Author: logocentric

gender

Sara Salih. Judith ButlerRoutledge 2002.

What Butler means is that gender is an act or a sequence of acts that is always and inevitably occurring, since it is impossible to exist as a social agent outside the terms of gender (GT: 5 cited in Salih 47).

Butler argues that sex and gender are discursively constructed and that there is no such position of implied freedom beyond discourse. Culturally constructed sexuality cannot be repudiated, so that the subject is left with the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction it is already in (GT: 31). Gender Trouble will describe how genders and sexes are currently ‘done’ within the heterosexual matrix, while elaborating on how it is possible to ‘do’ those constructions differently (Salih, 48).

‘gender is not a noun[but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (GT: 25 Salih, 50).

Reading structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of gender, identity and the law through a Foucauldian lens Butler

  • gives what she calls ‘a discursive account of the cultural production of gender’; in other words, she works from the premise that gender is a discursive construct, something that is produced, and not a ‘natural fact’;
  • and characterizes the law as multiple, proliferating and potentially self-subverting as opposed to the singular, prohibitive and rigidly repressive law posited by other theorists (for example, Lacan) (Salih, Sara. Judith Butler: 51).

‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (GT: 25 cited in Salih 63).

‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’, she writes (GT: 136; my emphasis).

Once again we return to the notion that there is no doer behind the deed, no volitional agent that knowingly ‘does’ its gender, since the gendered body is inseparable from the acts that constitute it. All the same, in the account of parody and drag that follows this description it does at times sound as though there is an actor or a ‘doer’ behind the deed, and Butler later admits that in Gender Trouble she ‘waffled’ between describing gender in terms of linguistic performativity and characterizing it as straightforward theatre. Her theories are clarified in Bodies That Matter where Butler emphasizes the Derridean and Austinian underpinnings of performativity that are as yet only implicit in Gender Trouble (Salih. 2002. p 65).

Gender does not happen once and for all when we are born, but is a sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something that’s been there all along. If gender is ‘a regulated process of repetition’ taking place in language, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do (and you might also recall my wardrobe analogy – the ripped clothes and the sequins representing my attempts to ‘do’ my gender in subversive and unexpected ways). As I argued previously, you cannot go out and acquire a whole new gender wardrobe for yourself, since, as Butler puts it, ‘[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very “taking up” is enabled by the tool lying there’ (GT: 145). So you have to make do with the ‘tools’, or in my example, the ‘clothes’ that you already have, radically modifying them in ways which will reveal the ‘unnatural’ nature of gender. There are two problems with this formulation: one is that the manner of taking up the tool will be determined as well as enabled by the tool itself – in other words, subversion and agency are conditioned, if not determined, by discourses that cannot be evaded. This leads to the second problem, which is that, if subversion itself is conditioned and constrained by discourse, then how can we tell that it is subversion at all? What is the difference between subversive parody and the sort of ‘ordinary’ parody that Butler claims everyone is unwittingly engaged in anyway. All gender is parodic, but Butler warns that ‘[p]arody by itself is not subversive’ and she poses the important question as to which performances effect the various destabilizations of gender and sex she describes, and where those performances take place (GT: 139). There are some forms of drag that are definitely not subversive, but serve only to reinforce existing heterosexual power structures – in Bodies, Butler cites Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie as an example of what she calls ‘high het entertainment’ (see Chapter 3, this volume), and we might also add the more recent film Mrs Doubtfire in which Robin Williams gives a cross-dressed performance as a nanny. Neither of these drag performances are subversive, since they serve to reinforce existing distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.

