Undoing Gender

“The very attribution of femininity to female bodies as if it were a natural or necessary property takes place within a normative framework in which the assignment of femininity to femaleness is one mechanism for the production of gender itself. Terms such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose.”

Referring to Butler’s Gender Trouble, this passage questions the origins of gender norms, noting how masculinity and femininity, while usually attributed to male and female, are not neatly categorized between the traditional binary of sex. This introduces the theme of Gender Performativity and the Social Construction of Identity. By including this in the Introduction, Butler ensures a foundation of knowledge for all readers regardless of their acquaintance with Gender Trouble.

“The category of the ‘human’ retains within itself the workings of the power differential of race as part of its own historicity. But the history of the category is not over, and the ‘human’ is not captured once and for all. That the category is crafted in time, and that it works through excluding a wide range of minorities means that its rearticulation will begin precisely at the point where the excluded speak to and from such a category.”

Butler’s argument regarding inclusion expands in this passage to encompass people who are minoritized because of race, as well as gender and sexuality. This introduces the theme of The Experiences and Exclusion of Marginalized Identities. The need to acknowledge those living at the fringe of inclusion allows Butler’s argument to expand until all humans are included within the “human.”

“And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must) we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of another.”

The possession imposed by the language surrounding gender and sexuality implies an ownership or internalization of these concepts. Society dictates what can and cannot be expressed, which is then internalized by the subject as a kind of “possession” taken from these norms and internalized as identity. Butler uses the colonial terms “possession” and “dispossessed,” which draws attention to the intersection of different forms of oppression explored throughout the collection.

“I cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me. In this sense, I am outside myself from the outset, and must be, in order to survive, and in order to enter into the realm of the possible.”

In this passage, Butler is arranging their call to action for inclusivity in what is considered intelligible to allow for greater expression of viable life. The first-person pronouns give the passage a reflective tone, highlighting the significance of personal experience in this work of theory and hence drawing attention to the way “the sociality of norms” directly impacts The Experiences and Exclusion of Marginalized Identities.

“If there is a Law that we cannot displace, but which we seek through imaginary means to displace again and again, then we know in advance that our efforts at change will be put in check, and our struggle against the authoritative account of gender will be thwarted, and we will submit to an unassailable authority. There are those who believe that to think that the symbolic itself might be changed by human practice is pure voluntarism.”

Butler argues against the symbolic order, here, in showing how there are constant efforts to “displace” what Lacanians consider immutable law. These efforts are “put in check” by the specific nature of symbolic order, reducing such efforts to “voluntarism,” or the belief that willpower is a dominant factor in shaping reality. However, Butler questions this arrangement on the grounds that one can already imagine the displacement of the law, and many individuals live entire lives outside it.

“The dissonance between gender and sexuality is thus affirmed from two different perspectives; the one seeks to show possibilities for sexuality that are not constrained by gender in order to break the causal reductiveness of arguments that bind them; the other seeks to show possibilities for gender that are not predetermined by forms of hegemonic heterosexuality.”

Separating sexuality, gender, and sex is one of the primary challenges of Butler’s field, and this paragraph illustrates how queer theory attempts to accomplish this task. Butler essentially argues that, because a woman could desire another woman, sex and gender cannot be tied, through heterosexuality, to sexuality, much as a woman who desires a man might perform masculinity, therein separating sex from gender.

“Another way of putting this is the following: ‘what, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?’ This question does not quite broach the question of what it is not to be, or what it is to occupy the place of not-being within the field of being. What it is to live, breathe, attempt to love neither as fully negated nor as fully acknowledged as being. This relationship, between intelligibility and the human is an urgent one; it carries a certain theoretical urgency, precisely at those points where the human is encountered at the limits of intelligibility itself.”

In discussing norms and how norms regulate individual identity, the question of “who am I?” shifts to Butler’s “who can I be?” These questions displace the source of identity from internal to external details. Butler uses the words “urgent” and “urgency” to convey the point that theoretical ideas apply to real experiences, and they portray an embodied image of their theory in the words “live,” “breathe,” and “love” to underscore this point.

“Do parents regularly rush off to gender identity clinics when their boys play with yarn, or their girls play with trucks? Or must there already be a rather enormous anxiety at play, an anxiety about the truth of gender which seizes on this or that toy, this or that proclivity of dress, the size of the shoulder, the leanness of the body, to conclude that something like a clear gender identity can or cannot be built from these scattered desires, these variable and invariable features of the body, of bone structure, of proclivity, of attire?”

