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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
With the publication of her highly acclaimed and much-cited book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler became one of the most influential feminist theorists of her generation. Her theory of gender performativity and her writings on corporeality, on the injurious capacity of language, on the vulnerability of human life to violence and on the impact of mourning on politics have, taken together, comprised a substantial and highly original body of work that has a wide and truly cross-disciplinary appeal.
In this lively book, Moya Lloyd provides both a clear exposition and an original critique of Butler's work. She examines Butlers core ideas, traces the development of her thought from her first book to her most recent work, and assesses Butlers engagements with the philosophies of Hegel, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray and de Beauvoir, as well as addressing the nature and impact of Butler's writing on feminist theory. Throughout Lloyd is particularly concerned to examine Butler's political theory, including her critical interventions in such contemporary political controversies as those surrounding gay marriage, hate-speech, human rights, and September 11 and its aftermath.
Judith Butler offers an accessible and original contribution to existing debates that will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
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Seitenzahl: 416
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Key Contemporary Thinkers
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Feminism, identity and difference
From homosexual to gay and lesbian to queer
The influence of poststructuralism
Hegel and desiring subjects
Postscript
2 Rethinking Sex and Gender
The trouble with women
Feminism and the sex/gender debate
Denaturalizing sex and gender
Cultural intelligibility – contesting heteronormativity
From phenomenology to performativity
Performing gender
Women in/and feminism
Conclusion
3 Towards a Subversive Gender Politics
From parody to politics
Subversive gender politics
Performativity and subversion
Free will versus determinism
Enter iterability
The ambivalence of drag
The matter of bodies
Politicizing abjection – making bodies matter
Conclusion
4 Psychoanalysis and the Gendered Subject
Gender trouble and psychoanalysis
Rubin and ‘the traffic in women’
Freud and oedipus
Melancholic gender identifications
Melancholia and performativity
Lacan and oedipus
Assuming sex
Locating resistance
Kinship matters
Psychic subjectivity
Passionate attachment and primary dependency
Resisting butler
Conclusion
5 ‘Talking Back’ – Resignification and Politics
Words that Wound
The force of the performative
Opposing sovereign performatives
A linguistic account of subjectivity
Linguistic subjectivity and responsibility
Revisiting agency – politics and resignification
Against the state
Conclusion
6 What Makes for a Liveable Life?
Normative violence and questions of liveability
Corporeal vulnerability
Mourning and grief
Questions of recognition
What’s wrong with ‘desiring the state’s desire’?
The politics of radical democracy
Cultural translation
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
For Andrew and Daniel
Copyright © Moya Lloyd 2007
The right of Moya Lloyd to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2007 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-07456-2611-6
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ISBN-13: 978-07456-5480-5 (Multi-user ebook)
ISBN-13: 978-07456-5481-2 (Single-user ebook)
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Key Contemporary Thinkers
Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989
Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction
M. J. Cain, Fodor: Language, Mind and Philosophy
Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption
Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction
Andreas Due, Deleuze
Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell
Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett: Reconciling Science and our Self-Conception
Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson
Chris Fleming, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis
Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction
Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty
Nigel Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination
Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations
Karen Green, Dummett: Philosophy of Language
Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary
Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship
Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism
Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience and Reality
Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics
Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics
Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction
Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction
Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-Modernism and Beyond
Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction
Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics
Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics
James McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind, and Politics
Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction
Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology
Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes
Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak
Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl
Harold W. Noonan, Frege: A Critical Introduction
James R. O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn
William Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction
Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric
John Preston, Feyerabend: Philosophy, Science and Society
Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall
Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography and Love
Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions
David Silverman, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis
Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity
Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity
Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells: The Theory of the Network Society
Geoffrey Stokes, Popper: Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method
Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason
James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy
Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Writing a book about any living author is difficult, and particularly one as prolific as Judith Butler. Indeed, twice, the submission of this manuscript was held up because Butler published new volumes that I wanted to examine. It needs to be remembered when reading this book, therefore, that what I am evaluating is not a completed body of work but one that is on-going. It also means that it has been impossible to judge the full significance of Butler’s work, particularly since, given the slowness of the publication process, responses to Precarious Life and Undoing Gender are only just beginning to appear while, as yet, there has been nothing published on Giving an Account of Oneself that I am aware of. The readings I present of these later books are, therefore, very much my own provisional readings. I hope, however, that they convey something of the excitement and intellectual stimulation that I feel when I encounter Butler’s always challenging, always provocative, if not always convincing, theoretical offerings.