Butler’s claim on the penultimate page of Gender Trouble that ‘[t]he task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’ (GT: 148) presents a similar problem: she has already asserted that to describe identity as an effect is not to imply that identity is ‘fatally determined’ or ‘fully artificial and arbitrary’, and yet at times it sounds as though the subject she describes is in fact trapped within a discourse it has no power to evade or to alter. In which case, ‘how to repeat’ will already be determined in advance, and what looks like agency is merely yet another effect of the law disguised as something different. All the same, this is certainly not a view Butler expresses, and she seems optimistic about the possibilities of denaturalizing, proliferating and unfixing identities in order to reveal the constructed nature of heterosexuality. A proliferation of identities will reveal the ontological possibilities that are currently restricted by foundationalist models of identity (i.e. those theories which assume that identity is simply there and fixed and final). This is not, then, ‘the death of the subject’, or if it is, it is the theoretical death of an old, fixed subject, and the birth of a new, constructed one characterized by subversive possibility and agency. ‘Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency’, Butler affirms (GT: 147; see also CF: 15), and this leads her to refute another assumption popular among critics who are hostile to so-called ‘postmodern’ formulations of identity: ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (GT: 148) (Salih.2002. p 67).

Gender Trouble calls the category of the subject into question as Butler engages in a genealogical critique that analyzes the conditions of the subject’s emergence within discourse. Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and feminist theories in her discussions of homosexuality and heterosexuality and their mutual construction within the law. Heterosexual identities are constructed in relation to their abjected homosexual ‘Other’, but melancholic heterosexuals are haunted by the trace of this ‘Other’ which is never finally or fully abjected. This means that identities are by no means as straight, straightforward or singular as they appear and may be subversively worked against the grain in order to reveal the unstable, resignifiable nature of all gender identities. Some of these subversive practices are outlined in Gender Trouble and are analyzed further in her next book, Bodies That Matter (Salih 2002. p 71)

Excitable Speech

Vicki Kirby. JB: Live Theory. 2006. Continuum

Language is not a mere instrument or tool in this account, a technology used to different effects by a sovereign subject who controls it. The complication here is that if we ourselves are an effect of language then the complexity of its ontology resonates with our own constitution (88).

There is a life a discourse that exceeds the subject’s own temporality (92).

In Excitable Speech Butler specifically interrogates the act of hate speech because although great suffering can be attributed to these injurious acts she disputes the juridical model of power which informs campaigns to stop it. … Butler’s point here is that ‘the sovereign conceit’ which installs a causal equivalence between the speaker’s intention to wound, the actual representation of hate and the impact felt by the victim shows little appreciation of the problematic nature of communication. Further to this, this style of analysis inadvertently constitutes the victim of hate speech as a powerless object of the act, a passive recipient of injury whose incapacity renders them totally vulnerable. Lacking agency, the subject’s only hope of protection is that the state will exercise its power to prohibit and police such acts (94).

From Butler’s 1999 interview with Vicki Bell:

I think there are all kinds of reasons to stop a person when they speak such things [racist and homophobic speech]… I think that’s important. But I think a politics that begins and ends with that policing function is a mistake, because for me the question is how is that person, as it were, renewing and reinvigorating racist rituals of speech, and how do we think about those particular rituals and how do we exploit their ritual function in order to undermine it in a more thorough-going way, rather than just stopping it as it’s spoken. What would it mean to restage it, take it, do something else with the ritual so that its revivability as a speech act is really seriously called into question? (Butler and Bell 1999, 166)

… her intention is to destabilize correspondence theories of language and to complicate what is actually meant by this notion of ‘discursive constitution’.

An important consideration for Butler is that the outcome of language is always threatened by incoherence, contingency and ambiguity, for it involves an intricate web of dispersed causality where the presumed integrity of authorship and authority, meaning and intention, are ‘spoken through’ by convention. This means that discursive convention is not a static structure but one which ‘suffer[s] destructuration through being reiterated, repeated, and rearticulated’. With this in mind, Butler asks, ‘[m]ight the speech act of hate speech be understood as less efficacious, more prone to innovation and subversion, if we were to take into account the temporal life of the “structure” it is said to enunciate? (Butler from Excitable, quoted in Kirby 2006, 95)

illocutionary act (performative utterance) language that performs an action as it is said.
“speech acts that in saying do what they say, and do it in the moment of that saying”. The illocutionary speech act is itself the deed that it effects

“I bet” when said to a casino employee, or “I do” when said in a marriage ceremony to a future spouse, respectively constitute the fact of bettting and marrying. The actual practice of language can here be described as truth producing.

