"One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one" --Beauvoir

First of all you should visit to see more of Catherine Tafur's crazy/creepy/awesome art centered around the deconstruction of gender and race. Remember when we were talking about coming across an organism that was neither a dog nor a human and trying to first decipher what kind of creature it was and then how to act towards it? breaking down the boundaries! creepy and weird and awesome, right.

and next on the menu...

Ohhhh, geeez! Part One in “Gender Trouble” has already blown my mind…Only nine pages through the text and I’m already bouncing off the walls in my brain. It was like reading in some parallel universe where Foucault was a woman! (And look how problematic my discourse of gender has already become!) Wonderful!

Butler does not want to restrict the meaning of gender in any sense, which means that she also wants to avoid the idealization of certain expressions of gender. Rather, she thinks that opening up a new field of possibilities concerning gender should be our aim, while recognizing that our sexual hierarchy produces and consolidates gender as we know it.

In “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire” Butler begins by positing a need to understand how the category of “women” is produced in our societal structures and how this production is the very thing which restrains it. She writes, “Juridical power inevitably produces what it claims merely to represent” (3). Immediately after reading this, my mind went directly to Foucault’s notion of the “deployment of sexuality.” Changing sex into a discourse through various power relations, such as the Catholic Church’s practice of confession, the attempted counter-conduct against a repressed sexual society by speaking verbosely of sex, etc., sex became an “imaginary element” which was produced by the discourse itself. From Foucault paper: (This imaginary element creates a desire in people: a desire to have sex, access sex, discover sex, liberate sex, articulate sex, and so on. This desirability makes us believe that we are affirming the rights of our sex against the power establishment which is believed to silence it, but all we are really doing to fastening ourselves even tighter to the deployment of sexuality.) This parallels all too well what Butler is saying about feminism.

Butler says that the formation of language and politics that represent “women” actually produce the subject “woman.” She is “discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation” (3). On the next page, Butler posits that maybe there is no woman subject who stands before the law, awaiting representation by that institution. Is it possible to exist outside of our social and legal institutions?—outside the gendered boundaries produced by these dynamic systems of power?

Foundationalists, she says, assume a non-historical “before” where people were not yet governed and willfully chose to be a part of some social contract. This is the assumed state-of-nature hypothesis which Butler finds very problematic. That all the knowledge we have rests on some “justified” belief of a pre-law society just doesn’t seem to work. This view can be (loosely?) compared with the inevitability hypothesis and essentialism. (Am I right here? I had trouble fully understanding this part of Butler’s text…How else does this connect to her argument?)

“Woman/Women” as a common identity have become troublesome terms—there are multiple significations of the term, writes Butler. To be a “woman” is not all one is and gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently; it exists and intersects with other categories of being such as race, class, ethnicity, etc. The result of this singular identity claim is that it becomes impossible to separate “gender” from politics and culture—the same politics and culture which is actually at work producing the labels of “male/female” and “man/woman.”

Political assumption of a universal basis for feminism where “the oppression of women has some singular form discernable in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination” becomes a way of reifying this oppression (5). Feminism tries to establish universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen feminist claims. Butler says this is a shortcut to a “categorical or fictitious universality of the structure of dominion, held to produce women’s common subjugated experience” (5). This again saturated my brain with memories of Foucault’s general notion of power. Power, he claims, is not something that can be reified. “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (History of Sexuality, 93). Foucault claims that power itself always remains invisible; it does not arise independently of knowledge and vise versa. Power is not a substance and is not possessed by someone—it has its own intents. Power is an action over other actions; it is an exercise. Can we say something similar about the power relations concerning the oppression of “women” in a Butlerian framework?

The masculine/feminine binary constitutes an exclusive conceptual framework where opposites, dichotomies are created and recognized. The feminine is separated from constitution of race, class, gender, etc… In other words, this binary constitutes “woman” as exclusively “woman”—the opposite of man, separating the subject from other constitutions of identity. This is an inappropriate singular designation of identity. (Am I oversimplifying this? Not understanding is fully? I feel like I’m missing something…)

Our representational discourse concerning gender undermines feminism. (Again, back to Foucault’s “deployment of sexuality”—verbal discourse undermining the act and performance of sex as sex). Some may refuse to accept the category of “woman” as represented in these power relations. Butler says that “These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes” (6). [Relate to Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct—I’ll leave a comment]. Feminism has its own representational claims. To suggest that it can seek wider representation is quite ironic since it is producing that which it is representing… This leads to misrepresentation because it is conforming to a requirement of representational politics. Butler says that our task should not be to refuse representational politics (since language and politics constitute contemporary fields of power), but rather to rethink the ontological constructions of identity.