Response - Judith Butler (LCL071510)

            Judith Butler’s groundbreaking Gender Trouble: Femiuism atld the Subversion of Identity (1990) was a powerful critique of heterosexual assumptions in feminist theory, of the dualism of masculinity and femininity, in the contexts of Western metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and power structures. It is a founding document of queer theory and a key statement of "performative" accounts of cultural meaning. Her goal is to uncover the assumptions that "restrict the meaning of gender to received notions of masculinity and femininity.      The feminist theory has been formulated as per an assumption that there is some existing identity as ‘women’ for whom a need of political representation was raised. The feminist theory found it necessary to develop a language which would be able to foster political visibility of women. The demand is viewed as somewhat essential but she problematizes the very category of ‘women’ as subjects. She describes the changes in perception of women as a category who no longer understood in stable or abiding terms and of what they are constituted of. There is a question of who is she to be politically represented and representation is needed only to what can be acknowledged as subject.

            She insisted that nothing is natural, not even sexual identity. Feminists have sometimes distinguished between "sex" as the anatomical difference between male and female bodies and "gender" as the meanings attached to those bodily differences in various cultures. Butler argues that even anatomical differences can be experienced only through the categories and expectations set out by the cullure's signifying order. Moreover anatomical differences are mapped to expectations about sexual desire, specifically to society's "compulsory heterosexuality" (a term Butler borrows from Adrienne Rich), which posits that there are two sexes and that desire runs from one sex to the other. Our culture's understanding of sexuality is ill-equipped, therefore to recognize bodies that confound the strict binary division between male and female, or desires that cross, combine, or otherwise fail to conform to a fairly narrow understanding of sex as genital intercourse between two people, one ;'naturally" female, the other "naturally" male.

           

            She stresses that modern culture sees sexuality as a fundamental constituent of identity. Our sex and our sexual desires and activities are profound indices of who we are. Butler hopes like many contemporary critical theorists-to reveal that the seemingly "natural" is actually socially constructed and, thus contingent. The established and conventional connections between anatomy and desire, and between sexual activities and ascriptions of identity, are not inevitable; they have been different in other cultures and in other historical eras, and they are open to revision or "resignification."

            Butler follows the accounts of subject formation found in Foucault and Lacan.  By drawing from Foucault’s ideas on subject as the products of juridical systems of power Butler opines that the subjects are the creation of power structures who are created in accordance with the power structures who are created in accordance with the power structures by means of limitation, prohibition, regulation, control or ‘protection’ of individuals as per its own requirements.  For Foucault discourse (the articulated categories of thought) orders knowledge along lines that produce subjects open to power's control. Such power, he stresses, works at the level of daily routine. For Lacan, individuals achieve an identity a recognized place in the social order by passing into the Law (the culture's signifying order')-at the cost of creating the unconscious and establishing a permanent split, an alienation of self from desire within the subject. Butler observes that women as the subject of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics. But the system produces gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination and also those who are presumed to be masculine.

            Butler finds that ‘the subjects’ are invariously produced through certain exclusionary practices by the juridical system of power. She highlights the need to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics but also to understand how the category of women the subject of feminism is produced and restrained by the very structure of power through which emancipation is sought. The term ‘woman’/ ‘women’ tend to transcend specific paraphernalia of its gender since it intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities. She finds that the categorization is not exhaustive. There was an attempt to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly western notions of oppression. There is question against the specificity of gender and thus the singular notion of identity becomes misfit. Butler says that a stable notion of gender no longer proves to be the foundational premise of feminist politics and hence a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable. According to her, this will contest the very reification of gender and identity. The text made her something between a celebrity and a cult figure, especially in gay and lesbian subcultures, and she has responded by jealously guarding her personal life from public scrutiny.