Numerous people have contributed to the development of this book. First, I would like to thank the two anonymous readers at Polity for their reports on the draft. I hope I have managed to respond to your criticisms adequately, though, of course, any remaining errors or omissions are mine. Conversations with Laura Brace, Terrell Carver, Samuel Chambers, Diana Coole, Mark Hoffman, Kimberly Hutchings, Birgit Schippers and Andrew Thacker on different aspects of Butler’s work, as well as on the factors shaping it, helped me clarify my argument. These discussions also gave me immense enjoyment, not least when accompanied by good food and wine! Thanks also to John Thompson and the editorial staff at Polity for their assistance over the course of this book’s production, and to Dave Allen, my head of department at Loughborough, for clearing time for me to make some final adjustments to the text. Finally, and as always, my biggest thanks go to my partner, Andrew Thacker, for listening to me talk endlessly about Butler, learning just how long it takes me to ‘finish a sentence’, and giving so generously of his time as this book neared completion, and to our son Daniel for distracting me when I needed it and for making each day so much fun. This book is dedicated to them.
Parts of Chapter 4 are drawn from ‘Politics and Melancholia’, Women’s Philosophy Review, 20 (1998–9), pp. 25–43. Reproduced with the permission of the Society of Women in Philosophy.
1
Introduction
In 1990 one of the most influential books of the coming decade was published: Gender Trouble. Routinely cited in disciplines from literary theory to cultural studies, sociology to political theory, philosophy to performance studies, Gender Trouble has also been translated into twenty languages, while in 1999 a special tenth anniversary edition was published, complete with comprehensive new preface.1 These twin publications of Gender Trouble book-ended a decade in which its author, Judith Butler, received the rare accolade (for an academic, at least) of being cited in The Face – a British style magazine – as one of fifty people who had the greatest influence on popular culture in the 1990s. It is not often that a scholar, a professional philosopher (she is the Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley), achieves iconic status. So, why did Butler? Gender Trouble wasn’t her first book. That place is reserved for Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, published in 1987 and then also reprinted in 1999 (with a new preface). It wasn’t her last. At the time of writing, there have been seven single-authored monographs since then, two co-edited books, as well as three co-authored texts.2 Yet Gender Trouble is the text most closely associated with the name of Judith Butler: so what precisely is the basis of its appeal?
Slavoj Žižek suggests one answer when he argues that Gender Trouble was not only a timely piece of theoretical work. More significantly, it both inspired and legitimized ‘a specific political practice’, namely, the ‘anti-identarian turn of queer politics’.3 Although the influence of Gender Trouble on queer theory and politics cannot be overestimated, what Žižek misses is the enormous impact the book had on feminism. Butler, one critic notes, is ‘the single most cited feminist theorist of the 1990s’, while another points out that Gender Trouble ‘rocked the foundations of feminist theory’.4Gender Trouble has been credited not only with defining the way that the relation between feminism and postmodernism has played out but also with setting the terms of the feminist debate about identity, both in the US and elsewhere.5 Whatever the merits of these competing interpretations, in order to understand the significance of Butler’s work it is necessary to understand something of the context in which it was written and of the kinds of debates that were taking place then.
The 1970s saw the emergence of the ‘new social movements’. These movements, including the women’s, civil rights, and gay and lesbian liberation movements as well as the anti-nuclear and environmental movements, brought about a change in the political landscape. Class politics began to recede as identity and lifestyle politics came to the fore. It is identity politics that is of particular interest to us. Identity politics operates with the assumption that one’s identity – as a woman, or gay man, or African American – furnishes the grounds for a collective politics. This politics typically has a dual purpose: to overcome the forms of oppression and marginalization that group members experience (both collectively and individually), which limit their participation in democratic society, and to create greater opportunities for group self-determination. Identity politics can thus be seen in developments as diverse as anti-discrimination legislation, demands for group quotas, and in the challenging of group stereotypes. Undoubtedly, these new social movements had significant political impact. During the 1980s, however, those based on identity (particularly the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement) soon began to experience certain difficulties in speaking of and for their constituencies. It is here that Gender Trouble is pertinent, for it is a central text in the debates on identity that took place in both movements.
It would be misleading, however, to assume that the critique of identity within either the women’s or gay and lesbian movements began with Butler. Two years prior to the publication of Gender Trouble, for instance, Denise Riley had already published Am I That Name?, a highly significant book exploring the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the category of women, a book moreover that Butler herself cites as instrumental to the development of her own work on gender.6 Similarly, throughout the 1980s, questions had been raised in gay and lesbian circles about the notion of homosexuality as an identity category. Here the work of Michel Foucault (himself frequently identified as the initiator of queer politics) was central. More generally, the work of Butler (and, indeed, of many other contributors to the debates about identity in both feminism and gay and lesbian theory/politics) owes much to the discourses on the ‘crisis of the subject’ that punctuated French theory from the mid-1960s onwards. In Butler’s case, this includes writings by Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, as well as the work of poststructuralists such as Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida.7 In order to situate Butler’s work more clearly, the next three sections will focus, respectively, on the debates immanent to feminism concerning identity and difference; the political developments within gay and lesbian movements that fostered identity critique and that led to the emergence of queer theory; and the broad terms of poststructuralism.
