the boundaries of the body that define gender (at least that is how I understood it).  Through her research, she is able to reveal how historical influences are able to mold perception of body, thus tying in the idea of a culture influenced gender (and slightly re-visiting the ideas of the nature /culture binary discussed in Orton’s essay). “Within the metaphoric of this notion of cultural values is the figure of history as the relentless writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transfigured in order for “culture” to emerge” (FT 435).

Additionally, Butler also discusses how understanding the physical limitations of the body can then give room to analyze the the gender performatives that are outwardly expresssed.  I found that part of her essay to be particularly interesting because it forces us to think about how and why we carry out specific behaviors.  It’s  actually confusing to think that expressions are or  could be manifestations of a gender identity that we are trying to hide, as Butler discusses, “…acts, gestures, and desire produce…this on the surface on the surface of the body…but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause” (FT438). When these actions are closely considered, we are left to catagorize behaviors and then impart the nature/ cultural standards of gender, which would be exclusive.

I  can partially understand what Wittig argues about , where gender can be seen “…as the workings of sex.”  But at the same time it also complicates the issue of our bodies being seen as a curltural sign when we are considering those who do not conform to the inner and outter bounds of the body due to performative expression that would render a different appearance or essence (as with Newton’s study).  Butler is right to say that “…gender should not be construed as a stable identity…” (FT441).  As society continues to change and adopt new ways of thinking, its important to redefine gender roles.  Although I still feel your sex is either male or female regardless of performaitve expression, there should be serious discussion on how gender is to be understood…or just agree to disagree that is incredibly ambiguous.

 

 

 

The life of Feminism

I must start this post by saying, feminism never seemed as complex as it is before this course. As one of 19 females within my family, I never stopped to think what exactly does it mean to be a female. Hearing the word ‘feminist’, but not fully understanding the complexity of it has left me reading and re-reading this excerpt. Judith Butler, though very articulate, has left me in a slight radical state of mind. Are we born females or is this gender role something that we acquire over time?

The challenge posed among the initiation of the reading, set up my perspective for the entirety of the exerts. The thought that sex and gender are socially constructed was something that I had never conceived to be true. How is it that my entire life I have distinguished ‘females’ as something that we are born as, whereas in all actuality it is something we have been socially constructed to be. When I began to associate this notion, I realized that as young girls we are automatically deemed to be delicate. It is implied that we be represented by specific colors, themes, roles etc. But does this make it true that sex and gender are both delegated?

Though I understood the gist of the reading, I found it difficult to agree or disagree with it all. Butler brings up valid points of sex and gender being social and political, but that could be said of many things in life. It comes down to a point of how we want to identify a person. When we think about women, we think about all the things that come along with them; make up, dresses, heels, bows, ceremonies. This may be off topic, but why is it that a women is more fluid into a “male” role. They can wear sneakers, ties and shave their heads, things that are dignified male traits, but still be deemed women, but men who do the opposite are exemplified as transgender etc. Though I may be flipping the script, it wouldn’t be a post by me if I didn’t refute what was argued in our readings.

Over all, I tried my best to understand this reading, and it may be that last week was my first class, but I am having a hard time understanding the theory. Reading everyone’s post has helped me catch a gist of it, but still difficult for me to write about it. Does anyone have any suggestions as far as being an effective reader with this type of literature?

Priori in gender Identity

By Mayra Jiménez

I have written a creative answer to Wittig and Foucault in relation to the body, and the idea of a preexisting priori that culture has defaced by placing categories to fit a planned scheme.

“Priori”

My body is the subject for much criticism, and has been used to define the ways of the world, as if my body is only a defining and concrete answer to everything I feel, think, and do.

I, the mind inside, the spirit, the human, the child, the parent, the sibbling, the artist, the worker, the healer…all my I’s are what I am; whatever I fit into my bucket, that’s who and what I am.

It is not my body, and not certainly a sticker posted on my forhead or on my back, what can define who I am. I am me, the I that is not defined until the day I die.

