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Policy Reflections
on Our Wounded
Identities in Law
Holy Trouble To Make a Dragon Move To Rescue or Research Pornography: Subjectivity and Gender-Identity in Cyberspace GWU Resources
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Performing
Gender (Theory): by:
Myra Remigio “For indeed, who is it that gets constituted as the feminist theorist whose framing of the debate will get publicity? Is it not always the case that power operates in advance, in the very procedures that establish who will be the subject who speaks in the name of feminism, and to whom? And is it not also clear that a process of subjection is presupposed in the subjectivating process that produces before you one speaking subject of feminist debate?” (Judith Butler, “Contingent
Foundations: Feminism and the
Question of ‘Postmodern’”) How does feminism function in the postmodern condition? How do feminist theorists with political agendas negotiate a theoretical/ social framework that has been categorized as apolitical? Many books and articles have been devoted to this subject: for example, in her introduction to Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, Linda Nicholson notes that in order to compare the two categories, each category must be defined. In her essay “Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance,” (the opening essay of Feminist Contentions), Seyla Benhabib links the two movements together “as categories of the present,” and frames them as oppositional rather than complementary. In “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism,” Susan Bordo critiques postmodern feminists for flattening all identities to ineffectual, subjectless performance, and in the epigraph above, Judith Butler tries to locate her own work in the dichotomy between the two movements. Butler’s role in this debate (or as she calls it, “one speaking subject of feminist debate”) is as an object as well as a subject; in this essay, I intend to examine the opposition between the simultaneous conditions, feminism and postmodernism, in the context of the debate between Benhabib, who critiques the postmodernist tendency to erase the speaking “I,” the subject, from feminist discourse, and Butler, who questions the feminist need to construct a subject for political purposes. More specifically, I will discuss Judith Butler’s Other role in the “uneasy alliance” between feminism and postmodernism; not only as a participant, but also as an icon, an intersectional figure who has become a sort of textual embodiment of the relationship between feminism and postmodernism, a “postmodern feminist” who performs feminist theory as she challenges its boundaries. Although I do not pretend that the writers I discuss here represent the monolithic voices of either “feminism” or “postmodernism,” I think that the examples I use do represent current concerns for feminists: the depoliticization of feminist theory, and the destabilization of “woman” and “gender” in postmodern theory, most famously exemplified by Judith Butler’s texts Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. In Unbearable Weight, a materialist feminist exploration of eating disorders as the contemporary equivalent of nineteenth-century hysteria, Susan Bordo examines representations of gender (e.g. ads that depict rail-thin women as “normal”) to demonstrate that the current increase in eating disorders is directly related to cultural factors and is not simply a phenomenal collection of individual medical cases. Bordo’s project is a study of the phallocentric manipulation of women’s bodies (and claims to power). She demonstrates that cultural metaphors are written on the bodies of women, that “hunger [is] ideology,” that medicine, advertising, and mass media intermesh to support the hegemonic control of women and their bodies. She states: “Taken together, the feminist critiques of gendered representations and of the politics of the material body can also be seen as an extended argument against the notion that the body is a purely biological or natural form” (Bordo 33). Bordo rightly credits feminist theory for breaking up the binary between nature and culture in relation to the (feminized) body. However, Bordo is careful to point out that although cultural factors shape bodies, “when bodies are made into mere products of social discourse, they remain bodies in name only” (35). She does not want to take the political aspect out of her argument or reduce her subjects to mere objects of examination. In order to align her work with political, theoretical activism, she critiques postmodern theorists for being apolitical, unengaged, and completely theoretical. Postmodern theorists, who either erase the reality of “sex” and “gender” categories or hyperspecify categories of difference, threaten materialist feminist theory (215-243). In the chapter “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism,” Bordo critiques postmodern feminists for diluting feminism and the feminist subject. She first discusses the academic tendency to be as categorically specific as possible when theorizing. Bordo, who uses footnotes to address factors like race and class, examines American culture’s effects on all of its women; she anticipates those who would critique her for erasing other identifying factors in her project. Bordo preemptively airs her own frustration with postmodern academia’s proliferation of differences: “. . .Just how many axes can one include and still preserve analytical focus or argument? Even more troubling is the (often implicit, sometimes explicit) dogma that the only ‘correct’ perspective on race, class, and gender is the affirmation of difference; this dogma reveals itself in criticisms that attack gender generalizations as in principle essentialist or totalizing” (Bordo 222). Bordo criticizes the postmodern valorization of “difference” as detrimental to feminism; instead of constructing useful paradigms of gender in order to work against