Although Gender Trouble is best located in terms of the above debates, since they explain the context of its composition and reception, both this text and Butler’s writings more broadly engage with and are influenced by a range of other work, including the existentialist phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir and the materialist feminism of Monique Wittig (both discussed in the next chapter), the feminist anthropology of Gayle Rubin and the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud (both discussed in Chapter 4), and the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and G. W. F. Hegel. Although I touch briefly on Nietzsche’s work in the next chapter, I devote more attention to Butler’s debt to Hegel since, as she herself declares in the 1999 preface to Subjects of Desire, ‘[i]n a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions’ (SD: xiv). This engagement with Butler’s Hegelianism – and, more specifically, with her interest in the relation between desire and recognition bequeathed by Hegel – begins in the final part of this chapter, where I examine Subjects of Desire, the revised version of Butler’s doctoral thesis. I should make clear, however, that my aim in this book is not to provide an exhaustive and detailed account of all the theories that have impacted on the development of Butler’s ideas. Such an enterprise would, I fear, be impossible. Nor is it to trace the influence of any one thinker on her work. Instead, my focus is threefold: first, I concentrate on elucidating and evaluating the arguments that Butler herself advances; second, I situate those arguments, as far as possible, in terms of the critical responses from feminists that they have elicited, though inevitably I have had to be selective here; and, finally, I pay particular attention to Butler’s political theory, that is, to the ways in which she understands political activity and transformation. Before we turn to the substance of her ideas, as I indicated above, it is first vital to have a sense of the intellectual and political background of her writings. I begin, therefore, with feminist debates on identity and difference.
Feminism, Identity and Difference
Feminism is a political movement organized around transforming the lives of women. To begin with, therefore, one of the primary aims of feminist scholarship was to contest the male-stream definitions of woman circulating in culture and society at the time of writing. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a text that was highly influential on Butler, exemplifies this aim perfectly. Here Beauvoir set out to demonstrate that humanity in a number of fields tended to be conceived of in terms of men and the male prerogative while woman was, quite simply, the ‘second sex’: weaker and essentially other to man. There was (and is) of course plenty of empirical evidence to back up women’s inferior position in society at large: women’s disqualification from many walks of life on the basis of suspect, masculinist conceptions of their nature, psychology, behaviour, and so forth. Important as it was to subject such misogynistic characterizations to radical critique, a later generation of feminists went a stage further. They articulated a feminism that was not parasitic on male-stream theorizing, as Marxist feminism or liberal feminism purportedly were, but was specifically woman-centred. Feminists such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Robin Morgan and Mary Daly thus began to develop a gynocentric political theory and practice of, by and about women. It aimed to analyse women’s oppression from women’s distinct perspective, to revalue femaleness and femininity, and to forge a political movement that foregrounded women as women. This feminism, ‘feminism unmodified’ as Catharine MacKinnon famously called it, or ‘radical feminism’ as it was otherwise known, had a huge impact.8 As Judith Grant suggests, its gynocentric focus radically altered the feminist agenda of the day, by politicizing ideas such as the body, sexuality and housework, and developing practices (such as consciousness-raising) that enabled the production of woman-centred knowledge.9 Furthermore, as Robyn Rowland and Renate Klein note, it also created ‘a new political and social theory of women’s oppression’.10 Indeed, radical feminism, it has been suggested, represents the first full articulation of feminist ideas per se.11
Generating woman-centred theory and politics was not, however, without its now very well-documented problems. These centred on the difficulty of trying to develop an account of women that could fit all women. Critics argued that rather than being universally applicable, such theories were, in fact, solipsistic (that is, based on the experiences of particular women), essentialist, ahistorical, over-generalized and partial.12 Such was the effect of these debates that, for some time, feminism appeared to be characterized more by factionalism amongst competing groups than by the sisterhood and unity envisaged by its earliest exponents. Although there was some attempt to redress these difficulties by articulating feminist political theories more attuned to the specific experiences of different groups of women – for instance, lesbians or women with disabilities or Black women – even these accounts were accused of excluding certain women from their analyses, of silencing others and of failing to recognize the inter-connected nature of ethnic, class and gender identity.13
When radical feminists attempted to develop woman-centred theory, they were, of course, responding to one of the key intellectual problems faced by all forms of feminism: ‘Who or what is a woman?’14 Is it Woman, the singular noun with a capitalized ‘W’, a shorthand term for the idea that all women share an essential connection with one another through the fact of being female? Or it is it women, the plural noun with a lower-case ‘w’, a descriptive sociological category referring to real historical women in all their variety? When they wrote about Woman in the singular, many feminists certainly assumed that their writings were relevant to living, breathing women in the plural. Their priority was simply to identify what it was that women shared – what identity – that could form the grounds upon which to build a collective emancipatory politics. As a result of the ensuing criticisms of this project, noted earlier, some feminists turned their attention to the pressing issue of how to deal with the differences between women, and in such a way as to keep alive the possibilities of a united political movement.15 These were the diversity feminists. By contrast, another group turned their attention to French theory, broadly understood, and began to focus on what might be called the indeterminacy of woman: that is, the idea that Woman as such does not exist. These were the différance feminists.
