GENDER TROUBLE

Judith Butler

Bricolage is perhaps the best term to use to think about what Judith Butler does to and with Freud's psychoanalysis. She uses bits and pieces of Freud in order to think about gender in a postmodern form, to problematize gender as category of essence. She wants to question the idea that a person IS male or female, masculine or feminine, which are the fundamental ideas Freud started with. Butler wants to show that gender is not just a social construct, but rather a kind of performance, a show we put on, a set of signs we wear, as costume or disguise--hence as far from essence as can be. She starts by asking questions about the category "woman:" who does it include, and how do we know who it includes? And who decides what's in this category anyway? We've already gone over this: in phallogocentric western discourse, "woman" is always the other of "man", hence excluded from culture or the Symbolic. In feminist theory, "woman" is universal category, which thus excludes ideas of differences among women (differences of race, class, or sexuality, for example). Both types of theory--psychoanalytic and feminist--rely on a notion of "woman" as referring to an essence, a fact, a biological given, hence a universal. Given the pomo emphasis on discarding universals, "grand narratives," comprehensive categories, Butler says we need to think about "woman" as multiple and discontinuous, not as a category with "ontological integrity." She turns to psychoanalytic theory to do so. She gives an overview of Freud and Lacan (pp. 326-327) as setting up "woman" as eternal abstract universal category, and implicates Irigaray in doing same thing. Then she points to the poststructuralist theoretical feminists who destabilize the concept of the subject as masculine/male by saying that the female isn't a subject, isn't fully in the Symbolic, that "woman" is on the margins, in the body, and is thus more free to play than man. But, if "woman" is not a subject, can she have agency? And if there is no normative or unitary concept of "woman," can we have feminism as movement/theory? If there's no single "woman," then there can be no single feminism. Thus the problem is to think about woman as fragmentations, and about feminism without a single unitary concept of woman. Butler then looks at psychoanalysis as a "grand narrative," about how "woman" as a unitary category is formed. Psychoanalysis is a story about origins and ends, which includes some aspects, and excludes others, as Butler notes on p. 329. The story starts with a utopian nondifferentiation of the sexes, which is ended by enforced separation and the creation of difference. This narrative "gives a false sense of legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific and, in some cases, culturally oppressive version of gender identity." In a way, Butler is asking the question about what happens in a psychoanalytic paradigm if you don't have a mom and dad and no one else; if you're raised by single parent, or two parents of the same sex, or by a grandmother, etc. She looks at how the Freudian "grand narrative" privileges a certain story, certain pattern of identifications, that supposedly produce a coherent unified gendered self (man, woman, masculine, feminine), and says no, that's not how it really works--you could have variations, fragmented identities, discontinuous or provisional understandings of our gender identities based on wider variety of identifications, beyond just mother/father/child. Freud sets up a system where certain identifications are primary in forming a (gendered) self, and others are secondary; the primary identifications have more power to shape a self than the secondary ones, and are subordinated/subsumed within the primary ones. Hence relations with the mother are primary (for both sexes), while relations with siblings, eg., are secondary, not as important in the narrative of how the gendered self is formed. The primary/secondary identifications are temporal: the primary ones happen first, the secondary are added on. Without that temporal placement (first this happens, then this happens), you couldn't tell which identifications were more important than others--which were substance and which were attributes. If we could redesign the Oedipal narrative so it wasn't linear/temporal, we'd have all the identifications going on at once, or without ranking--so that all would be equally important, all would be attributes without one being substance (or all would be copies without one being original). Butler wants to understand gendered subjectivity "as a history of identifications, parts of which can be brought into play in given contexts and which, precisely because they encode the contingencies of personal history, do not always point back to an internal coherence of any kind" (331). She then presents the idea that the concept of the unconscious makes any idea of coherence or unity suspect--whether we're talking about a slip of the tongue, or any narrative/story--including the "grand narrative" of psychoanalysis. Freud's story works hard to be unitary and coherent, to tell a connected story about how gender is formed. It does so by repressing certain elements, excluding them from the story. One of the ways it achieves this is to repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity in gender and sexual identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a sex OR you desire it; only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible to desire the sex you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for instance, Freud would say that's because you REALLY identify with women. Butler looks at how Freud tells the story of how fantasy identifications (identifications that happen in the unconscious) shape our identity (who we are). When we identify with someone else, we create an internal image of that person, or, more precisely, who we want that person to be, and then we identify with that internalized and idealized image. Our own identity, then, isn't modeled on actual others but on our image of their image, on what we want the other to be, rather than what the other really is. Gender, then, as the identification with one sex, or one object (like the mother) is a fantasy, a set of internalized images, and not a set of properties governed by the body and its organ configuration. Rather, gender is a set of signs internalized, psychically imposed on the body and on one's psychic sense of identity. Gender, Butler concludes, is thus not a primary category, but an attribute, a set of secondary narrative effects. Gender is thus a fantasy enacted by "corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations." In other words, gender is an act, a performance, a set of manipulated codes, costumes, rather than a core aspect of essential identity. Butler's main metaphor for this is "drag," i.e. dressing like a person of the "opposite sex." All gender is a form of "drag," according to Butler; there is no "real" core gender to refer to.