Author: logocentric

interpellation

(Salih 2002. p 88-89)

To claim, as Butler does, that sex is always (‘to some degree’) performative is to claim that bodies are never merely described, they are always constituted in the act of description. When the doctor or nurse declares ‘It’s a girl/boy!’, they are not simply reporting on what they see (this would be a constative utterance), they are actually assigning a sex and a gender to a body that can have no existence outside discourse. In other words, the statement ‘It’s a girl/boy!’ is performative. Butler returns to the birth/ultrasound scene in the final chapter of Bodies, ‘Critically Queer’, where, as before, she argues that discourse precedes and constitutes the ‘I’, i.e. the subject: To the extent that the naming of the ‘girl’ is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain ‘girling’ is compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm. This is a ‘girl’, however, who is compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. (BTM: 232) ‘It’s a girl!’ is not a statement of fact but an interpellation that initiates the process of ‘girling’, a process based on perceived and imposed differences between men and women, differences that are far from ‘natural’. To demonstrate the performative operations of interpellation, Butler cites a cartoon strip in which an infant is assigned its place in the sex– gender system with the exclamation ‘It’s a lesbian!’. ‘Far from an essentialist joke, the queer appropriation of the performative mimes and exposes both the binding power of the heterosexualizing law and its expropriability’, writes Butler (BTM: 232; her emphasis). We will return to expropriability and citation shortly; here the point to note is that, since sexual and gendered differences are performatively installed by and in discourse, it would be possible to designate or confer identity on the basis of an alternative set of discursively constituted attributes.

Clearly, to announce that an infant is a lesbian is not a neutral act of description but a performative statement that interpellates the infant as such. ‘It’s a girl!’ functions in exactly the same way: it is a performative utterance that henceforth compels the ‘girl’ to cite both sexual and gendered norms in order to qualify for subjecthood within the heterosexual matrix that ‘hails’ her (Salih 2002. p 88-89).

8) “It’s a girl!” and “It’s a lesbian” Are these really equivalent?

lesbian phallus pt 2

(Salih, 2002. p 86).

‘The question, of course, is why it is assumed that the phallus requires that particular body part to symbolize, and why it could not operate through symbolizing other body parts’, writes Butler, and she argues that the ‘displaceability’ of the phallus, its ability to symbolize body parts or body-like things other than the penis is what makes the lesbian phallus possible (BTM: 84).

Women can both ‘have’ and ‘be’ the phallus, which means that they can suffer from penis envy and a castration complex at the same time; moreover, since ‘the anatomical part is never commensurable with the phallus itself’, men may be driven by both castration anxiety and penis envy, or rather, ‘phallus envy’ (BTM: 85). The phallus is ‘a transferable phantasm’ (BTM: 86), ‘an imaginary effect’ (BTM: 88), part of an imagined morphology (or a ‘morphological imaginary’) that can be appropriated and made to signify/ symbolize differently.

Such ‘aggressive reterritorializations’ (BTM: 86) deprivilege the phallus as both symbol and signifier, as well as revealing its status within a bodily schema, which, like language, is a resignifiable signifying chain with no ‘transcendental signified’ at its origin. Butler makes the most of this resignifiability in her ascription of the phallus to other body parts:

‘Consider that “having” the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things’, she writes. ‘[T]he simultaneous acts of deprivileging the phallus and removing it from the normative heterosexual form of exchange, and recirculating and reprivileging it between women deploys the phallus to break the signifying chain in which it conventionally operates’ (BTM: 88). Butler claims that the phallus is a ‘plastic’ signifier that may ‘suddenly’ be made to stand for any number of body parts, discursive performatives or alternative fetishes (BTM: 89).

And yet it would appear that the phallus remains somewhat elusive, since Butler does not specify exactly how such resignifications can ‘suddenly’ happen, or why women would want to make their arms, tongues, hands, pelvic bones, etc. into phallic signifiers. The subversive potential of the resignifiable phallus resides in Butler’s insistence that you do not need to have a penis in order to have or be a phallus, and that having a penis does not mean that you will have or be a phallus. ‘[T]he lesbian phallus offers the occasion (a set of occasions) for the phallus to signify differently, and in so signifying, to resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist and heterosexist privilege’, she writes (BTM: 90).