Using toys as a synecdoche for the ways children express themselves, Butler shows how toys are often used as an early indicator of gender identity. However, within these meanings, there is significant overlap between what is appropriate for “boys” and “girls,” which does not usually result in rushing to a doctor. This untenable position is what reveals, for Butler, the “enormous anxiety” of gender, which both calls attention to everyday details and ignores them situationally.

“Thus, on the one hand, the diagnosis continues to be valued because it facilitates an economically feasible way of transitioning. On the other hand, the diagnosis is adamantly opposed because it continues to pathologize as a mental disorder what ought to be understood instead as one among many human possibilities of determining one’s gender for oneself.”

One of the many paradoxes Butler highlights in this collection is the GID diagnosis. This passage details the paradox of GID, noting how it can allow many to receive important affirming care but carries the weight of pathologization. Presenting these paradoxes side by side, using the metaphors of “one hand” and “the other hand,” Butler constructs a measured tone with an aim of conveying the nuances of their topic.

“He seems to be relatively unconcerned with girls, which impresses me as entirely symptomatic of his preoccupation with patriarchal authority, and his inability to see the threat that women of all kinds might pose to the presumptions he makes about male power. The fate of masculinity absorbs this study because masculinity, a fragile and fallible construct, needs the social support of marriage and stable family life in order to find its right path.”

Butler’s response to George Rekers’s obsession with masculinity highlights how norms are integral to many discussions on sex and gender. Masculinity is itself dependent on these social structures, and Rekers’s rigid understanding exposes the “fragility” of these structures. Butler uses the alliteration of “fragile and fallible” to draw attention to these qualities of masculinity and hence undermine its normal associations with strength and immutability. 

“In this sense, we must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are. This is surely the paradox of autonomy, a paradox that is heightened when gender regulations work to paralyze gendered agency at various levels. Until those social conditions are radically changed, freedom will require unfreedom, and autonomy is implicated in subjection.”

Butler’s paradox of autonomy is rooted in the need for social conditions that allow autonomy to exist at all. Essentially, the individual is only afforded autonomy by the society that conditions and develops normalization and enforcement of regulation on that individual. Butler uses oxymorons—“freedom” and “unfreedom,” “autonomy” and “subjection”—to show that the path forward must be as paradoxical as the state in which people live.

“Even within the field of intelligible sexuality, one finds that the binaries that anchor its operations permit for middle zones and hybrid formations, suggesting that the binary relation does not exhaust the field in question. Indeed, there are middle regions, hybrid regions of legitimacy and illegitimacy that have no clear names, and where nomination itself falls into a crisis produced by the variable, sometimes violent boundaries of legitimating practices that come into uneasy and sometimes conflictual contact with one another.”

This passage underpins the primary issue with the proposed binaries of sex and gender, as Butler notes the many ways individual identities refute these binaries. Further, Butler notes how these boundaries are not comfortable, as individual identities clash within themselves to maintain their rigid enforcement. When using the terms “regions” and “boundaries,” Butler uses an extended spatial metaphor to portray an image of a person moving and existing in the physical world, thus aiming to elucidate their argument and highlight the physical reality of the violence they describe.

“What is this desire to keep the state from offering recognition to nonheterosexual partners, and what is the desire to compel the state to offer such recognition? For both sides of the debate, the question is not only which relations of desire ought to be legitimated by the state but also who may desire the state, who may desire the state’s desire.”

Butler creates a chain of desire in their discussion of gay marriage, in which marriage is seen as the state’s desire for certain sexualities and certain pairings of gender and sex. The question ceases to be simply who would want to get married and becomes: Who might the state desire? Further, Butler asks who, then, wants the state to desire them, and what implications the state’s desire enforces, meaning that the consequence of the state’s desire may include a limitation on other freedoms. By ascribing desire to the state, Butler embodies the state, drawing attention to the human compulsions that govern people and hence highlighting the prejudices behind faceless institutions.

“It is not the simple presentation of a subject for another that facilitates the recognition of that self-presenting subject by the Other. It is, rather, a process that is engaged when subject and Other understand themselves to be reflected in one another, but where this reflection does not result in a collapse of the one into the Other (through an incorporative identification, for instance) or a projection that annihilates the alterity of the Other.”

This passage highlights the conditions under which successful recognition can occur. Essentially, recognition is, ideally, the ability to see and understand the other without projecting the subject onto the other or incorporating the other into the subject. This process requires the acknowledgment of difference.

“But what were those questions, and were they really posed in the right way? Were we right to presume the binary of man and woman when so many gendered lives cannot assume that binary? Were we right to see the relation as a binary when the reference to the tertiary is what permitted us to see the homosexual aims that run through heterosexual relationality? Should we have asked these questions of gender instead? At what psychic price does normative gender become established?”