Diversity feminism, as the name suggests, concentrated on understanding the variety of experiences of being female. The question its proponents pondered was not just how to understand differences amongst women but, more importantly, how to understand the nature of the relation between different aspects of a woman’s identity – her race, sexual orientation and class – and how these fitted with her femaleness. Was, for instance, a Black lesbian oppressed as a woman and as a Black person and as a lesbian, or was she oppressed as a Black lesbian woman? Could, that is, the different elements of her identity be separated out or were they inextricably entwined? Some feminists argued for the former: that it was possible to identify the different forms of oppression to which a woman was subject, and thus to deal with them separately.16 Others contested this view and argued that sexism, racism, and homophobia, for example, worked through each other; that the relation between them was an interlocking or ‘intersectional’ relation.17
The other strand of feminism that is pertinent to the discussion at hand is what I have referred to as différance feminism, or what is sometimes called deconstruction feminism.18 As I am using these terms here, it refers to the work within the Anglo-American context of those feminists who drew on the writings of thinkers such as Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, as well as on Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. Despite significant differences between these French theorists, what most share is the idea that the subject is always in process (that is, is always incomplete in some sense) and that language, discourse and/or power (depending on the thinker) are central to its constitution. Taken up by différance feminists, these insights have been used to contest or ‘deconstruct’ the very category of Woman upon which radical feminism was predicated. Although Butler acknowledges some of the concerns of diversity feminism in her writing, her own work might reasonably be characterized as a form of différance feminism.
The impact of diversity and différance feminism both on the women’s movement and on feminist political thinking was profound. Deconstructing the idea of a unified feminist subject seemed to put at risk the very politics of feminism. If women do not exist, who is feminism supposed to liberate? Diversity and différance feminism raised difficult questions for political representation, for justice and for an understanding of political agency. Just who is supposed to be represented if, because of their diversity, women are not representable as women? How can the claims of universal justice be squared with the need to recognize not just particularity and difference but also the fluidity and instability of any identity (group or individual)? If the subject is an effect (of power, discourse, language, etc.), then how can it act to alter the conditions of its own subordination? As I will show in the following chapters, not only did Butler’s work respond to some of these debates within feminism, it was pivotal in shifting the terms of that debate away from a unified conception of women towards an alternative understanding of subjectivity, centred on performativity, and contributed to a reorientation in thinking about the nature of feminist (and, in fact, radical) politics. Before I do this, however, it is necessary to turn to the second contextual factor that locates Butler’s work: the shifts that took place in gay and lesbian politics from the 1960s onwards.
From Homosexual to Gay and Lesbian to Queer
In many respects, the trajectory followed by feminism – affirming an identity, questioning the homogenizing tendencies of that identity, recognizing its constructedness and diversity, before endeavouring to capture these in a more fluid idea(l) – has also been followed, though in diverse fashion, within gay and lesbian politics. The major difference, however, is that this trajectory has been marked in the latter by a certain shift in terminology: from talk about homosexuals, then to gays and lesbians, and most recently to queers. It is certainly not the case that all in the movement have approved or followed these shifts. Indeed many, specifically older activists, have resisted the advent of queer theory and activism. The gay and lesbian movement is, like the women’s movement, still an internally diverse, and at times fractious and divided, political movement. Nevertheless, it is against the background of its changing logic that Butler’s work on sex, gender and sexuality needs to be positioned.
As Jeffery Weeks wrote in 1985, ‘recent sexual politics has been a politics of identity’.19 Emerging in the late 1960s, the gay and lesbian movement was very much a product of the radical politics of the time.20 Like other of the new social movements, it conceived of itself as a political movement for the liberation of a subordinated group. In this case, the aim was to transform the oppressive social structures that defined homosexuality as a pathology. The 1960s was, after all, a time when the medical, psychological and legal systems still conceived the homosexual as a ‘psychologically abnormal, morally inferior, and socially deviant human type’.21 Gay and lesbian activists thus sought both to reject demeaning definitions of same-sex desire as abnormal and to affirm an alternative, positive identity based on sexuality, an identity moreover that was conceived of as authentic and natural. In line with other forms of identity politics, the assumption was that the identity that all gays and lesbians shared – and the belief was that there was one – was the basis for political solidarity.22 Just as identity had posed a problem for feminism, so too it began to pose a problem for the lesbian and gay movement.
