Sara Salih. 2002: 78-79
By ‘sex’ Butler is not referring to ‘sexual intercourse’, but to one’s sexed identity. Whether you tick the ‘male’ or ‘female’ box on census forms or application forms usually depends on whether you possess recognizably male or female genitalia, and it is on this basis that your sexed identity is allocated to you when you are born.
To talk in terms of the ‘allocation’ of sex is already to assume that it is not ‘natural’ or given, and in her brief description of the ‘sexing’ which takes place at the scene of birth, Butler relies on the notion of interpellation.
She writes: Consider the medical interpellation which (the recent emergence of the sonogram notwithstanding) shifts an infant from an ‘it’ to a ‘she’ or a ‘he’, and in that naming the girl is ‘girled’, brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender. But that ‘girling’ of the girl does not end there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation is reiterated by various authorities and throughout the various intervals of time to reinforce or contest this naturalized effect. The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm. (BTM: 7 – 8)
Whether it takes place before birth through an ultrasound scan, or when the infant is born, the interpellation of sex and gender occurs as soon as a person’s sex is announced – ‘It’s a girl/boy!’ (Salih 2002. p 77).
definition of the verb ‘to interpellate’ will tell you that it is the action of appealing to someone, a summons, citation or interruption, but Butler uses ‘interpellation’ in a specifically theoretical sense to describe how subject positions are conferred and assumed through the action of ‘hailing’. To adapt de Beauvoir’s statement, cited earlier, we might say ‘One is not born, but rather one is called, a woman’.
Butler draws this idea from Althusser’s essay, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, where he uses the term interpellation to describe the ‘hailing’ of a person into her or his social and ideological position by an authority figure. Althusser gives the example of a policeman calling out ‘Hey, you there!’ to a man [sic] in the street. By calling out, the policeman interpellates the man as a subject, and by turning around the man takes up his position as such. ‘By this mere one-hundred-and eighty-degree physical conversion [i.e. turning around] he becomes a subject’, Althusser writes. ‘Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else) . . . The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’ (Althusser 1969: 163).
There are all sorts of ways in which people are interpellated by ideology and you don’t need a policeman in the street to shout out ‘Hey, you there!’ in order to be constituted as a subject. In fact, a (relatively benign) example of interpellation occurred in the first paragraph of this chapter when I addressed you, the reader, directly, writing as if I knew you and what you have read and what you think about what you have read. In doing so I was interpellating you, both literally by addressing you (as I am doing now) and in an Althusserian sense by implicitly slotting you into a preconceived ‘readerly’ and theoretical role (‘You have read Gender Trouble haven’t you? And you understand it/agree with it don’t you?’). In making these assumptions I am effectively constituting you as a subject – in this specific context, as a reading subject, who is not only familiar with Gender Trouble and all the arguments in it, but who also agrees with them. A literary example of interpellation occurs in Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), which is subtitled ‘A Pure Woman’. In the novel, Angel Clare interpellates Tess as ‘pure’ in a moral sense by assuming that she is an innocent virgin who has no knowledge of men, and it could be argued that she in turn constructs herself according to his model of ‘proper’ femininity until this construction becomes unsustainable (Salih 2002. p 78).