phallocentrism, “now feminist criticism has turned to its own narratives” (216) and shifted focus away from the original problem. Bordo’s second issue with postmodern feminism is what she calls “‘the view from nowhere’ and the dream of everywhere,” or, the problem with deconstruction. Although she does not mention Judith Butler specifically, Bordo’s critique is of Butler’s postmodern impulse to interrogate gender itself. In Gender Trouble, Butler takes Bordo’s binary inversion one step further. While Bordo notes that the sexed body is a product of culture as well as nature, Butler asserts that there is no sex, only gender. And gender itself is a construction in a matrix of imaginary constructions: “If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (GT 174). For Bordo, this “gender skepticism” is dangerous for feminism; while she acknowledges that the binary gender construction is a cultural phenomenon that manifests itself on sexed bodies, she stresses that a complete dismantling of gender is useless while the binary produces material effects. Feminism should not dismiss analyses of gender while the social construction still exists. Instead, the duality should be employed, as should “women” as a category. If feminist theorists follow the postmodernist impulse, then real change cannot occur, and political theory would not happen. Bordo says, “The transformation of culture, and not merely greater statistical representation of women, must remain the goal of academic feminism as well. . . . It is disquieting that academic feminists are questioning the integrity of the notion of ‘female reality’ just as we begin to get a foothold in those disciplines that could most radically be transformed by our (historically developed) ‘otherness’ . . .” (Bordo 240). Bordo implies that postmodern feminists are using postmodernism to flatten feminism into just another academic field; instead, they should use feminism to “radically” change academic disciplines that women have only recently gained access to. Bordo’s problems with postmodernism are not unusual. Her concerns with postmodern feminism – the valorization of difference and the de-emphasis on gender – are detrimental for feminism because they take agency away from the feminist theorist and erase a collective, unified, political “voice” from academic feminism. Other theorists have similar apprehensions. In “Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance,” Seyla Benhabib voices her own concerns about the dubious relationship between the two theories. This essay, originally a symposium presentation in 1990, is part of a dialogue between Benhabib, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and Drucilla Cornell, who compiled their essays and responses into one intertextual volume, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. Feminist Contentions not only presents multiple aspects of the debate between feminism and postmodernism, it is also a postmodern feminist performance in itself; this text, which sets up a running dialogue between Benhabib and Butler, has had a long post-publishing life as a paper topic in academic journals, has become a major text about the perceived schism between feminism and postmodernism, has demonstrated the way academic stars are made, and has solidified the thematic opposition into a key concern for both disciplines. Benhabib’s essay begins the dialogue with a critique of postmodernism in the feminist context. She gives a brief history of feminist alliances: first with Marxism, now with postmodernism. With Marxism dead or dying, feminism and postmodernism emerge as “the two leading currents of our time” (Benhabib 17). She delineates her version of postmodernism, mainly a refutation of all “grand narratives.” Benhabib takes Jane Flax’s postmodern death-theses and rewrites them to encompass the feminist viewpoint (18). The feminist counterpoint to “The Death of Man” is the “Demystification of the Male Subject of Reason,” in which the postmodern “Man” represents the universal (male) subject. Both theses erase the subject; the feminist counterpoint denaturalizes the association between the male gender and the neutral, idealized category. She continues: the feminist counterpoint to the “Death of History” is the “Engendering of Historical Narrative;” to the “Death of Metaphysics,” “Feminist Skepticism toward the Claims of Transcendent Reason” (18-19). Although Benhabib sets up a nice balanced association between postmodernism and feminism, she immediately complicates it. Benhabib asserts that the feminist versions of Flax’s postmodern tenets are not exact cognates. The postmodern “Death of the Subject” does not work in its feminist context. Like Bordo, Benhabib declares that feminism only works if there is a subject to act and to protest. She asks “how in fact the very project of female emancipation would even be thinkable without such a regulative principle on agency, autonomy, and selfhood?” (Benhabib 21) Benhabib then directly critiques Judith Butler’s postmodern turns. For Benhabib, Butler’s “Death of the Subject” approach to gender erases any possibility for activism; after all, if there is no one to speak as or for, then there is no need to speak at all. She says, “For Butler, we might say, the myth of the already sexed body is the epistemological equivalent of the myth of the given” (21). Butler’s theory that a sexed body is all culture is detrimental for Benhabib’s feminism: like Bordo’s, feminism depends on an oppositional duality based on the reality of gender and gender oppression. Benhabib then reads Butler’s theory of performance, which effectively erases the subject and replaces it with a continuous series of performances. She asks: “If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and let it rise only if one can have a say in the production of the play itself? Isn’t this what the struggle over gender is all about? . . . . What follows from this Nietzschean position is a vision of the self as a masquerading performer, except