I can write tattoos on my skin, but that doesn’t mean I am dirty or perverted. I choose the lenght of my hair, not to fit into a gender acepted kind of look, but to match the way I want to feel the air against my skin…

Culture and Gender

           “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one”; Butler claims that the phrase is “odd” and “nonsensical”. I agree with Butler’s beginning point, that culturally we put to much emphasis on gender and those who do not fall into this category are left “outside the human”. Leaving those who feel that God has placed them into the wrong body shunned from our society and viewed as taboo. Our culture imposes gender rules on us from the very beginning by asking if  “is it a girl or boy” and assigning the color pink to a baby girl and blue to a boy. Butler poses a question from the very beginning, “are there ever humans who are not, as it were always already gendered?” I believe that there are people who are not always gendered. For those who are transgender they are stuck between what is “culturally correct”and their own feeling of what their gender is.  In these terms gender goes beyond the body but implies that gender is also a state of mind. 

         This opening phrase is entirely culturally driven which caused me to think about many coming of age ceremonies such as; a quinceanera and a bar mitzvah, and many phrases such as; “a girl becomes a woman once she has a child” or “or a woman becomes a mother once she becomes pregnant while a man becomes a father upon seeing his child born”. Each of the ceremonies mentioned are transitions for a child to become an adult and each phrase represents a cultural accomplishment which Beauvoir means. As Butler states, ” Beauvoir, of course, meant merely to suggest that the category of women is a variable cultural accomplishment, a set of meanings that are taken on or taken up within the cultural filed, that no one is born with a gender–gender is acquired”. 

     The importance of gender and being defined as either male or female is “odd” since once we are in our mothers wombs we are “female”. It isn’t until later that the male hormone kicks in and his gentiles appear. Something that is mentioned later on in the piece when Butler presents Wittig’s second argument that lesbians are not woman. ” Wittig understands sex to be discursively produced and circulated by a system of significant oppressive to women, gays and lesbians”.

From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

During the discusions of gender there has been the main idea of society indicating which is the way to go for each gender in terms of roles to take in every aspect of life. This excerpt from Butler is an example of many stereotypes that are said about certain situations in life about what genders should and should not do. Butler mentions the diffrence between the external and the internal of the body. Butler feels that the body is sometimes looked ‘as passive and prior to discourse”. In other words there are many times that we are judged by our appearence. Our gender is one of the first things that are evident physically and our part of our external.

Butler mentions Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas. This excerpt according to Butler suggests that the body entails many taboos and cultural coherence. The body give impressions of somone from the outside but in actuallity internally the intelect is completley different. The way to differentiate the two are two words used by Butler one of them is the performatice they are gestures, acts, and desires created by each person. Then their is the fabrcications which is what the body demonstrates by general and corporal signs.

In Butler’s excerpt there are many examples of showing the diffrence between the external and internal of each individual. The gender troubles seem to be the “body” because it immediatley associates certain objective views. As Butler mentions other subjects like gays and lesbians and states that people immediatley associate gay with the AIDS disease. This can be seen as a performative stereotype. Butler’s excerpt mentioned many important examples and thoughts that explain the gender trouble.

The Heterosexual Matrix

Reading Judith’s Butler’s excerpt from Gender Trouble opened up my eyes and mind to theories I was not even aware of. In the excerpt, Butler introduces Monique Wittig’s views, and begins by stating her beliefs that the terms “male” and “female” and “masculine” and “feminine” are only existent within the heterosexual matrix, and are just common terms that keeps the matrix concealed, protecting it from radical critique (141).

This view is interesting because it challenges terms and language that have been existent in the minds and mouths of people for centuries. Where did these terms come from, and, more interestingly, are they serving some agenda?

Butlergoes on to highlight Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” Beauvoir believes everyone is born with a sex in the anatomical sense, but a person acquires gender over time. Sex is a just a trait of being human, but sex does not determine what gender one can become (142).

            Wittig supports the de Beauvoir theory that “one is not born a woman,” but does not agree with Beauvoir’s theory that everyone is born with a sex. For Wittig, sex is a gendered category which serves a political purpose of reproductive sexuality. Sex then promotes heterosexuality and is not natural. Thus, a lesbian is not a woman, and that the term woman exists only to stabilize and consolidate an opposite relation to man—the relation being heterosexuality (143,144).

            This is the part of the text that just confused me. I was able to grasp the idea that gender could quite possibly be acquired throughout time, though even that notion is a little hard to understand, especially in the case of homosexuality—whether one is born gay, lesbian, or straight. Would the acquired gender argument refute that one is born a certain way?—Please feel free to chime in on this!