… if I am a heterosexual man standing in front of a registrar in a Register Office and I utter the words ‘I do’ in answer to the question, ‘Do you take this woman to be your wife?’, then I am actually performing the action by making the utterance: statements like these are called performative utterances or illocutionary acts. ‘To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) the words “I name &c.” When I say, before the registrar or altar &c., “I do”, I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it’ (Austin 1955: 6) (Salih 2002. p 88).

perlocutionary act (constative utterance) language that describes the world
“speech acts that produce certain effects as their consequence; by saying something, a certain effect follows.” The perlocutionary merely leads to certain effects that are not the same as the speech act itself.

In Bodies That Matter Butler once again draws from these lectures on linguistics, How To Do Things With Words. Austin distinguishes between two types of utterances, those that describe or report on something, and those that, in saying, actually perform what is being said.

Austin calls constative utterances, might be the statement, ‘It’s a sunny day’, or ‘I went shopping’ (Austin also calls these perlocutionary acts); by saying ‘I went shopping’, I am not doing it, I am merely reporting an occurrence.

butler discourse

In sum, then, Butler’s desire to engage the structured movement of differentiation within language does not preclude the existence of an outside language that truly does exceed our perceptions and representations; it’s just that the human condition bars access to it. Accordingly, the perception and representation of this outside, despite its convincing transparency and our sense of its immediate accessibility, will always be a language effect — a cultural production. Butler’s reliance on the overarching term ‘culture’ as the explanatory category that contains this shifting process surely makes the point. In other words, language and culture and mutually implicated — indeed, some would say they are one and the same (68).

No signifier can be radically representative, for every signifier is the site of a perpetual méconnaisance; it produces the expectation of a unity, a full and final recognition that can never be achieved. Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers … fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (Butler in Bodies That Matter, 191. cited in Kirby JB: Live Theory, 73).

If women and other socially abjected subjects are themselves subjected to/through these same significatory transformations then their existence and its significance must be determined within the Symbolic order. Unfortunately, Žižek’s reading of the bar as an absolute prohibition, as if the cut of castration is a definitive fact, reaffirms an ‘outside discourse’ in derelict terms of trauma and castration. Thus, by appropriating Lacan’s notion of the Real to explain this foreclosure, Žižek actually endorses the inevitability, the indisputable necessity, of this violent inheritance of abject subject formation.

In view of this, Butler’s intervention is important because it illustrates that the bar is not an absolute, fixed barrier, but a process of demarcation, an ongoing attempt to bar or draw a line that is never finished. The installation of the bar as an absolute frame achieves the effect of both discovering and repudiating that outside as inherently deficient and naturally base (Kirby, 2006: 73).

By interrogating the foundation, or what is supposedly ‘given’ as the indifferent ground of valuation, and by discovering that it is forged from the same political determinations as other significatory practices, Butler is able to dispense with the foreclosure of the Real entirely (73).

lesbian phallus

Vicki Kirby. JB: Live Theory. Continuum 2006.

But why should libidinal transfer be described in terms of paternity? Through a sliding metonymy of references that presumes the identities it is trying to explain, Freud conflates the generative power of the phallus with the male organ. As we have seen, the phallus is more accurately understood as a productive process of delineation through which entities/body parts emerge into identifiable significance. When this transformative dynamism is arrested and likened to a thing-like property however, man appears to have the phallus, just as woman appears to be this erotic and valued object; a commodity possessed or exchanged between men. This sexualized matrix of oppositional functions and subject positions organizes other divisions, whereby woman becomes a being of passivity to man’s activity, a vacuous instrument for his agency and pleasure, a vulnerable body that requires protection from his invulnerable one, a dumb body that depends on the superiority of his more evolved reasoning capacities. Because the phallus (woman) is figured as an attachment, a tool to be used and manipulated, this heterosexual economy of signification understands man as an incorporated being: He may have a body and certainly desires it, yet he is not himself, body. Despite its cartoon logic, these ‘natural’ associations exert an insidious gravitational pull on the way we conceptualize sexual identity as well as what constitutes a legitimate mode of attachment and exchange/sexual intercourse (53-4).