Again we return to the idea that anatomy is discourse or signification rather than destiny, which means that the body can be resignified in ways that challenge rather than confirm heterosexual hegemony. In her conclusion to the second chapter of Bodies, Butler states that she is not suggesting that a new body part is required, since she has not been talking about the penis as such; instead she calls for the displacement of the symbolic heterosexual hegemony of sexual difference and the release of alternative imaginary schemas of erotogenic pleasure (BTM: 91). It would indeed appear that Butler has wrested this hitherto privileged signifier from Lacan’s discursive control (BTM: 82– 3), and yet the lesbian phallus she ‘offers’ in her description of alternative bodily schemas (BTM: 90) will be equally open to appropriation and resignification by those who do not identify as ‘lesbians’. Indeed, we might well wonder who can ‘have’ and ‘be’ a lesbian phallus that is presumably vulnerable to subversive reterritorialization by men who, among other complexes, may also suffer from ‘lesbian phallus envy’ (Salih, 2002. p 86).

WIELDING THE LESBIAN PHALLUS

The lesbian phallus is not a dildo and it is not something one keeps in one’s desk drawer (see GP: 37). The morphological imaginary is the morph or form the body takes on through imagined or fantasized projections, and Butler’s rewriting of Lacan’s morphological imaginary displaces the phallus from its privileged significatory position. Asserting that penis and phallus are not synonymous, Butler shows how the phallus may be ‘reterritorialized’ by people who do not have penises. This is because the phallus is a symbol of a body part whose absence or ‘vanishing’ it signifies. To disconnect sign (phallus) from referent (penis) in this way allows Butler to displace the privilege Lacan accords this phallic signifier. ‘Of course there’s also a joke in “The Lesbian Phallus” because to have the phallus in Lacan is also to control the signifier’, Butler states in an interview. ‘It is to write and to name, to authorize and to designate. So in some sense I’m wielding the lesbian phallus in offering my critique of the Lacanian framework. It’s a certain model for lesbian authorship. It’s parody’ (GP: 37) (Salih 2002. p 87).

being or having the phallus

‘BEING’ AND ‘HAVING’ THE PHALLUS

According to Lacan, a defining moment in sexual development occurs when the infant perceives that its mother desires a phallus that she does not possess.

‘The child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire’, writes Lacan, but whereas the little boy actually ‘has’ the phallus, the little girl must ‘be’ it for someone else (when she grows up this will include her male partner who desires her phallic body). For Lacan, this is what differentiates the sexes: whereas ‘having’ the phallus seems fairly unproblematic for the lucky little boy, Lacan asserts that ‘being’ the phallus requires a sacrifice of femininity on the part of the girl: ‘in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other . . . a woman will reject an essential part of femininity, namely, all her attributes in the masquerade. It is for that which she is not that she wishes to be desired as well as loved’ (Lacan 1958: 290) (Salih 2002. p 85-86).

lesbian phallus

… in order to secure a coherent heterosexual identity, a primary homosexual desire must be overcome (Salih 2002. p 81).

The dictionary definition of ‘morphology’ is ‘the science of form’, and in the psychoanalytic accounts under discussion, ‘morphological’ refers to the form assumed by the body in the course of ego formation. ‘Imaginary’ in this context does not simply mean ‘imagination’ or ‘imagined’, but is part of Lacan’s three-fold distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real:

  • the imaginary is the realm of conscious and unconscious images and fantasies;
  • the symbolic order refers to language, the system into which the infant is compelled to enter on leaving the imaginary;
  • the real is what lies outside the symbolic and the limits of speech (Salih 2002. p 83).