When lesbian and gay activists conceived of liberation initially, many thought that it would be based on transcending restrictive definitions of sex and gender. They assumed, in other words, that the whole of humanity – not just gays and lesbians – might be emancipated from the confines of homosexual versus heterosexual or man versus woman.23 Increasingly during the 1970s, however, they began to think of gay and lesbian liberation ‘along the lines of ethnic or racial politics’.24 This ‘ethnic’ or ‘ethnic nationalist’ politics, as it has been called, combined elements of civil rights discourse with an emphasis on pride in one’s identity.25 It worked in at least one of two ways. First, some activists began to campaign for the right to equal treatment of gays (and later gays and lesbians) as a distinct minority within the wider population. Here the work of pressure groups such as the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA) in the US and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) in Britain was central.26 Clearly influenced by a liberal agenda of assimilation, the purpose of such groups was not to overthrow a so-called ‘oppressive social order’ but to ensure the inclusion of lesbians and gays within the existing system on equal terms with their heterosexual counterparts. Second, some lesbian feminists began to pursue a separatist agenda. They endeavoured, that is, to create spaces away from men within which women could flourish. This separatist politics was inspired largely by the work of one group of lesbian feminists who started to argue in the early 1970s that far from lesbianism being grounded in the natural and unalterable sexual desire for another woman, it was, in fact, a political identity based on ‘woman-identification’.27 This proved to be a highly contentious move. Other lesbians and lesbian feminists resisted this characterization of lesbianism. They argued that it desexualized lesbianism and that, politically, it served to exclude those lesbians for whom same-sex desire was a fact of nature and not a political choice.
Increasingly, during this period, therefore, gay and lesbian politics began to experience kinds of internal dissent parallel to those that feminism was also experiencing. Criticisms were levelled that the movement promoted white, middle-class values, thus occluding the experiences of gays and lesbians of colour. Tensions between gays and lesbians increased, with some lesbians becoming increasingly critical of the masculinism of gay culture. Lesbians divided further during the ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s when, as Shane Phelan notes, the ‘sex radicals’ (those lesbians affirming the value of practices such as sado-masochism and pornography) found themselves allying with ‘nonlesbian “sexual minorities” ’ against those lesbian feminists committed to a view of women as ‘inherently life-affirming, gentle, and egalitarian’.28 As with feminism, it appeared that the solidarity and collective identity envisaged by earlier gay and lesbian liberationists was fracturing under internal discord. Identity was becoming a problem.
One of the ways in which this problem was addressed within this movement was to begin to conceive of gay and lesbian identities not as operating according to a ‘natural and universal’ logic but as working within a ‘social and historical’ logic: that is, to see identity as socially constructed.29 From the early to mid-1980s, therefore, in some quarters at least, there was yet another shift in lesbian and gay politics. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this reoriented gay and lesbian politics was characterized, first, by a refutation of essentialist identity claims, including the idea of a unified homosexual identity, and, second, by a greater attention to how particular kinds of sexual identity are produced as contingent and historical effects of power and discourse. In this context, as Steven Seidman notes, the idea of a unitary gay identity came to be seen as both normalizing and disciplinary.30 It was this shift to a social constructionist understanding of identity that marked the beginnings of queer theory and politics. It would be wrong, however, to see this as the sole basis for the emergence of this most recent phase in gay and lesbian politics. There are a number of other relevant factors.31
There was the challenge that bisexuality posed to understandings of the relation between sexuality and politics as bisexuals demanded inclusion in gay and lesbian organizations and communities. There was the impact of deconstruction within academic work both by and about lesbians and gays. Finally, the kinds of political activism that emerged within the gay community in response to HIV/AIDS were also central. Of particular note here is the work of the militant American group the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), who combined ‘direct action politics and activist glamor’ in spectacular political interventions and events – die-ins, for instance – designed to publicize the US government’s funding failures with regard to AIDS research.32 It is this theatrical and direct action style of politics that informs Butler’s work and that she appears to advocate.33 The combination of all of these elements, therefore, gives rise to ‘queer’ theory (associated most strongly with the writings of Eve Sedgwick, Diana Fuss and, of course, Judith Butler) and to the queer politics of organizations such as Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers, who have continued and, indeed, developed the often dramatic activist politics of ACT UP. Although Butler has observed in interviews that her association with the beginnings of queer theory and politics was unwitting (‘GP’: 32), as will become clear in the forthcoming chapters, there is no doubt that her work has been seen as central to the advent of queer politics, with Gender Trouble regarded as one of its foundational texts.