            But Wittig’s idea that sex is a gendered category was and is still hard for me to grasp, not because I don’t understand what she is saying, but because I don’t understand how she could think this is quite possible. It is clear that men and women are both human, but there are distinctions that separate the two—not only physically, but internally as well.  Butlersays, “That penis, vagina, breasts, and so forth are named sexual parts is both a restriction of the erogenous body to those parts and a fragmentation of the body as a whole.” Perhaps the names have become restrictions, but named or not, it does not change the fact these parts do exist. (146)

Wittig refuses to take part in these labels and wants to overthrow the vocabulary. She wants to change the description of bodies without referring to sex or gender.Butlersays that, “the political cultivation of intuition is precisely what she wants to elucidate, expose, and challenge” (145).

ButButleralso says that “it is unclear, however that these features could be named in a way that would not reproduce the reductive operation of the category of sex.” I don’t think that these features can be named without sex being involved.

 “‘Men’ and ‘women’ are political categories, not natural facts,” Wittig says (147). And that is where the agenda comes into play. Can sex really all just be some political ploy to keep men on top? Is this all really just serving the heterosexual matrix?

Gender Trouble: Escaping Operative and Compulsive Heterosexuality

By Frank Miller

Butler opens with a critical approach to a claim made in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” As Butler poses several questions directed toward the distinctions between gender and sex in humans, her readers begin to question Beauvoir’s claim as well, attempting to deconstruct the distinctions within one’s own mind. Butler then offers her interpretation of Beauvoir’s claim, “gender [is] acquired…whereas sex cannot be changed…gender is the variable cultural construction of sex” (142). However, Beauvoir is simply used  as a stepping stool to introduce the more controversial Monique Wittig.

The passage transitions to a claim made by Wittig in Feminist Issues (1:1), “one is not born a woman.” Wittig views sex as a distinction that already contains a gender (which culture has grown to accept as “the norm,” though it is far from normal), a belief supported by her proposal that “sex is neither invariant nor natural, but is a specifically political use of the category of nature that serves the purposes of reproductive sexuality” (143). Wittig’s second, and perhaps more provocative claim lies in her belief that “a lesbian is not a woman” (143) and that she argues that the term “woman” is dependent upon the existence of the institution of heterosexuality (serving as the binary opposite term to “man”). A lesbian is much different from a “woman” because she rejects the conventions of heterosexuality, no longer allowing her to be defined as a term that exists as a byproduct of a tradition she opposes. In Butler’s analysis she concludes that a lesbian is “sexless,” and that Wittig too would believe that “one is not a female, one becomes female” (144) referencing Beauvoir’s claim. Butler brings up a particularly interesting concept stating that “one can, if one chooses, become neither female nor male, woman nor man” and that “the lesbian appears to be a third gender…a category that radically problematizes both sex and gender as stable political categories of description” (144).

Wittig writes that it is a “linguistic discrimination of ‘sex’ secur[ing] the political and cultural operation of compulsory heterosexuality,” speaking of how “sex” has been dubbed female, while males “within this system participate in the form of the universal person” (144). She calls for females to escape from the title that “female sex” itself suggests within the political and cultural borders of heterosexuality. She proposes language as the power to signify the structures of  “sex” in a heterosexual and compulsive manner, and that this power has “distribut[ed] the rights of full and authoritative speech to males and deny them to females” (147). Wittig states that women must be much more assertive and take an authoritative role, which is “in some sense their ontological grounded ‘right’ — and to overthrow both the category of sex and the system of compulsory heterosexuality that is its origin” (147). She labels the “the ‘naming’ of sex an act of domination” and that “‘men’ and ‘women’ are political categories, and not natural facts” (147). This seems as if it opposes what was said earlier to radically reorganize the description of bodies and sexualities without recourse to sex” (145).