(Salih 2002. p 84-85).
‘Although Freud’s language engages a causal temporality that has the body part precede its “idea”, he nevertheless confirms the indissolubility of a body part and the phantasmatic partitioning that brings it into psychic experience’, Butler claims (BTM: 59). In other words, a body part and the imagining of that body part (the ‘phantasmatic partitioning’ of the body) are inseparable, so that the ‘phenomenologically accessible body’ (i.e. the body that is knowable by being perceived) and the material body are one and the same entity.

Lacan moves from Freud’s body as known through experience (specifically, the experience of pain) to an analysis of the body as it is signified in language. Butler sees this as a ‘rewriting’ of Freud, whereby Lacan theorizes the morphology of the body as a psychically invested projection and idealization (BTM: 73). One’s morphology or bodily form is fantasized by an ego that doesn’t exactly precede the body since ‘the ego is that projection [and] . . . it is invariably a bodily ego’ (BTM: 73). In other words, the body and the ego cannot be theorized separately, since they are simultaneous projections of one another. Certain body parts are given significance in this fantasized body, and Butler uncovers the masculinism of Lacan’s positioning of the phallus as the privileged bodily signifier, arguing that it is possible to appropriate and recirculate the phallus so that it is no longer necessarily or intrinsically connected to the penis. Butler focuses on two important essays by Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (1949) and ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958).

In ‘The Mirror Stage’, Lacan claims that an infant acquires a notion of its bodily integrity when it perceives its reflection in the mirror. Up until that point, the infant’s bodily self-perception has been chaotic, scrambled, in pieces, what Lacan calls a ‘homelette’, but when it sees its reflection it gains a sense of its bodily contours and its physical differentiation from others. Butler argues that, in the Lacanian account of the body, it is not experiences such as pleasure and pain that constitute the body, but language. This is because the mirror stage coincides with the infant’s entry into language or the symbolic order. Language does not simply name a pre-existing body, but in the act of naming it constitutes the body; at this stage it would be useful to recall the definition of performativity as that aspect of discourse having the power to produce what it names, even though Butler is not specifically talking in terms of performativity here. She mentions ‘the performativity of the phallus’ only in passing (‘briefly’, as she herself acknowledges), but in her discussion of the lesbian phallus it becomes clear that both penis and phallus are retroactively constructed by, and in, discourse – in other words, they are performative. Butler and Lacan part theoretical company over the issue of the phallus (although they largely seem to have been in agreement up until this point):

whereas Lacan installs the phallus as a privileged signifier that confers meaning on other bodily signifiers, Butler regards the phallus as ‘the effect of a signifying chain summarily suppressed’ – in other words, it does not have a privileged or inaugural status on a signifying chain that does not make itself evident (BTM: 81). However, Lacan and Butler concur on one point: for both of them, penis and phallus are not synonymous, since the phallus is what Butler calls ‘the phantasmatic rewriting of an organ or body part’ (BTM: 81). More simply put, the phallus is the symbol of the penis, it is not the penis itself. Butler and Lacan’s theorizations of the phallus may be seen as a struggle between the two theorists over the signification and symbolization of both penis and phallus: whereas Lacan asserts the primacy of the phallic signifier, Butler topples the phallus from the privileged position Lacan gives it. The disconnection of phallus and penis is crucial for Butler, since, if the phallus is no more than a symbol, then it could just as well symbolize any other body part,

and those who neither ‘have’ nor ‘are’ the phallus (an important distinction for both Butler and Lacan) may ‘reterritorialize’ this symbol in subversive ways (BTM: 86). The disjunction between signifier (phallus) and referent (penis) allows Butler to remove the phallus from an exclusively male domain and to collapse the distinction between ‘being’ and ‘having’: in fact, no one ‘has’ the phallus, since it is a symbol, and disconnecting phallus from penis means that it may be redeployed by those who don’t have penises (Salih 2002. p 84-85).

implicated yet enabled

(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).

sex gender interpellation

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).

