(Salih 2002. p 79)
To theorize sex in terms of interpellation as Butler does is to imply that one’s body parts (particularly penis and vagina) are not simply and naturally ‘there’ from birth onwards, but that one’s sex is performatively constituted when one’s body is categorized as either ‘male’ or ‘female’ … Butler spends some time considering how subject positions are assumed in response to what she calls the ‘reprimand’ of the law – i.e. the policeman’s call. Unlike Althusser, who regards this hailing as ‘a unilateral act’, Butler argues that interpellation is not ‘a simple performative’, in other words, it does not always effectively enact what it names, and it is possible for the subject to respond to the law in ways that undermine it. Indeed, the law itself provides the conditions for its own subversion (BTM: 122). Butler recognizes that acts of disobedience must always take place within the law using the terms that constitute us: we have to respond to the policeman’s call otherwise we would have no subject status, but the subject status we necessarily embrace constitutes what Butler (borrowing from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) calls ‘an enabling violation’. The subject or ‘I’ who opposes its construction draws from that construction and derives agency by being implicated in the very power structures it seeks to oppose. Subjects are always implicated in the relations of power but, since they are also enabled by them, they are not merely subordinated to the law (BTM: 122– 3) (Salih 2002. p 79).
If one is ‘hailed’ into sex rather than simply born a ‘woman’, then it must be possible to take up one’s sex in ways which undermine heterosexual hegemony, where hegemony refers to the power structures within which subjects are constituted through ideological, rather than physical, coercion … A girl is not born a girl, but she is ‘girled’, to use Butler’s coinage, at or before birth on the basis of whether she possesses a penis or a vagina. This is an arbitrary distinction, and Butler will argue that sexed body parts are invested with significance, so it would follow that infants could just as well be differentiated from each other on the basis of other parts – the size of their ear lobes, the colour of their eyes, the flexibility of their tongues. Far from being neutral, the perception and description of the body (‘It’s a girl!’, etc.) is an interpellative performative statement, and the language that seems merely to describe the body actually constitutes it. Again, Butler is not refuting the ‘existence’ of matter, but she insists that matter can have no status outside a discourse that is always constitutive, always interpellative, always performative. We will return to the perceived body – what you could call a phenomenology of body parts – later when we consider Butler’s discussions of the psychoanalyst, Lacan (Salih 2002. p 80).