At the end of the excerpt, Butler poses a question for her audience, “what criteria would be used to decide the question of sexual “identity”?” (162) which seems to be where the heart of the problem exists, and raises multiple questions. Is becoming a lesbian really breaking the ties of “female sex” or taking an authoritative stance against heterosexuality or is it just a “third category” that can be used to side-step the real issue of women’s oppression or add more chaos to the mix of labeling gender and sex? Additionally, can any fourth or alternative categories arise from this mode of thinking? In regards to language serving as the liberator of women within a male implemented and dominated system, wouldn’t women participating in the “naming” of sex as an act to free themselves that has been considered a “dominant” act be just as wrong? Wittig’s statement on 145 regarding radical reorganization seems the most reasonable to me.

Constructing Gender

In class and in our past readings, we have touched upon the idea that gender is not a state into which a person is born, but rather a role that is eventually assumed. But what then, is gender? If it is an unnatural division between the sexes, then how and why does it exist? Through the Butler article and her understanding of Wittig, the construction and purpose of gender is called into question as well as the definition of sex in the binary male and female sense. The foundation of the query lays in the fact that there are obvious exceptions to the “rule” of heterosexuality e.g. lesbian and gay men, so the rule is obviously not a rule at all. Therefore, the sexes are not complementary opposites at all and are not restricted to an “one or the other” ethos.

Before I discuss the building blocks of gender and sex construction, attention must be given to the purpose of gender and identifying sex. As I reflected in my earlier post on Rubin’s writing, the assignment of gender is not biological, but economic and social. Throughout history, heterosexuality as an institution has supported role of marriage as the preeminent  goal of human relations. A woman then, as society categorizes the creature, “only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation to a man; that relation…is heterosexuality.”(143) So what is woman exactly? The opposite of a man. I would argue that by society identifying woman this way, it is only further proving that gender is fabricated an unnatural.How can you define a living being only through its comparison to another being? The answer is through the forms of the sexes, i.e. through the “sexual” parts of the male and female body. Butler comments,”That penis, vagina, breasts, and so forth, are named sexual parts is both a restriction of the erogenous body to those parts and fragmentation of the body as a whole.”(146) If sex is restricted to these areas of the body, then what of the other parts of a man and woman? Does a man’s arm have no sex? I imagined for a moment, a rather violent image of man and woman with their “sexual” organs hacked off. They did not cease to exist or lose their humanity, or even lose their unique composition. The image came to mind easily because by attempting to rationalize and classify gender by a person’s sexual organs, words are dissecting the being and placing certain fragments above others. It is language then, that Butler argues is the founding construct to sex and gender roles.

“Language gains the power to create ‘socially real.'”(146) Butler is seeming obsessed with the power of language, and for good reason. She argues that sex appears only in a “second level” of reality. That is, it does not exist as a universal norm. Instead, it is called into being by language, which Wittig defines as ” as set of acts, repeated over time, that produce reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as ‘facts.'”(147) However, the misperception has become material through language and through time, which explains how Wittig could argue that “sex” as a category can enslave. Speaking, as Wittig argues, “invokes a seamless identity of all things.”(150) Therefore, language creates a concrete frame into which people have to pour themselves. How can anyone, regardless of sex, identify themselves if not through language? When a person is born and develops they do not place their own name on their sex, let alone establish their own hierarchy of sexual identifiers. A person learns a language with pre-established “rules” and emphasis. How can sex be deconstructed when many languages are composed of masculine and feminine word forms? I agree with both Wittig and Butler in their assessment that in order to deconstruct sex, our language of binary male and female must be eliminated.

The Natural Irrelevance of Male and Female Divisions

Maybe I have been brainwashed by traditional society to believe in the importance of sex, but I could not wrap my head around the foundational arguments of Monique Wittig’s thoughts on sex and gender in “Gender Trouble” by Judith Butler. I found it virtually impossible to follow Wittig’s premise that “there is no reason to divide up human bodies into male and female sexes except that such a division suits the economic needs to heterosexuality and lends a naturalistic gloss to the institution of heterosexuality,” (143).

Even with clear paraphrasing of this argument by Judith Butler, I cannot look at sex divisions as politically constructed agendas. When all animal species that reproduce through sexual reproduction are divided almost equally into male and female, it is hard for me to see this as either biologically coincidental. I think that sex divisions have to be meaningful simply because it does serve a purpose in animal societies of all sorts and even penguins and seahorses and lions have established roles based on sex. In looking at a male penguin as a caretaker I see that gender roles are not dictated by sex in the animal kingdom, but I also see a clear example of gender role division by sex in a society that is not linguistic or political. This makes me face an obstacle in comprehending Wittig’s argument and more importantly makes me faces obstacles in understanding my own thinking.