abjection

Indeed, it is part of Butler’s political project to seek out the limits of discursive intelligibility in Bodies, so that, as in Gender Trouble, she can draw attention to those identities and bodies that currently ‘matter’ and those that don’t. Again, as in Gender Trouble, Butler will assert that sexed identities are taken on through the violent rejection and exclusion (or ‘foreclosure’) of identities that are deemed not to matter, i.e. not to count within a heterosexual matrix which has a vested interest in preserving its own stability and coherence at the expense of ‘other’ identities (Salih 2002:76).

bikelove

Foucault power psyche

To this end she concentrates on Foucault’s neglect to explain how power comes to inhabit the subject’s interiority, rendering him docile. Foucault makes reference to the subject’s interiority in his description of the Panopticon, a prison whose architectural arrangement incorporates such observational efficiency that it allows the prisoner no privacy. But ‘no privacy’ is a misleading description in this instance, because the prisoner[s secret life, his inner dreams and desires, are not so much thwarted by his imprisonment as they are constituted and affirmed. In other words, his personal interiority is so effectively inculcated with disciplinary expectation that he is the psychic instrument of his own compliance — ‘he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault 1982, 203). Foucault eschews psychological explanations of this process and elides its actual operation by focusing on the totality of its outcome, using the word ‘soul’ to evoke power’s effectiveness in seizing the very core of the subject’s being.

Butler believes that a psychoanalytic elaboration of subject formation represents a much les totalizing and deterministic view of the subject because it demarcates the normative demands of the Symbolic order from the deregularizing eccentricity of the individual’s psyche, or unconscious. In other words, because the unconscious exceeds power’s normative conventions its operations are inherently resistant to power’s demands. Thus, instead of Foucault’s rather disheartening suggestion that the interiority of the body is the unilateral effect of disciplinary power, Butler will argue that the psyche’s internal dissonance and resistance represents a space whose transvaluations might help us conceive ‘a radically conditioned form of agency’ (Butler Psychic Life of P 1997, 15) (Kirby 2006: 116)

The body is not a site on which a construction takes place; it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed. The formation of this subject is at once the framing, subordination, and regulation of the body, and the mode in which that destruction is preserved (in the sense of sustained and embalmed) in normalization (Butler, Psychic Life of P. 92, cited in Kirby 118).

If the soul is the normalizing ideal through which the subject assumes coherence as an embodied subject, in a body whose identity is specularized and discursively regularized into social legibility (an ideal, an imago), then Butler surmises that the body that enables this process continues to endure in some way, even though it is sublimated within the process of normalization. Happily then, things are not frozen into place, as if normalization is a straightforward process that can be finessed once and for all.

Sublimation must constantly be reinstated and maintained, and this means that the subject is always in the process of coming into being with the shifting valencies of social reinscription (Kirby 119).

As Butler explains it, because the sign’s original intention is perverted and changed when read through a different context, meaning and truth are always provisional, unstable and in need of repair to re-establish their standing, their authority. If this structural stutter in power’s operation is truly intrinsic to subjectivation, then the subject’s mandatory subordination to power is never a process of docile compliance (Kirby 2006, 119).

Butler makes an interesting observation between psychoanalysis and Foucault: the former, the subject (of the Symbolic) is differentiated from the psyche (the interiority of the individual that exceeds social regulation), and in the latter the subject, or soul, emerges from a body that enables subjectivation while somehow preceding and exceeding its injunctions. Butler muses that perhaps the Foucaultian body and the psychoanalytic psyche have interchangeable functions, but how might this blurring of terms prove suggestive for a more radical appreciation of identity and agency?

If power is haunted by the ghostly residue of the body, something it can’t shake off, then the psychic life of power incorporates an internal disjunction that does two things at once: on the one hand, it incites a performative iteration of norms in order to reinstate their authority and, on the other, this very repetition derails the possibility of power’s unilateral efficacy as a purely dominating force. In other words, there will always be a ‘misfit’, some sort of interruption between the demand to conform and the individual’s capacity to faithfully comply. And this rewriting, or rerouting, marks the ambivalence and perversion that is the psychic life of power (Kirby, 2006: 119).

