Restructuring Feminism

 Restructuring Feminism

The political representation was the primary concern of feminism since its begining.Butler in this essay explores how the feminism itself promotes the heterosexual construct through which patriarchy excercise its power over women. Butlers illuminating essay finds out the loop holes within the very discipline of feminism as well as the conceptual errors regarding gender and sex. She pin points the errors committed by pioneers like Simon de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray . She illustrates how the interpallation of women as subject takes place. The attempts to disrupt the existing order itself contribute its naturalization.

The political representation was the focus of feminism since its started.But Butler points out that ' the terms politics and representation itself are controversial”.

Political representation seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects while representation takes place in terms of language causes representing reality or what is true about women.For feminist theory the development of language that fully or adequately represent women has become important. Now many dimensions are ascribed to the very term woman.

The category women itself is a construct and we are seeking emancipation through the very power structure which created it. Woman is not a stable signifier.

“The gender was not constructed coherently or consisstently in different historical contexts and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities”. Plucking out the term gender from its socio cultural context and defining it is absolutely foolish. The universal basis of feminism as well as the notion of universal patriarchy was widely criticised and efforts to apprpriate non western cultures to support highly western notions of oppression and construction of concepts like third world or orient in which gender opression is essentially viewed as non western barbarism.Category 'women' achieve stability and coherence only in the context of hetero sexual matrix. Butler insists that ' the identity of feminist subject ought not be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of subject takes place within the field of power regularly buried the assertion of that foundation.

Sex itself is a gendered category.Having a male or female organs will not make anyone male or female.Butler criticises Simon de Beauvoir's second sex where she stated that “one is not born a woman but rather becomes one”.While doing this Beauvoir again confirms that there are two categories.

Construction of gender is problematic. Gender is constructed suggests a certain determinism of gender meanings inscribed on automatically differentiated bodies, where those bodies are understood as passive recipients of an inexorable cultural law.Gender is determined as it was under the biology is destiny formulation.

Body is figures as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural meanings are only externally related.There is a hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on binary structures.Gender is only a set of relations and not an individual attributer.Irigaray argues that women constitute the unrepresentable in a masculinist phallogocentric world.Beauvoir says that women are negative of men.

“Women are not only represented falsely, within the Sartrian frame of signifying subject and signified other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure of representation as inadequat”.

“Gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific set of relations. Irigaray points out that feminine could not be theorized in terms of determinate relation between the masculine and femininePositioning of woman thus implies a fundamental critique of the very disemobodiment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject. Female sex is restricted to their body. Masculine pose a disembodied universality and the feminine a disavowed cororeality. Beauvoir unknowingly maintain mind body dualism.This again falls in the realm of phallocentrism.Though the cultural association of mind with masculinity and body with femininty are well documented and this uncritical reproduction rationalised the gender hierarchy.

Beauvoir failed to comprehend reciprocity of an assymetrical dialect while Irigaray suggests that the dialectic itself is masculinist signifying economy.

The effort to identitfy the enemy as singular form is the reverse discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of oppression. Universality of female identity and essentialisation of oppression are non sensical. Beauvoir points out that female body is marked within masculinist discourse, but masculine body is conflated with the universal remains unmarked.There is no need to establish the category of women, and not to be filled with various components of race class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality.Creating solidarity or unity of women in order to take political action is not preferred rather disrupting the very border of identity concept itself is the aim.

Creation of ;intelligible' genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice and desire. Discontinuity and incoherence involves happens when there are persons who fail to confirm to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility.

The heterosexualisation of desire institute the production of descrete and assymetrical opposition between feminine and masculine.When gender identities cannot be followed from sex and practice of desire do not “follow” from either sex or gender. Gender identities which fail to confirm to the norms of cultural intelligibility appear as develomental failures or logical impossibilities. Irigaray claimed that there is onl sexwhich created the other.

Sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance , a self identitcal being. This conceal the fact that “being” sex or gender is fundamentally impossible. According to Irigaray, gender the binary effectively mask the hegemonic discourse of masculine, phallogocentrism, silencing the feminine as a cite of subversive multiplicity.

Wittig points out that overthrowing a systen of compulsory heterosexuality will inaugurate a true humanism of 'person'.

“Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular sense because indeed there are no two genders.There is only one, the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender for the masculine is general.Wittig calls for destruction of the concept sex.According to her person cannot be signified within langauge without the mark of gender.Gender is naively confused with sex, serves as a unifying principle of the emodied self and maintains that unity over and against an “opposite sex”. Gender is a psychic cultural designation of the self and desire and the desire only in heterosexual context.

Desire reflects gender and gender reflects desire or express it. Foucault says that sex concels the stragic aim of the very apparatus of production by postulating “sex” as a cause of sexual experience, behaviour and desire.

Within the inherited discoursee of the metaphysics of substance gender proves to be performativeThere is no gender identity behind the expression of gender, that identity is performatively instituted by the very “expression” that are said to be its result.

Wittig seems to dispute the theory of metaphysics of substance, but she retains the concept of 'human subject, individual as the metaphysical locus of agency.Wittig says that language is instrument or tool that is in no way misogynist in its structures, but only in its application. For Irigaray possibility of another language or signifying economy is the only chance to escape from the matrix of gender.Wittig thus asserts ' there is no feminine writing'.As a materialist however she considers langauge to be another order of materiality.The linguistic fiction of “sex” was produced and circulated by the system of compulsory hetero sexuality.,It was an effort to restrict the production of identities along the axis of heterosexual desire. Wittig underestimatees the meaning and functIon of the language in which 'the mark of gender' occurs.Lacan's sexual difference is not a simple binary that retains the metaphysics of substance theory as its foundation. Feminine is the signification of lack, signified by the symbolic.The masculine linguistic position is meant for finding prohibition of the symbolic law, law of father.Power rather than law, encompasses both the juridical and the productive functions of different relations.Sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power relation is not a simple replication of a masculinist economy of identity. The utopian notion of sexuality freed from heterosexual construction, a sexuality beyond 'sex' failed to acknowledge the ways in whichpower relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a “liberated” heterosexuality or lesbianism. The return to biology seems to defeat feminist premise that ' biology is not destiny'

Heterosexual norms are imposed from above.Thus gay or lesbian becomes copy of the copy . We idealise the 'straight' and we copy the straight in our lives.

There is no possibility of inversion subversion or displacement within the terms of constructed identity.”Woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end”