I almost was incapable of following Wittig’s logic and I really dislike that I cannot tell if this because I felt that there was faulty reasoning or if I cannot comprehend a different view of sex that is so far outside the box of what I have known. De Beauvoir’s view of gender as a role and act made perfect sense to me, and also accounted to why certain individuals with certain biological characteristics might play a certain gender based on how they might believe it suited them to be cast in a certain role.

I am unable to separate a physical body from the equation. It feels uncharacteristically traditional and conservative for me to say this, but I see the interplay of my body and my identity to be a very important part of the human experience. Try as I might to see gender identified physical features as “in themselves as neutral as others” (145) I cannot do that.  Biologically there is of course more in common between male and female than there is different, but it is also small biological differences that make me different from my cat. Ironically, Wittig is also unable to separate gender and sex (which is why she postulates that lesbians are not women), but our thinking diverges about this issue.

I feel that I am an interplay between a sex and a gender, much more like De Beauvoir’s view.  But I am extremely bothered by my inability to fully understand Wittig’s reasoning. I do not like feeling a block between my understanding and her perspective particularly if this is not my thinking as an individual but rather society thinking for me. I hope to gain further clarity on Wittig’s argument and get more insight into how to further think unconventionally about sex.

The Birth of the Gender System

In the excerpt from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler critiques the ideas of original and performative gender. Butler’s begins by implying that the body, far from being the determinant of sex/gender distinction, is simply a blank slate on which to inscribe the culture. She cites examples from Christian and Cartesian principles, which describe the body as a a “void”, “signifying nothing”, and “radically immaterial”. Foucault and Kafka provide the background for Butler’s idea on the cultural inscription of the body, where ” the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history, [which is] the creation of values and meanings by signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body” (497). I would further invoke Foucault’s concept of the prison system onto this idea. The final, most efficient form of social control that Foucault describes depends on the social construction of norms, through which an individual can judged as a deviant, these norms are the rules which govern society, and through which the governed learn to govern and judge themselves. Tying this back into Butler’s point of the body as a “passive medium”, one can consider the idea of gender norms as the rules that govern the sex/gender distinctions in society. Therefore, the body does not subscribe to a gender of it’s own volition, and according to Butler, it does not subscribe to a sex either.

Butler further cites examples that show how cultural discourse constructs the body. Mary Douglas explains that “the very contours of ‘the body’ are are established through markings that seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence” (497). This means that the body is like clay to be molded for the creation of social order, “the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain taboos regarding appropriate limit, postures, and modes of exchange…” Like Ortner’s investigation of the parallel between Culture and Nature vs. Man and Woman, Douglas’ concept uses the same language of Culture’s manipulation or organization of Nature. Nature is raw and must be curbed by culture. She further goes on to explain how this concept relates to the polluting person; “he has developed wrong condition, or simply crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone” (498). This explains the fear of homosexuality, with the belief that the homosexual has crossed a boundary, and is therefore at risk of passing on this disease, which is what I assume the “danger” another person may face from the polluted individuals “crossing”. Admittedly, some of this fear enlists from the view that AIDS if a “gay disease”, further alienating this community, but there is also the fear of catching “gayness” which Butler surprisingly does not mention though it is a major factor in the marginalizing of homosexuals. Returning to Foucault, punishment not only works to chasten the delinquent, but it should serve as an example or deterrent to possible delinquents as well.

Though I focused on the way rules and norms inscribe gender onto the body, as a Shakespearean, the idea of crossing dressing, in addition to gender norms and fear of pollution naturally bring me to the story of Hic Mulier and Haec Vir. Both represent a transgressive performance of gender by women and men respectively, and literally translated mean the manlike woman and the womanish man. However, at the same time, there was a belief that sex was  changeable and that a woman could physically transform into a man. Although there was no evidence of the converse happening, men harbored the fear of being turned into women.