Gender Trouble summary by Salih

Now that you’ve read Gender Trouble, you are fully convinced that gender is the effect rather than a cause of discourse; you are highly suspicious of the category of ‘the subject’, since you know that it is constructed on the basis of the violent exclusion of those ‘Others’ who in some way do not conform to the heterosexual matrix. Although you’re concerned by the intrinsically oppositional nature of identity, you derive some comfort from the possibilities of agency and subversion that open up when Hegelian dialectic (the subject constructed through opposition) is supplemented with a Foucauldian model of power (power as multiple, dispersed, spawning resistance). Fully aware of the difference between performativity and performance, you are now setting your mind to devising ways in which your gender, which you know is a discursively constituted series of acts, could be re-enacted against the grain of the heterosexual matrix. Perhaps you are also thinking about your melancholic gender identity and wondering how you could ‘do’ your gender differently in order to signal the desires you’ve had to reject in order to constitute yourself as a stable subject. It might not be entirely practical for you to turn up at work in drag tomorrow, but you’re sure there must be less dramatic performative acts that will effectively draw attention to gender’s constituted and constructed nature (Salih, 2002. p 73).

performativity

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 62.

Butler has collapsed the sex/gender distinction in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender. All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence (and there is no existence that is not social), which means that there is no ‘natural body’ that pre-exists its cultural inscription. This seems to point towards the conclusion that gender is not something one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’ (GT: 25).

Melancholia part 1 of 2

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 53

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud distinguishes between mourning, which is the reaction to a real loss, usually the death of a loved one, and melancholia. Since the melancholic does not always know what he or she has lost and is in fact sometimes unaware of having ‘lost’ anything at all, Freud regards it as a pathological condition resembling depression. He argues that, instead of ‘getting over’ and accepting the loss, the melancholic response is to take the lost object into the ego by identifying with it.

Identification is a concept that is central to Freud’s theories of the structuring of the mind into ego, superego and id and, as you might expect, denotes the process and effects of identifying with others, often as a response to loss.

Introjection is the process whereby the subject takes objects from the outside world into itself and preserves them in the ego, and is closely related to identification. In fact, identification takes place through introjection as an object is metaphorically ‘installed’ in the ego, and Butler will argue that introjection is not the only way in which identification takes place.

In The Ego and the Id Freud no longer regards melancholia as a pathology or mental illness, but he now describes all ego formation as a melancholic structure. Freud claims that in the process of ego-formation a child’s primary object-cathexes are transformed into an identification, a formulation that is not as complicated as it might sound once you have deciphered the Freudian terminology. Initially the infant desires one or other of its parents (these are its primary object-cathexes), but the taboo against incest means that these desires have to be given up. Like the melancholic who takes the lost object into heror himself and thereby preserves it, the ego introjects the lost object (the desired parent) and preserves it as an identification. ‘[A]n object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is . . . an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification’, Freud writes (1923: 367). The ego is therefore a repository of all the desires it has had to give up, or as Freud puts it, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices’ (1923: 368).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 53.

Mourning: the response to a real loss.

Melancholia: the response to an imagined loss. Object-cathexis: the desire for an object; in this case, one’s mother or father.

Identification: the process by which one comes to identify with someone or something; in this context, the object that has been lost. Identifications take place through introjection or incorporation.

Introjection: the process whereby objects from the outside world are taken into and preserved in the ego.

Incorporation: Dispositions: the process whereby objects are preserved on the surface of the body (Freud does not discuss incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id). whether, from birth onwards, you desire members of the same or the opposite sex.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.Routledge, 2002. p 54.

If your primary desire is for your mother, you will introject the figure of your mother and establish an identification with her; conversely, if your primary desire is for your father, you will substitute your impermissible object-cathexis for an identification with him. Freud is not sure what determines the primary object-cathexis – i.e. why the infant desires one parent rather than the other – but he gets around this problem by attributing the direction of the infant’s desire to what he calls dispositions.

