Judith Butler’s Anti-eseentialist Bodies
Judith Butler made a paradigm shift by her Gender Trouble
through the questioning of the received categories of gender and sexuality. She
subverted the gender dichotomy by pointing out the baselessness of gender
division on the basis of biological or physical characteristics of humans.
Gender division is constructed culturally to accommodate the social needs of
power. In other words, gender is role playing rather than what we receive by
birth. The physical differences achieved through the control of bodies and
various ways like dressing, talking, etc. cannot be taken as natural in any
circumstance. The gender role assigned to individuals is primarily a matter of
socio-political signification in the form of identity. In modern societies,
forced heterosexuality that becomes normative obliterates anything other than
male and female for the sake of social order. The construction of pater
familia as the only possible and divinely designed structure of human
sexuality and reproduction subjugated the hitherto existed differences in the
category of gender. Transgenders, bisexuals, gays, lesbians, transvestites and
all other entities of gender and sex underwent a process of erasure for making
male/female permanent and scientific. Medical science took the role of curing
others as aberrant and abnormal on the pretext of scientific validity of gender
dichotomy. Butler pointed out the specific role of body as a completely
gendered object to signify gender in a given society provided the rules of
gender observed. The gendering of the body and the idea of body are the
preconditions of forming heterosexual normative regime.
The
idea of exchange is manifested in the concept of difference in gender too.
Butler’s inquiry does not discuss the process of exchange made through gender.
The role of desire in forming an atmosphere of exchange and the networks developed
through it need a deep deliberation. She starts by systematically nullifying
the well-established premise in discourses about gender. “The urgency of
feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen
the appearance of feminism’s own claims to be representative has occasionally
motivated the shortcut to a categorial or fictive universality of the structure
of domination, held to produce women’s common subjugated experience “(5). Working
in a Foucaultian fashion, i.e problematizing the repressive hypothesis in the
history of sexuality, Butler subverted the pre-existing subjugated subject of
woman, and destabilized the notion of identity. In place of such a stable identity,
a discursive is formed to negotiate gender. As the body itself is a construct,
rather than a biological given, configuring it according to the laws of
normativity is the obligation of the subject within the syntax of gender, and
thus “the female sex constitutes the unconstrainable and undesignatable” (13). This inevitably leads to a rethinking about
the concept of identity, especially when the category of subject is positioned
in the structural and semantic construction of masculinity. Commenting on
Irigaray’s argument that there is only one gender that is male and Mattig’s
statement that there is only one gender that is female, Butler posits an
epistemological break with the feminist tradition of Europe since Mary Wollstonecraft
to Simone de Beauvoir that developed a set of universal categories to formulate
theories of emancipation. Beauvoir failed to mark the mind-body separation in
Western philosophy. Even the dialogical thinking overlooked the unequal
distribution of space in a dialogue. A normative telos of definitional closure
enters the gender duscourses and forms a truth of sex, as Foucault suggested. The
fetish of representation and the reification of gender, that is gender valued
on the basis of some illusory prizes function in the phallogocentric discursive
of modernity.
“The
binary regulation of sexuality suppresses the subversive multiplicity of a
sexuality that disrupts heterosexual, reproductive, and medicojuridical
hegemonies”(26). As Wittig suggested the profusion and diffusion of a
non-phallocentric erotic economy may dispel the illusion of sex, gender, and
idenitity. The essentialism of traditional emancipatory projects cannot explain
the role of substance and attribute in shaping subjectivities. Relying on
Nietzsche’s concept of doing without doer, Butler like Wittig puts forward a
new social constructionism of gender. The regulatory fiction of identity is
used to maintain hegemonic power structure. On the other hand, anti-essential
sexuality and “polymorphous perversity” that rejects genital sexuality
precludes the magnitudinal subversion of power.
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