Notes
on: Butler J.(1994) ‘Against Proper Objects.Introduction’,
in Differences.A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6
(2+3): 1-26.
[This
piece takes the form of a critique of a recent
Reader in Lesbian and Gay Studies (Abelove et
al. 1993)] [herineafter
lesbian and gay studies becomes L&G] A
common distinction between feminism and L&G
sees their concerns as gender and sex
respectively as central concepts.Some
L&G theorists then go on to insist that the
category of gender includes both females and
males, which seems to offer a connection between
sex and gender after all!The
category of sex itself covers a range of
applications—identity regimes as in Foucault,
but also sex and desire, sexual sensations and
practices.L&G's emphasis on sex is therefore
intended to incorporate and reduce feminist
interests: feminism properly specializes only in
sex as identity: any attempt to extend into
sexual practices involves crossing a boundary
into another specialism, such as lesbian and gay
studies.Feminism
has been reduced in order to justify the
emergence of L&G as a successor specialism.Ironically,
the reduction involves accepting a simple binary
notion of sex [division into men and women], and
ignores the interrelationships in some feminist
approaches.It also ignores the diversity in sexual
difference. The implication is that the kind of
sex that one is, and the kind of sex that one
does belong to two different domains.This
sort of reduction has long been criticized in
feminism, but seems to be revived here in the
interests of establishing the new specialism.
Butler
says there is no feminist work that would
operate with these simple binaries or see gender
as incorporating both male and female [although
some feminists claim that gender politics aimed
at demolishing phallogocentrism would surely
destroy conventional male identities as well?],
nor would they see the separation between the
biological and the social.Instead,
it has long been argued that gender is a matter
of a network of power relations rather than a
set of attributes [and lots of feminist writers
are cited in support, page 5].Feminism
has also long seen the connection between
gender, race, class and post colonialism.[Spivak
is the only name cited that I recognize].Even
sexual difference theorists see that category as
a problematic one, not to be reduced to biology.
The whole
issue is contradictory [‘chiasmic’], and seems
to be driven by a need to isolate a proper
object for lesbian and gay studies, ‘an
idealization that is perhaps not without its
aggression’ (6).The claim to begin with an analogy with
feminism in fact offers a serious reduction of
its object of interest.Establishing
the proper objects of study is often accompanied
with ‘a mundane sort of violence’ of this kind,
or fabricated founding narrative.Only
after a considerable reduction and redefinition
of concepts, can 'proper objects' emerge.In
this case, the break between the two disciplines
is also excessive, since there is a great deal
of overlap and common interests from which both
have emerged.The break emerged from dubious denials of
this common history, and undue specialism which
excludes the originating interests in race and
class as well.
[The next
bit clarifies further trends which have
marginalised and reduced feminism, especially
the campaign against pornography which has
rendered women as helpless victims ,and
sexuality as a simple matter of domination or
subordination].
MacKinnon
in particular has seen sexual domination as
central to masculinity, with coercive
subordination as defining women.This
is reductionist, both of gender and of
heterosexual activity.[Argued
out at a conference in 1983!] Feminism has been
seen instead as involving sexual liberation
[more names, of whom I recognized only bell
hooks, 8].Sexual freedom involves danger but also
pleasure, and this has involved more than simple
opposition to pornography.This
is another tendency that resists the dualism
announced by L&G.
The Reader
apparently cites an essay by Rubin on the
tendency in some feminism to equate gender and
sexuality, but this was related to a debate
within feminism at the time, and cannot be
generalized.[And then there is detailed critique
which I think is arguing that particularly close
connections between gender and sex have emerged
in different places and at different times, but
should be understood as hegemonic.Other
feminist strands have been effective at refusing
the terms of this hegemonic equation].Even
Rubin apparently separated sexual and gender
forms of oppression, and was arguing for an
investigation of the specific politics of
sexuality to include queer categories in 1983,
before the announcement of the need for a new
discipline.
It is
important to refuse all reductions—of sexuality
to class and of sexuality to gender—but there is
a reduction to lesbian and gay studies being
proposed in the Reader too.The
latter approach neglects factors such as race
and class (or sees them as mere instances), and
also excludes other sexual minorities—it tends
to explain transsexualism as a kind of
homosexuality, for example.By
avoiding the concept of gender, it also ignores
transgender issues.By
claiming an exclusive focus on sex, it seems to
be laying claim to heterosexuality as well.Butler
also thinks that even queer theory might not be
able to achieve inclusiveness (11).
Rubin is
really criticizing MacKinnon and her insistence
that genders are the result of the construction
and manipulation of sexual identity.It is
MacKinnon’s approach which has become associated
with feminism [in popular discourse?], and this
has opened Rubin to the unintended consequence
of being a founding text for lesbian and gay
studies.It
has also marginalized the sexual liberationists
who are now not often recognized as being
feminist at all.It is also responsible for the apparent
disinterest in feminism in sex.Rubin
actually was developing a Foucaldian line on the
development of a separate regime of sexuality,
splitting from kinship.Kinship
regulates gender, but a whole new series of
state regulations are required to regulate
sexual activity for Rubin.[This
argument apparently lay behind feminist interest
in psychoanalysis, and then its rejection in
favour of Foucault]. Does this distinction still
work?Foucault
can be seen as unnecessarily Eurocentric [and
also reproducing a particular context in other
ways?].