By ‘disposition’ he appears to mean the infant’s innate desire for a member of the opposite or the same sex, but Freud expresses some hesitation on this subject in his description of the development of the ‘little girl’. Freud writes that, after relinquishing her father as a primary love-object, the girl ‘will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify with her father (that is, with the object that has been lost) instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition – whatever that may consist in – is strong enough [i.e. to identify with her father]’ (1923: 372). It would seem that object-cathexes are the result of primary dispositions, i.e. whether one is innately ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ to start with, and, as you might expect by now, Butler refutes Freud’s somewhat tentative postulation of innate sexual ‘dispositions’.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 54.

Melancholic Heterosexuality

Now let us look at what Butler does with Freud. Butler is interested in the ‘dispositions’ Freud glosses over somewhat hastily, but, rather than accepting that they are innate, she wants to know how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ dispositions can be traced to an identification, and where those identifications take place. In fact, Butler asserts that dispositions are the effects of identifications with the parent of the same/ opposite sex rather than the causes of those identifications; in other words, desire does not come first. ‘What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders?’ she asks, noting the ‘hyphenated doubt’ (‘– whatever that may consist in –’) with which he interrupts his assertion (GT: 60). While Freud describes ego formation as a melancholic structure because the infant is forced to give up its desire for its parents in response to the taboo against incest, Butler argues that the taboo against incest is preceded by the taboo against homosexuality (although curiously, she does not specify her source here) (GT: 63). This seems to imply that the child’s primary desire is always for the parent of the same sex – after all, why do you need a taboo if there is nothing to prohibit? – and although Butler argues that the law produces the desire it subsequently prohibits, she is still unspecific as to why one desire is produced and repressed before another. ‘Although Freud does not explicitly argue in its favour, it would appear that the taboo against homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo’, writes Butler (GT: 64) and, although she reiterates this assertion several times in this section, the qualifiers she introduces here (‘Although Freud’, ‘it would appear’) resemble the ‘hyphenated doubt’ that she notes in Freud’s description of dispositions. All the same, the assertion that the taboo against homosexuality precedes the incest taboo is crucial to Butler’s argument that gender and sex identities are formed in response to prohibition. Rather than regarding gender or sex as innate, Butler asserts that ‘gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity’ (GT: 63). Since the ‘prohibition’ to which Butler refers is the taboo against homosexuality, it is clear that for Butler all gender identity is founded on a primary, forbidden homosexual cathexis or desire. If melancholia is the response to real or imagined loss, and if heterosexual gender identity is formed on the basis of the primary loss of the same-sexed object of desire, it follows that heterosexual gender identity is melancholic. Butler’s Foucauldian appropriation of Freud’s theories of mourning, melancholia and ego formation and her argument that heterosexuality is founded on primary homosexual desire constitute one of Gender Trouble’s most important achievements and, since the theory of melancholic gender identities and identifications underscores so much of her subsequent work, I will quote Butler at length here by way of summary:

If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of [the taboo against homosexuality], and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego-ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity.

Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex but in the production and ‘disposition’ of sexual desire . . . dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal (Judith Butler. Gender Trouble 63-4, cited in Salih, 56).

melancholy heterosexuality

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 56.

MELANCHOLY HETEROSEXUALITY

The case study of the ‘little girl’ could be summarized as follows:

‘little girl’s’ desire for her mother → incest taboo → ‘little girl’s’ melancholia→identification with mother through incorporation → ‘little girl’s’ disavowed homosexual desire → femininity→melancholic heterosexuality