of course we are now asked to believe that there isno self behind the mask” (Benhabib 22). Benhabib takes exception to Butler’s erasure of the self because part of feminism’s political, activist agenda is to encourage autonomy and feelings of selfhood in women. For Benhabib, feminism cannot afford to be postmodernist. It is invested in affirming, not erasing, the subject. Likewise, it cannot participate in the “Death of History” or the “Death of Metaphysics,” because women’s history is a tool of emancipation, a (meta)narrative that empowers feminism and feminists. Gender remains an important categorical duality as well. Butler’s response, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” was presented after Benhabib’s essay. Although the focus of Butler’s essay is the relationship between postmodernism and feminism, the lens is herself, the theorist-as-performed, and the academic context she performs in. She (here I mean “she” as the writer figure of the text itself) begins with an interrogation of “postmodernism” and suggests that the term has been ascribed to her and her writing, not a label she chose intentionally: “Who are these postmodernists? Is this a name that one takes on for oneself, or is it more often a name that one is called if and when one offers a critique of the subject, a discursive analysis, or questions the integrity or coherence of totalizing social descriptions?” (Benhabib 35). Throughout the presentation, Butler keeps “postmodern” in quotes. She states, several times, that “I don’t know what postmodernism is” but she senses it when she comes across it. Although Butler’s performance is a rebuttal to Benhabib’s essay, she does not engage with (activist) feminism until the end. She first invokes Foucault to ground her theory in and among power systems, then asserts that Benhabib’s conceptualization of feminism is restrictive and paranoid: “To claim that politics requires a stable subject is to claim that there can be no political opposition to that claim. Indeed, that claim implies that a critique of the subject cannot be a politically informed critique but, rather, an act which puts into jeopardy politics as such” (Benhabib 36). Butler then brings “Judith Butler” into her argument: she transforms her own identity into contingent performance: “If there is something called ‘Butler’s position,’ is this one that I devise, publish, and defend, that belongs to me as a kind of academic property? Or is there a grammar of the subject that merely encourages us to position me as the proprietor of those theories?” (Benhabib 42) Butler rebuts Benhabib’s protest over the death of the Subject by calling into question her own subject position, turning the theorist into a text, into a mere participation in grammar exercises, and into a representation of her written self as she reads “Butler’s position” in front of an audience. Finally, Butler asserts that her own “postmodern” erasure of gender categories and the gendered subject is a liberatory move for feminism. In fact, she states that she does not erase these categories, she merely frees them. Whenever a discourse (like feminism, in this case) starts naming its participants, it starts to fix them and pressure them into conformity. Benhabib’s feminism, which insists on a subject that relies on the sex/gender binary, is exclusionary. Butler states, “I would argue that any effort to give universal or specific content to the category of women, presuming that that guarantee of solidarity is required in advance, will necessarily produce factionalization, and that ‘identity’ as a point of departure can never hold as the solidifying ground of a feminist political movement” (Benhabib 50). She imagines a space open to other configurations, an open horizon of possible “resignifications” that could transform the category “women” from within, by women themselves. Just as Judith Butler constructs her own multivalent presence in her textual performance, she envisions a multifaceted and shapeshifting feminist who does not feel bound by the already-inscribed categories “subject,” “feminist,” or “woman.” Although Butler’s purpose is to open multiple possibilities in various contexts, the debate between feminism and postmodernism has ossified in the academic context; both theorists represent academic tropes – Benhabib represents the feminist who critiques postmodernism, and Butler has become almost iconic, a definitive voice of postmodern feminism. While Butler’s essay strives to decodify subjects in discourse, it has become a normative piece itself and has spawned several published articles after its publication. One such article, “The Politics of Sex and Gender: Benhabib and Butler Debate Subjectivity,” reads like sports color commentary. Fiona Webster views the debate between the two theorists as a symptom of a crisis in academic feminism about the (possibly fallacious) differences between sex and gender. She delineates both sides of the argument, and states that both Benhabib and Butler advocate some kind of agency but disagree over how agency manifests itself. Although I follow a similar play-by-play strategy in my essay, my own concerns are with Judith Butler’s role as an academic performer and icon, an embodiment of the debate between feminism and postmodernism that presumably is raging around her. Webster’s critique discusses the concept of agency in the context of a debate between two theorists that exists as a categorical, normative example of the sex/ gender negotiations in a larger “theory war.” Webster also examines both theorists by examining their strategies and perspectives. She states, “I want to suggest here that even if we disagree specifically with Benhabib over the question of precisely whether Butler’s performative account of those categories provides an adequate framework in which to address and support either its own implicit political commitments or those issues of political representation and agency as they are debated in the broader context of the Anglo-American