However Butler finds something disturbing in the way Lacan’s argument seems to have it both ways. He explains the organizational logic of the Symbolic order, those cultural and linguistic structures into with the child is interpellated, as a given system of binary identifications whose positions are determined by a transcendental signifier —the phallus. And yet he also insists (and we are reminded here of Lévi-Strauss and the more general cliams of structuralism) that the Symbolic order exceeds specific cultural or social ascriptions for its is the universal principle of differentiation that motors all languages. For this reason, Lacan will echo Freud by insisting that the phallus should not be confused with the penis, or indeed with any organ or particualr imaginary effect. But what can be done if we accept this thesis? As Butler’s critical energies are focused on the need to contest political inequities, her concern is that Lacan’s ‘explanation’ has the performative consequence of investing the penis (and masculinity) with the symbolic privilege accorded the phallus, and in a way that places the male organ’s political significance beyond question (58).

incest taboo

Vicki Kirby Judith Butler: Live Theory 2006. page 33.

Crucial to Freud’s understanding of how the incest taboo actually works is the need to explain the boy’s repudiation of the mother, his primary love object. The conventional interpretation of the boy’s identification with the father rests on the fear of castration if his rivalry with the father continues. This heteronormative explanation is significantly complicated, however, when Freud concedes that perhaps an incipient bisexuality informs the child’s ambivalence towards the parents.

Butler argues that the boy is actually required to make two choices; an object choice between the mother or the father, and a choice of sexual disposition between masculine or feminine. Of course, the threat of castration becomes more ambiguous in a culture which denigrates and ‘feminizes’ the homosexual as an improper man. Given this, Butler muses in regard to the boy’s rejection of the mother, “do we construe the punishing father as a rival or as an object of desire who forbids himself as such?”

The important point here is that this fraught constellation of sexual dispositions and object choices ‘becomes the founding moment of what Freud calls gender “consolidation”.

opacity to myself

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005.  Print.

[…] we might consider a certain post-Hegelian reading of the scene of recognition in which precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others.  It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves (41).

The recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be selfsame at every moment.  Suspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence, which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same (41-2).

The means by which subject constitution occurs is not the same as the narrative form the reconstruction of that constitution attempts to provide (69).

So what is the role of language in constituting the subject? And what different role does it assume when it seeks to recuperate or reconstitute the conditions of its own constitution?

The infant enters the world given over from the start to a language and to a series of signs, broadly construed, that begin to structure an already operative mode of receptivity and demand.  From this primary experience of having been given over from the start, an “I” subsequently emerges.  And the “I,” regardless of its claims to mastery, will never get over having been given over from the start in this way (77).

This mode of relationality, definitionally blind, makes us vulnerable to betrayal and to error. We could wish ourselves to be wholly perspicacious beings.  But that would be to disavow infancy, dependency, relationality, primary impressionability; it would be the wish to eradicate all the active and structuring traces of our psychological formations and to swell in the pretense of being fully knowing self-possessed adults. Indeed, we would be the kind of beings who, by definition, could not be in love, blind and blinded, vulnerable to devastation, subject to enthrallment. If we were to respond to injury by claiming we had a “right” not to be so treated, we would be treating the other’s love as an entitlement rather than a gift.  Being a gift, it carries the insuperable quality of gratuitousness.  It is, in Adorno’s language, a gift given from freedom (102).

belie

belie
1. To picture falsely; misrepresent: “He spoke roughly in order to belie his air of gentility” James Joyce.
2. To show to be false: Their laughter belied their outward grief.
3. To be counter to; contradict: At first glance, life at the boarding school seemed to belie all the bad things I had heard about it.
4. His innocent face belies his cunning.

Giving Account JB again

The dyadic exchange refers to a set of norms that exceed the perspectives of those engaged in the struggle for recognition (29).