MELANCHOLY GENDER

The loss of a love object results in melancholy and an identification with that object. According to Butler, the taboo against homosexuality precedes the taboo against incest, which means that homosexual desire is prohibited from the outset. Whereas it is possible to grieve the consequences of the incest taboo in a heterosexual culture, the taboo against homosexuality cannot be grieved and so the response to the taboo against homosexuality is melancholia rather than mourning (GT: 69). The melancholic identification with same-sexed parent is incorporated, i.e. preserved on the surface of the body, so that, far from being ‘natural’ or a given, like gender, sex is a process, something one assumes through identification and incorporation. The melancholy heterosexual subject will ‘bear’ her or his forbidden same-sex desire on the surface of the body, so that physical ‘ultra-femininity’ and ‘ultra-masculinity’ denote the subject’s relinquished desire for an object of the same sex. This means that you ‘are’ what you have desired, and that the desires you have been prevented from expressing are symptomatized on the body and in your behaviour. All sexuality and gender identities are melancholic, but Butler points out that, since there is not the same sanction against acknowledging heterosexual desire in a heterosexual culture, homosexual and heterosexual melancholia are not identical (Salih, Sara. 2002. p 58).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 56.

INCORPORATION

By referring to ‘the stylization of the body’ and ‘the production and “disposition” of sexual desire’ in the section I have just quoted, Butler introduces the idea that sex, as much as gender, is a result of the taboo against homosexuality. So far she has argued that the taboo against homosexuality triggers the melancholic response described by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in other words, an identification with the parent of the same sex. Butler talks of this identification in terms of ‘internalization’, implying that, as in Freud’s descriptions, the lost object is introjected and set up in the ego as an identification . Now, departing from Freud, who does not talk about incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id, Butler asks where melancholic identification takes place, and she concludes that identifications are incorporated, i.e. preserved on the surface of the body (GT: 67).

Here Butler follows Abraham and Torok, who argue that, whereas mourning leads to the introjection of the lost object, melancholia results in its incorporation. ‘When we consider gender identity as a melancholic structure, it makes sense to choose “incorporation” as the manner by which that identification is accomplished’, Butler writes; ‘[G]ender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body . . . incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth’ (GT: 68). It is not just the ego that is the receptacle for object-cathexes that have had to be abandoned, but the body itself is a sort of ‘tomb’ (note the word ‘encrypts’) in which, however, these lost desires are far from ‘buried’ since they are preserved on the surface of the body and thus constitute one’s sex and gender identities. Butler formulates the ontological equation in the following way: ‘If the heterosexual denial of homosexuality results in melancholia and if melancholia operates through incorporation, then the disavowed homosexual love is preserved through the cultivation of an oppositionally defined gender identity’ (GT: 69). Or, more bluntly put, you are what you have desired (and are no longer permitted to desire). All stable gender identities are ‘melancholic’, founded on a prohibited primary desire that is written on the body and, as Butler asserts, rigid gender boundaries conceal the loss of an original, unacknowledged and unresolved love (GT: 63). It is not just straight people who suffer from melancholy gender (if ‘suffer’ is the right verb: Butler calls melancholy heterosexuality a ‘syndrome’, which does seem to hint that there is something pathological about it (GT: 71)). Butler accepts that ‘a homosexual for whom heterosexual desire is unthinkable’ will maintain his or her heterosexual desire through the melancholic incorporation of that desire, but she points out that, since there is not the same cultural sanction against acknowledging heterosexuality, heterosexual and homosexual melancholia are not really equivalent (GT: 70). Like gender, the body conceals its genealogy and presents itself as a ‘natural fact’ or a given, whereas, by arguing that relinquished desire is ‘encrypted’ on the body, Butler asserts that the body is the effect of desire rather than its cause. The body is an imagined structure which is the consequence or the product of desire: ‘the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object’, she writes; ‘The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself’ (GT: 71). The idea that desire ‘transfigures’ the body is complex, but for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to note that Butler is not positing a body that is stable, fixed and ‘merely matter’, but one that is constructed and contoured by discourse and the law. Butler returns to the question of the body in the third chapter of Gender Trouble, ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’, where she considers both sex and gender as ‘enactments’ that operate performatively to establish the appearance of bodily fixity. If both gender and sex are ‘enactments’ rather than givens, then it will be possible to enact them in unexpected, potentially subversive ways. Before she goes on to discuss performativity and parody, Butler considers the subversive potential of the law.