The Influence of Poststructuralism
Poststructuralism is notoriously difficult to pin down. First, some authors sharply differentiate poststructuralism from the associated term, postmodernism. So, for instance, Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi in the introduction to their collection Postmodernism and Society contend that postmodernism is a term characterizing a set of aesthetic projects, while poststructuralism refers to work in literature, history and philosophy that stresses issues of plurality and provisionality.34 In Boyne and Rattansi’s terms, Butler is a poststructuralist. Others, however, refer to such philosophical work as ‘postmodern’, making no distinction between aesthetic projects and other ones. The difficulty is that in using the term ‘postmodern’ they obscure one of the important facets of this philosophical work: its relation to structuralism. Second, the authors grouped together under whichever label a critic deploys can vary considerably. For instance, Christine di Stefano limits her discussion of ‘postmodern’ ideas to the works of Richard Rorty, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, interestingly occluding the contribution of female philosophers, such as Julia Kristeva, to its genesis and evolution.35 By contrast, Teresa Ebert presents a more capacious understanding of ‘postmodernism’, finding space for Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida as well as for Alice Jardine, Donna Haraway, Ernesto Laclau, Luce Irigaray and several others, including Butler.36 Next, regardless of whether the range of authors referred to is limited, as with di Stefano, or more expansive, as with Ebert, considerable difficulties arise from bundling together quite diverse theoretical approaches. Although there are surely some similarities in the themes these authors cover, there are also marked differences between them. They differ, not least, in terms of the political consequences of their respective analyses and in how they understand the subject (if they discuss this at all). While a ‘careful reading’ of specific authors is generally, in my view, preferable to a general overview of poststructuralism (for the reasons already given), in order to contextualize Butler’s work it will nevertheless be necessary to tender some general remarks on this otherwise protean mass of ideas.37
The simplest way to conceive poststructuralism in general is to see it as a negative or critical philosophical position. It is, in other words, anti-essentialist, anti-foundational, suspicious of grand narratives, opposed to the idea of history as linear and progressive, and distrustful of metaphysics. It is often wary of any appeal to the stable unified subject, and doubtful of the possibility of certainty in meaning. It is, in this way, I would suggest, more of an interrogative than normative mode of inquiry, challenging and contesting received ideas and norms rather than attempting to resolve problems and prescribe solutions. Certainly aspects of all of these elements are more or less present in the work of Butler, as we will see. Moreover, poststructuralism, as its name suggests, defines itself in relation to structuralism, with the prefix ‘post’ suggesting that it either goes beyond structuralism in some way or, more simply, comes after it. Either way, it is informed by it. Indeed, the trajectory from structuralism to poststructuralism can be seen, it has been suggested, in the intellectual careers of thinkers such as Foucault, who, it is alleged, began as a structuralist before becoming a poststructuralist.38 So what is structuralism?
Itself an internally variegated theory, structuralism can be characterized, amongst other things, by its critique of the human subject and by the endeavour to apply the methods of ‘science’ to an understanding of social and human phenomena, ranging from language to human psychology, and from anthropology to literary theory. Central to its approach, therefore, is its emphasis on the ‘subject’ (or even ‘Subject’) rather than on the individual. The idea of the individual was shorthand for the notion of a rational, self-conscious, coherent and stable actor. By contrast, the idea of the subject conveys the notion that human reality, the unconscious and our inner selves are, in fact, constructions or products of ‘signifying’ activities.39 The second key point to note is that the core task of structuralism, as its name implies, was to ‘isolate the general structures of human activity’.40 So, for instance, the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure emphasizes the ‘structural’ relation between signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept) that makes up the signs that constitute language. Structuralism was interested, therefore, in general laws and universal ‘systems’. Importantly, the subject was conceptualized as an effect of these structures; thus, for Lacan, for example, language constitutes the subject.
Poststructuralism differs from structuralism in a number of ways. First, structuralists conceived of the structures they analysed as stable and invariant, that is, operating in the same way at all times. Poststructuralists, in comparison, reject the idea of general laws and universal systems and, instead, stress instability and indeterminacy. So, where structuralists thought meaning was relatively stable, because, to refer to Saussure again, the link between signifier and signified was fixed (even though it was a conventional rather than natural relation), poststructuralists like Derrida argue that meaning can never in fact be fixed. Signifiers can change into signifieds, signifieds can commute into signifiers. Moreover, in the poststructuralist account of language, one signifier always implies (signifies) another in an endless chain of signification. Language is thus a temporal process in which ultimate meaning is perpetually deferred.41 Second, both structuralism and poststructuralism jettison the idea of a unified and self-contained subject. Structuralism concentrates on identifying the moment at which the Subject comes into being – when, as Althusser argues, it is ‘hailed’ (or interpellated) by the policeman – poststructuralism, however, does not. As a consequence of its dismissal of the idea of general laws and invariant structures, poststructuralism in its Foucauldian form looks to the variable and historically specific ways in which subjects – or rather subject positions – are produced by discourse and power, while in its Derridean form it focuses on the impossibility of defining any identity (for instance, woman) because any such definition is inherently open to resignification. As such, it is ‘undecidable’.
As suggested above, the impact of poststructuralism on Butler, particularly the work of Derrida and Foucault, and her own impact on the development of poststructuralist thought have been significant. Yet, interestingly, Butler began as a critic of poststructuralism; as she comments, she ‘resisted’ it (SD: viii). Her doctoral thesis, ‘Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre’ (1984), exploring the influence of Hegelian ideas in France, is noteworthy for its inattention to poststructuralist (and, indeed, structuralist) ideas. Yet when her thesis was published some three years later, matters had moved on. Subjects of Desire contains an additional section exploring the ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, though exclusively in the context of French Hegelianism. Where Gender Trouble is, without doubt, a more poststructuralist text than Subjects of Desire, nevertheless, the revisions Butler made to her thesis indicate the beginning of what has been her on-going engagement with and interrogation of poststructuralist theory. It is to Subjects of Desire that I now turn.