feminist theory in which she is situated” (Webster 12). Webster is concerned with these transcribed performances to fit them into specific theoretical and political schools; I propose that the debate itself is a generative work. It challenges the boundaries of who “does” feminism; Butler herself performs postmodern theory as she denies knowledge of it. While I believe that the debate between Benhabib and Butler is not merely an example of the “uneasy alliance” between feminism and postmodernism, I do think that for “Judith Butler,” the debate is symptomatic of Judith Butler’s tendency to blur the boundaries between discourses. Is Judith Butler a feminist? Is she a postmodern feminist? Or is she a performance studies/queer studies/literary critic? Her two major feminist works, Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, are cross-listed as “Philosophy/ Women’s Studies/ Gender” while an anthologized essay is listed in the section “Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, Queer Theory” (Imitation 722). Judith Butler’s texts fit into various categories because she resists the easy positions of “woman” and “feminist” and writes texts that focus on the contingency of such categories. Butler advocates, but does not prescribe, the possibility of subverting the phallocentric hegemony. In Gender Trouble, Butler implies a feminist consciousness as she discusses the body’s performative potential. As she mentions in her rebuttal to Benhabib, fixing identities is ultimately oppressive. In a postmodern fashion, Butler rejects the inviolability of the whole subject and the united body. Whether the united body is one person performing gender or a movement like feminism, Butler notes its instability. She says, “If the body is not a ‘being,’ but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, then what language is left for understanding this corporeal enactment, gender, that constitutes its ‘interior’ signification on its surface?” (GT 177) Similarly, if feminism is not a “being,” but a variable boundary, how does it enact feminism? For theorists like Bordo and Benhabib, feminism would lose its power if it is indeed a variable boundary. Butler would answer such critique by questioning the function of constructing a unified front; although the illusion of a unified feminism with a unified agenda filled with unified bodies suggests a coalitional power that aids women, the restrictive category of “women” as it has been constructed and perceived excludes those who do not fit into the category for various physical or social reasons. Butler tends to ignore the fact that total liberation from the body or from subjectivity is impossible -- without consensus and certain fixed categories, the liberated body signifies without citation. Although this is the case, the limitless horizon of possibilities she imagines allows her book to permeate different disciplines. Gender Trouble encourages interdisciplinary study because its approach toward gender itself comes from different disciplines. When Butler describes gender as “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (179), she blends the visual metaphors of performance theory with the liminal possibilities of queer theory and the use of “gender” as a concept from feminist theory. All three work together to produce a conception of the self as an atom in motion rather than a discrete unit. In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Butler examines the forms of femininity. She continues the performative current of Gender Trouble but addresses many of its feminist critiques. She states “It has seemed to many, I think, that in order for feminism to proceed as a critical practice, it must ground itself in the sexed specificity of the female body. . . . Sex must still be presumed as the irreducible point of departure for the various cultural constructions it has come to bear. . . . In an effort to displace the terms of this debate, I want to ask how and why ‘materiality’ has become a sign of irreducibility, that is, how is it that the materiality of sex is understood as that which only bears cultural constructions and therefore, cannot be a construction?” (BTM 28) While Gender Trouble dissects the way the constructions of gender work to support other constructions, Bodies that Matter dissects the ground itself, the materiality which signifies the inscrutable, futile, final layer of truth. For Butler, materiality itself is gendered feminine. Rather than appease her critics, Butler confounds them. As in Gender Trouble, when she removes the subject from the body to reveal a continuous performative state, Butler removes the body from materiality in Bodies that Matter to reveal the very constructed “feminine” gender category. Is this a vindictive or a playful postmodernism? Is this a hopelessly abstracted or a provocative feminism? I believe that Butler, who writes herself in each text yet denies it, addresses critics by frustrating them. Some would say that postmodern feminism is simply a solipsistic exercise that undermines the feminist project; I say that feminists like Butler, who critiques theory even as she does it, opens a space of interdisciplinary cohesion.
Works
Cited and Consulted Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, eds. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge, 1995. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ---Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. ---“Imitation and Gender Subordination.” In Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. Cheah, Pheng, and Elizabeth Grosz. “The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell.” Diacritics 28.1 (1998) 19-42.
Heinamaa, Sara. “What is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference.” Hypatia 12.1 (1997) 20-39. http://theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm Webster, Fiona. “The Politics of Sex and Gender: Benhabib and Butler Debate Subjectivity.” Hypatia 15.1 (2000) 1
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