-Kaydian Campbell

“Are All Feminists Lesbians?”: Challenging Gender Transcendence

Less than a week ago, I wrote a frenzied post about obligatory, or compulsory, heterosexuality. “[Gender] entails that sexual desire be directed towards the other sex,” said Gayle Rubin in The Traffic in Women, and from readings like this week’s Judith Butler essay, Gender Trouble, it is clear that compulsory heterosexuality is an often discussed topic in Feminist Theory. Here, Butler analyzes text by Monique Wittig, who writes of a need to “makes the categories of sex obsolete in language.” (153) Butler shows that Wittig’s ideas clash with the very community she strives to protect.

Butler’s analysis of Wittig begins similarly to Rubin’s of Lévi-Strauss. Drawing from a quote from pioneer Simone de Beauvoir (“One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one”), Wittig asserts what Lévi-Stauss implies: “there is no reason to divide up human bodies into male and female sexes except that such a division suits the economic needs of heterosexuality and lends a naturalistic gloss to the institution of heterosexuality.” (141, 143). Further, Wittig states that one cannot apply the gender division to a homosexual, and that “a lesbian is not a woman. A woman…only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation to a man; that relation…is heterosexuality.” (143) Beyond the gap between gender and sexuality, Wittig believes that because sexuality is non-conforming, gender too cannot be so stringently divided.

If a lesbian is not a woman, then what is she? If not for gender, how then are we to “‘qualify bodies as human bodies?” After all, “the moment in which an infant becomes humanized is when the question, ‘is it a boy or girl?’ is answered.” (142) Following Wittig’s logic, “a lesbian has no sex; she is beyond the categories of sex.” Society, then, truly means for gender and sexuality to be intertwined such that a compulsory heterosexuality may exist. To exist outside this “heterosexual matrix” is to be “a third gender or…a category that radically problematizes both sex and gender as stable political categories of description.” (144)

How then do we as the minority come out (no pun intended) from under the heterosexist regime? They key, according to Wittig, is language: “Wittig argues that the linguistic discrimination of ‘sex’ secures the political and cultural operation of compulsory heterosexuality.” Language perpetuates “sex,” or more appropriately, the “female sex,” which lacks a parallel. The male exists instead “in the form of the universal person.” (144) Wittig calls to “overthrow the very grammar that institutes ‘gender’.” (145) Later, Butler describes Wittig’s attempt in Les Guérilleres to eliminate male pronouns that cause the gender division, instead “to offer elles [typically feminine plural] as standing for the general the universal.” In English as in French, it is banal to address mixed company as “the guys,” or employ the masculine plural ils, yet almost sacrilege to use the inverse. Wittig claims, “‘The goal of this approach is…to make the categories of sex obsolete in language.'” (153) Essentially, minorities are trapped within a culture, down to the words used to describe themselves. In making “categories of sex obsolete,” women and homosexuals may achieve gender transcendence, freeing themselves from both linguistic and literal bondage.

Butler sees problems with Wittig’s theory. Where Wittig writes of the homosexual “no longer [knowing] one’s sex, [engaging] in a confusion and proliferation of categories that make sex an impossible category of gender,” Butler points out that Wittig “overrides those discourses within gay and lesbian culture that proliferate…gay sexual identities by appropriating and redeploying the categories of sex. (156) Wittig sees language as the enemy of the homosexual, and yet the gay community, using words like “dyke, queer and fag redeploy and destabilize the categories of sex and the originally derogatory categories for homosexual identity.” (156)

Further, Butler claims, “Whereas Wittig…envisions lesbianism to be a full-scale refusal of heterosexuality, I would argue that even the refusal constitutes an engagement and, ultimately, a radical dependence on the very terms that lesbianism purports to transcend.” (158) When comparing Wittig’s text with Butler’s rebuttal, the reader begins to picture Wittig as an idealist born too late, that her “radical” ideas no longer fit within the framework of modern feminism.

Butler concludes that Wittig’s texts “cut off any kind of solidarity with heterosexual women and implicitly [assumes] that lesbianism is the logically or politically necessary consequence of feminism.” (162) It is as if Butler seeks to disqualify Wittig entirely, and while her ideas may be antiquated, they are not without some merit.