Hegel and Desiring Subjects
Described by Butler as her ‘juvenilia’, for which she asks the reader for ‘abundant forgiveness in reserve’, Subjects of Desire charts how certain ideas developed by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit are critiqued and developed by two generations of French philosophers: the first, writing during the 1930s and 1940s, is that of Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite – the two thinkers who introduced Hegel’s philosophy to France – Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl and Simone de Beauvoir (though Butler makes only passing reference to the last two); and the second is the generation of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva and Deleuze (SD: viii).42 The book is organized into four sections. It begins with an exploration of Hegel’s Phenomenology. This is the text where Hegel explains in detail the logical movement of consciousness from its most primitive mode (what he calls ‘sensuous certainty’) to its most advanced (which he terms ‘absolute knowing’). Butler is particularly interested in the early part of the Phenomenology; specifically, the chapter on consciousness and the first part of the chapter on self-consciousness, where Hegel sets out the parable of the Lord and the Bondsman (or master–slave dialectic, as it is often labelled). As such, she does not discuss the full movement towards Spirit charted by Hegel. Instead, she limits herself to discussing the co-emergence of desire and self-consciousness in his work. In the second section, Butler concentrates on outlining the influential reworkings of Hegel developed by both Kojève and Hyppolite. This is followed, in section 3, by an exploration of Sartre’s examination of existential desire and the self–other relation, while the final section focuses on the so-called ‘post’- or ‘anti’- Hegelian revisionings of the subject of desire developed by Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Kristeva.43 The chapter ends, importantly in the light of Butler’s later work, with a short critical discussion of Kristeva and Foucault and the potential for a ‘major conceptual reorientation’ of Hegel’s desiring subject through a ‘history of bodies’ that both goes beyond Foucault’s work and is, amongst other things, attentive to gender (SD: 235).
Butler’s aim in Subjects is to plot the concept of desire as it is first articulated by Hegel, through its subsequent re-articulations in French thought. Obviously there is much that could be said about this. What I want to draw out are two general points about her reading of this intellectual history, before moving on to more substantive matters: first, Butler disagrees with those readings, commonly those of his poststructuralist interpreters, that conceive of Hegel’s philosophy as a totalizing or ‘ostensibly all-inclusive [and closed] system’ (SD: 13). Instead, she prefers a reading that stresses the openness of his thought.44 Second, she proposes that, far from Hegel’s French critics escaping the Hegelianism they are attempting to refute or transcend, they remain ensnared in a dialectical relation to Hegel that strengthens rather than undermines the logic of his thought. For even as they attempt to displace or dismiss Hegel’s idea of the desiring subject, they continue to give life to it. This does not mean that Hegel cannot be criticized; clearly he can be and has been (and, indeed, Butler cites examples of this by those she studies). It is that such criticism for her is itself evidence of dialectical thinking. Since Butler is also a critic of Hegel, albeit a friendly and responsive one, then logically we must assume that her own work bears a similar dialectical relation to Hegel’s.
My reason for discussing Subjects of Desire is not, however, to appraise the adequacy, originality or otherwise of Butler’s interpretation of French Hegelianism, hence my schematic plotting of the book’s contents. It is to understand better how Butler’s subsequent work is indebted to Hegel, even as it is also shaped by that of other authors. In what remains of this chapter, therefore, I consider four areas where Butler’s work might profitably be thought of in relation to Hegel’s: first, the idea of the subject of desire; next, the link between subjectivity and alterity (or otherness) set out by Hegel in the Lord–Bondsman scenario; then, the idea of dialectical thought; and, finally, the relation between Hegel’s rhetorical style and Butler’s own writing style.
The Subject of Desire
The central theme of Subjects of Desire is, as already noted, the relation between the subject and desire. While thinkers prior to Hegel had examined the nature of desire, few, as Allan Megill notes, had thought that there might be ‘a constitutive relation between desire and subjectivity’, as Hegel did, and it is this constitutive relation that both interested his French critics and continues to interest Butler.45 Hegel’s Phenomenology, as stated, examines the way in which desire and self-consciousness emerge side by side. For Butler, the Phenomenology is not to be read as offering a philosophical truth; it is to be read as a series of ‘instructive fictions’ in which the relation between subjectivity and desire is plotted (SD: 21).46 The journeying consciousness on its way to absolute knowledge is, she suggests, like a cartoon character who in his willingness (and it is a he [SD: 20]) to continue on a journey beset by one failure after another appears to be like the myopic ‘Mr Magoo whose automobile careening through the neighbour’s chicken coop always seems to land on all four wheels’, ready to travel somewhere else to fail all over again (SD: 21).47 Although the desiring subject might gain intermittent comfort from moments of recognition, and be tenacious enough to continue when what he believes is true is revealed as illusory, he is never destroyed by his experiences of negativity. Instead, he journeys onwards ‘with compulsive metaphysical honesty toward his ultimate dialectical harmony with the world’ (SD: 22).