Butler questions the binary and “complementary” assumptions of gender and sex, looking to the possibility that theorists have asked potentially incorrect questions of incorrect subjects. By taking questions like these and redirecting them at new fields and quandaries, Butler is provoking the need for innovation in how theorists look at these issues. The “psychic price” sets a condition on these questions, asking that they be answered in a way that does not incite greater harm.

“[I]t remains difficult to distinguish between incest as a traumatic fantasy essential to sexual differentiation in the psyche, and incest as a trauma that ought clearly to be marked as abusive practice and in no sense essential to psychic and sexual development.”

This passage sets up the critical issue with the Oedipal conflict and the incest fantasy, in which incest is both a desire for heteronormative development and an obvious moral and ethical violation. Butler considers the fact that, if incest is beneficial to development, that would seem to override its moral complications, and yet incest is explicitly immoral and unethical, which would then override its importance in development. Butler acknowledges difficulties in the topics that they consider, thus constructing a tone of reassurance in a complex field.

“One argument that psychoanalysts sometimes make is that although the incest taboo is supposed to facilitate heterosexual exogamy, it never quite works, and that the array of perversion and fetishism that populates regular human sexuality testifies to the failure of the symbolic law fully to order our sexual lives. By this argument we are supposed to be persuaded that no one really occupies that norm, and that psychoanalysis makes perverts and fetishists of us all.”

Butler highlights the main issue with the traditional psychoanalytic view that development occurs in a structured fashion and that all those who develop “deviant” identities are pathological. The issue inherent in these paradigms is that so many people are implicitly “deviant,” making the structure of development unwieldy. Instead, Butler encourages the reader, using a sardonic tone, to consider the myriad possibilities formerly ruled out or pathologized.

“If it is one desire that the analysand seeks to speak to the analyst, it is another desire that takes hold in the speaking. For by the time the speech is made, the analysand desires for the analyst to know and expects or fears some kind of reaction to what is said.”

Butler’s analysis of confession involves a critical split between the guilt that prompts the action, the action that prompts the confession, and the confession itself, proposing a dynamic situation within the confession that obscures the nature of guilt and desire. This separation complicates an understanding of the confession as an act, but it also opens the possibility of greater interpretation and clarity, which Butler displays in their reading of Antigone.

“A speech act in the context of the transference thus might be said to attempt to communicate a content, but also to display or enact another set of meanings that may or may not have a relation to the content that is said. […] [H]ow one utters that content, or what the uttering of that content does, will probably comment on the content, will probably comment on the intention that bears the content along.”

In Butler’s discussion of speech as an act, they identify multiple components beyond the specific words spoken. Body language, tone, facial expression, cultural context, and narrative context can all interfere with the specific meaning of words.

“For many, I think, the structuring reality of sexual difference is not one that one can wish away or argue against, or even make claims about in any reasonable way. It is more like a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world. And those who seek to take issue with it are arguing with the very structure that makes their argument possible.”

The semiotic importance of sexual difference, in this passage, becomes a foundation on which all other social and cultural discourse can occur. However, much like Lacan’s symbolic order, Butler is not placing sexual difference in an untouchable category separate from human discussion; rather, Butler is posing the question of the body and language as they are currently understood, seeking solutions to the issues inherent to this dynamic.

“The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who,’ but who, nevertheless, demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. The excluded, in this sense, constitutes the contingent limit of universalization.”

The dynamic of the fringe of the universal, or the fringe of normalization, is such that those outside the universal occupy an untenable position. Butler argues that those outside the universal pose this constant challenge, demanding inclusion, just as those within the universal try to reject such claims. They continue to use spatial metaphors, such as “occupy the place” and “limit,” to portray the physicality of The Experiences and Exclusion of Marginalized Identities.

“That feminism has always thought about questions of life and death means that feminism has always, to some extent and in some way, been philosophical. That it asks how we organize life, how we accord it value, how we safeguard it against violence, how we compel the world, and its institutions, to inhabit new values, means that its philosophical pursuits are in some sense at one with the aim of social transformation.”

The link between feminism and philosophy asserts the role of feminism in changing or transforming philosophy, which, in turn, changes politics, society, and culture. The social transformation of feminism is rooted in these questions of life and death, recalling Butler’s earlier use of the term “viable.”

“To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed.”

This passage is critical to understanding Butler’s call to action, which can appear semantic in some contexts. Terms like “unreal” or “copy” have material consequences for those who live with and under them, and Butler specifies that even being called “unreal” constitutes a form of oppression even as it opens the door for more material oppression.