However,
modern medical regimes of sexuality can still be
used to support kinship systems or ‘family
values’.So
do some state regulations such as the management
of the endangered child, the insistence on
sexual privacy, the moral campaigns against
people with AIDS and their dissociation from
‘normal families’.Currently frozen notions of kinship still
establish a norm, although there are attempts to
think of more utopian forms such as the buddy
system between male gays, rights for non
heterosexual couples, property relations
extending beyond heterosexual relations.These
are ways of moving not only beyond the idea of
reproduction as central to kinship, but breaking
with other conceptions as well.There
is a more radical attempt to break with
psychoanalytic notions of family relations as
well, and to identify specific sites of sexual
constraint and prohibition.It is
necessary to see the strands as having common
cause politically, not least in opposing
MacKinnon’s campaigns.
So
identifying feminism as simply a concern with
gender ignores such interesting radical sexual
politics and interest in the interrelations with
race and class—feminism has established a number
of anti racist practices, for example,
especially in third world feminism.MacKinnon
is not the defining writer; gender is not a
matter of fixed sexual identities and there has
been considerable debate about the relation
between the two; sexual regulation cannot be
easily separated from the politics of gender.Thus
the objects of analysis of lesbian and gay
studies are inadequately defined.
Braidotti
is one feminist who shows the interweaving
implications in sexual difference.She
and Grosz have tried to develop notions of
corporeality that are not biologically or
culturally reductionist, so that sexual
difference can be reduced neither to gender nor
to sex.The
critique of the subject prevents these easy
reductions: the construction of the subject is
what excludes the feminine.Language
is seen as crucial and this must be accepted by
conventional gender approaches: the construction
of the subject precedes Lacanian emphases on the
subsequent gendering of the subject and the
development of the unconscious (16).The
asymmetry of this structuring process can
sometimes be ignored by some gender studies
approaches.
[I think
Butler is arguing that there could be an unholy
alliance of these two trends.In
America, gender studies is being attacked by
lesbian and gay studies, while European
theorists see the turn to gender as an
unnecessary constraint on feminist politics.Both
positions over emphasize the interest in gender
in feminist politics as opposed to an interest
in sexual liberation, or in combinations of
gender and race, especially in the USA.The
term to gender began as an attempt to move
beyond biological determinism, but it is now
seen to be an unnecessary constraint—unfairly,
Butler thinks in both cases?Some
American feminists have also seen gender as too
simple a term compared to psychoanalytic
approaches.Again, it is possible to see all these
positions as taking too simple a view of
feminist work on gender].
Sexual
difference approaches examine the asymmetrical
construction of masculinity and femininity,
often at the symbolic level.Gender,
however tends to be a sociologistic category,
examining social configurations rather than the
construction of subjects.The
former assumes that the symbolic is a prior
category to the sociological.
However, a
further complication is found in the work of
Irigaray on the feminine as a category that
exceeds all representations in articulations.Specifically,
the feminine ‘is a signifier within a
masculinist economy, but then it “exists”
outside that economy’ (18), as something that
must be controlled and ‘repudiated’ by
masculinist economy.Those
approaches that focus on gender only in the
former sense have misidentified it, and run the
risk of reproducing masculinist categories
instead of establishing a basis to criticise
them.So
Irigaray claims that the feminine is always
somewhere else; Spivak talks about simultaneous
creation and erasure of the feminine as a
process within masculinist economy.The
excessive nature of the feminine is not captured
in conventional representation, which is based
on masculinist assumptions: Cornell says that
the ‘feminine has no place in reality’ (19), and
thus escapes conventional representation and
heads towards the sublime.
Thus
sociologistic perspectives on gender miss this
critical potential, and fail to explain why the
feminine is so poorly represented in the first
place—what must be done to overcome this
tendency?How
can the feminine present itself when it is
radically unrepresentable?
This
argument that the feminine exceeds the limits of
representation is also an argument to say that
it structures representation and its
articulation with the social.Yet
this can be too tight and eternal an
articulation as in Lacan—‘the phallus emerges as
the primary signifier, and the feminine as the
always-already repudiated’ (19), and this
underpins ‘the cultural presumption of
heterosexist hegemony’.There
is clearly a need to rethink the relation
between the social and the symbolic [the
representational], possibly to think of ways in
which changes in the former might affect the
latter.We
might need to disentangle this search from
Marxist teleology [not sure why, something to do
with teleology now being contained entirely
within the symbolic?] (20).[Then
I think a bit about whether sexual difference
approaches could undo this repressive
articulation with the social].
The
Lacanian bond can be undone by a thinking of the
symbolic as far more dynamic, subject to change
as a result of social practices.These
must involve sexual practices [I think], and it
will be a conservative move to separate sex and
gender politics, especially if sexual practices
are seen as having nothing to do with sexual
differences of the conventional kind.This
would be a conservative kind of liberation that
did not threaten masculinism.This
naivety extends to including lesbian and gay
practices together as if both can escape
equally. Others have warned about the tendency
for male gays and queers to separate themselves
from feminism, leading to gay conservatism.The
theoretical split between feminism and lesbian
and gay studies ‘perform[s] the academic version
of breaking coalition’ (21).
Both
L&G and queer studies need to move beyond
these positions and resist ‘the interests of
canonization and provisional institutional
legitimation’ (21).Race
and class, and their connections with relations
of power need to be brought back in, against
‘institutional separatisms’.We
need conversations and self criticisms rather
than ‘territorial claims’ which often turn into
caricature of rival positions.These
are the real basis for claims of autonomy.We
want to re-establish links and resist
institutionalization [perhaps this is a bit
strong]: ‘For normalizing the queer would be,
after all, its sad finish’ (21).
[Apparently,
the piece goes on to examine two interviews to
show the possibilities—presumably in the same
journal?The
notes contains small extracts from these
interviews as well?]