In contrast to other readers, Butler declines to understand the Phenomenology as an account of a subject who is progressing neatly from one ‘ontological place to another’. This is not the tale of a subject on its way to journey’s end, to the attainment of absolute knowledge, she claims. It is not, to recall the Mr Magoo analogy, the story of a subject who lands on all four wheels and stays put. It is the story of a subject who must forever careen (SD: xv). As Butler interprets it, the Phenomenology charts the story of a subject that ‘must suffer its own loss of identity again and again in order to realize its fullest sense of self’ (SD: 13). This is the narrative, therefore, of what Butler calls, echoing Martin Heidegger, an ‘ek-static’ subject, a subject outside itself, or, to put it differently, a subject that is not self-identical. It might, of course, be objected, and perhaps fairly, that Butler is only able to present the Hegelian desiring subject as an incomplete ek-static subject because she does not engage with the whole logic of Hegel’s system. She suspends the narrative, that is, before the journeying consciousness encounters reason or spirit.48 I leave that to others to debate. For the purposes of this particular book, what I want to emphasize is that the idea of ek-static subjectivity, derived, however loosely, from Hegel, continues to inspire Butler’s work to date, although the form it takes is one increasingly informed, in large part, by psychoanalysis. For this reason, far from the comic subject of desire she attributes to Hegel, Butler’s subject is a melancholic figure.49 (I will examine this in more detail in Chapter 4.) Finally, where Hegel assumes a masculine subject, Butler focuses, as I demonstrate in the next two chapters, on the regulatory processes that generate sexed and gendered desiring subjects.
In the next section, I move on to consider another element of Hegel’s thought that has influenced Butler (and, indeed, many others): the encounter with the other sketched in the section of the Phenomenology where Hegel explores the struggle for recognition between Lord and Bondsman. For now I will just set out the terms of the struggle and indicate where it is salient for Butler’s work. I will examine Butler’s critique of recognition more fully in Chapter 6.
Subjectivity and Alterity – the Tale of the Lord and the Bondsman
Hegel’s account of the parable of the Lord and the Bondsman, which introduces the idea of intersubjective recognition, follows on from the episode in which self-consciousness attempts to secure confirmation of itself through the ‘negation’, in this case the consumption, of material objects. The problem with attempting to satisfy desire in this way is that it entails a ‘constant activity of negation’ (SD: 39), since to consume an object is to destroy it, which means that desire has repeatedly to find more and more objects to consume. Self-consciousness realizes, therefore, that what it needs is a ‘being like itself’ (SD: 40), another self-consciousness (an other), that can affirm its existence as a self-conscious, and autonomous, being.
When self-consciousness begins its encounter with the other, it does so from a presumed situation of independence; it believes itself to be sovereign. This illusion is soon shattered as self-consciousness comes to realize that in its desire to be confirmed by the other it has become dependent on them. So, just as in the encounter with the material world, the Subject attempts to assert its supremacy by ‘negating’ the other, but here the other, in order to preserve its own autonomy, resists. A ‘life-and-death struggle’ thus ensues in which each tries to negate – to kill – the other. The difficulty is that if one self-consciousness succeeds in this task, then it will lose its chance at recognition by another self-conscious being. So instead of slaughtering his opponent, the ‘winner’ enslaves him: ‘Domination, the relation that replaces the urge to kill, must be understood as the effort to annihilate within the context of life.’ The slave must ‘live its own death’ (SD: 52). In this way, the two equal self-consciousnesses are replaced by one that is independent (Lord) and one that is dependent (Bondsman) and ‘whose essential nature’, as Hegel notes, ‘is simply to live or to be for another’.50 Truncating (Butler’s recounting of) Hegel’s argument, the net result of the struggle is not, in fact, the affirmation of the self-consciousness of the Lord, because the Bondsman as a slave is not the Lord’s equal but is rather his subordinate. As such, his recognition is not enough, for the Lord is recognized only by a demeaned, objectified consciousness. Moreover, the Bondsman also fails to gain recognition because he is enslaved. There is no ideal reciprocal relation here. The irony is, however, that it is the slave who gains most from the relation with his master, for having experienced the fear of death, he has experienced full consciousness of his own existence. Plus, by being compelled to labour on the objective world, he is able to transform it, thereby enabling him to objectify his own identity. No longer engaged merely in consumption, the desire of the Bondsman is satisfied rather through ‘the re-creation of natural objects into reflections of their maker’ (SD: 57).
Although Butler pays very little attention in her subsequent writings to the way in which labour constructs the material world, she does return again and again to the theme of recognition. Her work is thus threaded through with her own distinctive attempt to pursue Hegel’s claim that it is through recognition that persons are engendered as ‘socially viable beings’ (UG