Foucault and Wittig through Butler: Power and Parody in Gender Performatives. L.R. Corcoran

Implicit in the distinction between sex and gender is the ideological formulation that sex in a distinct and imperturbable entity. Sex–as constructed through the binary opposition of male and female–would seem to be a posteriori a biological facticity. All organisms in nature appear to inherently and neatly fit the sexual demarcation: cows and bulls, chickens and roosters, meres and stallions, etc. This assumption then logically leads to the notion that sex, constructed as such, is situated outside of discursive construct, and, upon these basic biological differences, the social structure of gender is laid.

Butler readily points out that even Foucault, an ardent archeologist of discourse, allows this fundamental bedrock of gender identity to remain uncracked. To this apparent oversight, she parries: what if sex (not gender) is as much of socially rendered episteme as gender? That is, what if our very model sex perception–the way the mind perceives body parts and constitutes them as a whole–is a purview molded by socioeconomic forces that seek to keep to the established order of things (in this case heterosexuality) utterly hegemonic?

Before getting to Foucault, let us first examine this concept of a socially molded sexual perception. For this, we turn to Wittig as quoted by Butler in Gender Troubles: “But we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construct [my italics], an ‘imaginary formation’ which reinterprets physical features…through the network of relationships in which they are perceived.” This statement, a profound one at that, takes on a striking Bakhtinian formulation (Butler mentions Wittig’s invocation of Bakhtin); in that it circumscribes all perception within the materiality of a social semiotics. In other words, the paternalistic hierarchy is indissolubly embedded in language. Therefore the means by which humans organize perception, a procedure that undoubtably passes through the relay of language, will always perpetuate the hierarchy.

With this reconsideration, that of reframing sex from biology to culture, Foucault’s theory of criminal inscription begins to further unravel the initial construct of sex. In his theory, Foucault  claims that criminals are not corrected by having their desires limited, rather they are rather forced to signify the law. The law is never actually internalized, but instead, it is incorporated within the criminal: they become signs for the law. This role is not due to an internal essentialist nature–although it is expressed as such–it is impressed upon the criminal by an external force. Here Witig and Foucault intersect. Both are describing a mechanism which purports an essentialism that is in fact a construct of power. Foucault defines the soul in such terms: “It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within, the body by the functioning of a power…”

vis-à-vis these premises, Butler’s idea of gender performatives can be illuminated. That is to say, sex and by extension gender are roles ascribed by paternalistic hierarchy which must be played. Butler states, “Hence, as a strategy of survival with a compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences.” Drag and gender-transgression can then be sort of a parody of this gender role; by co-opting marked gender traits from another sex, the person in drag parodies the gender performative by exposing its plasticity and artificiality.  Here again another possible Bakhtinian formulation could be posed. specifically his conception of theme/meaning, stratification of language, and heteroglossia (how language resists centripetal authority and its parodying effects)–but that, alas, is a subject for another paper.

The Body and Gender Performatives

By: Rachelly Crime

In “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity”, Judith Butler begins with what she may believe is a simple question. The crucial question seems to be: Can feminist identity politics survive without the feminist identity? Butler chooses to answer the question by focusing on factors that surround the building of feminine identity and at certain points made it difficult for me to follow what was her focal point; although there was a question to be answered. In trying to understand Butler’s ideas I did biographical research and one of the sources pointed out that her work was greatly influenced by the work of Michael Foucault who wrote History of Sexuality.

The entire section where she defines “the body” through Foucault’s understanding was extremely confusing and seemed to relate better with the concept of kinship based on my understanding because of the references to culture and order. She states, “. . . the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transmitted in order for “culture” to emerge.” (Butler, 434) This idea was very confusing and what she meant based on my interpretation was that the body serves as a representation of values that add up through cultural and personal experiences. So in order for “culture to emerge” the body must go through certain experiences that would create cultural order because the body provides a distinction between men and women.

A little light to my understanding of this “the body” concept was shed when I came across the “Gender Performatives” section. Here, the idea that gender is the medium through which the body could be understood is brought up. Gender is defined as: the set of processes and practices that shape our understanding of sexed bodies; the way a sexed body becomes socially comprehensible, a “man” or a “woman”. Performativity creates a notion that gender is not something you are, but it is something you do.

Butler states, “. . . the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already established. . .” (441) The repetition is what constructs the concept that gender is something you are. So the conclusion is that we can understand the body by understanding that gender is performative and masculinity and femininity is constructed by the way we act; our daily repetitions create our gender.