The possibility of an ethical response to the face thus requires normativity of the visual field: there is already not only an epistemological frame within which the face appears but an operation of power as well, since only by virtue of certain kinds of anthropocentric positions and cultural frames will a given face seem to be a human face to any of us. After all, under what conditions do some individuals acquire a face, a legible and visible face, and other do not? There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language is a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability (29-30).

My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do? If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? Or is it a failure that gives rise to another ethical disposition in the place of a full and satisfying notion of narrative accountability? Is there in this affirmation of partial transparency a possibility for acknowledging a relationality that binds me more deeply to language and to you than I previously knew? And is the relationality that conditions and blinds this “self” not, precisely, an indispensable resource for ethics (40).

poiesis

Martin Heidegger refers to it as a ‘bringing-forth’, using this term in its widest sense. He explained poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger’s example of a threshold occasion: a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another.

pronunciation here

Giving an Account

JB. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham UP. 2005 This book is a collection of lectures given in 2002.

The context is not exterior to the question; it conditions the form that the question will take. In this sense, the questions that characterize moral inquiry are formulated or stylized by the historical conditions that prompt them (6).

Yet there is no “I” that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence, no “I” that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning.

The “I” does not stand apart from the prevailing matrix of ethical norms and conflicting moral frameworks. In an important sense, this matrix is also the condition for the emergence of the “I,” even though the “I” is not causally induced by those norms. We cannot conclude that the “I” is simply the effect of the instrument of some prior ethos of some field of conflicting or discontinuous norms. When the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist (7).

The reason for this is that the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation —or set of relations— to a set of norms. Although many contemporary critics worry that this means there is no concept of the subject that can serve as the ground for moral agency and moral accountability, that conclusion does not follow. The “I” is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence. This dispossession does not mean that we have lost the subjective ground for ethics. On the contrary, it may well be the condition of moral inquiry, the condition under which morality itself emerges. If the “I” is not at one with moral norms, this means only that the subject must deliberate upon these norms and that part of deliberation will entail a critical understanding of their social genesis and meaning. In this sense, ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique. And critique finds that it cannot go forward without a consideration of how the deliberating subject comes into being and how a deliberating subject might actually live or appropriate a set of norms. (8)

[…] norms also decide in advance who will and will not become a subject … Did he consider the operation of norms in the very constitution of the subject, in the stylization of its ontology and in the establishing of a legitimate site with the realm of social ontology (9).

Even if morality supplies a set of norms that produce a subject in his or her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject most negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).

JB on Nietzsche: The institution of law compels an originally aggressive human to turn that aggression “inward,” to craft an inner world composed of a guilty conscience and to vent that aggression against oneself in the name of morality. 14

JB distancing herself from what she said in The Psychic Life of Power on page 15

JB’s Foucautian take on things: There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. The practice of critique then exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all. To make oneself in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms (17).

catachresis

CATACHRESIS (Grk. “misuse, misapplication”): A completely impossible figure of speech or an implied metaphor that results from combining other extreme figures of speech such as anthimeria, hyperbole, synaesthesia, and metonymy. The results in each case are so unique that it is hard to state a general figure of speech that embodies all of the possible results. It is far easier to give examples.

For instance, Hamlet says of Gertrude, “I will speak daggers to her.” A man can speak words, but no one can literally speak daggers. In spite of that impossibility, readers know Shakespeare means Hamlet will address Gertrude in a painful, contemptuous way. Sometimes the catachresis results from stacking one impossibility on top of another.

Can’t you hear that? Are you blind?

Red trains cough Jewish underwear for keeps! Expanding smells of silence. Gravy snot whistling like sea birds.”

(Amiri Baraka, The Dutchman)

“Joe will have kittens when he hears this!”

Catachresis often results from hyperbole and synaesthesia. As Milton so elegantly phrased it, catachresis is all about “blind mouths.”

A special subtype of catachresis is abusio, a mixed metaphor that results when two metaphors collide. For instance, one U. S. senator learned of an unlikely political alliance. He is said to have exclaimed, “Now that is a horse of a different feather.” This abusio is the result of two metaphors. The first is the cliché metaphor comparing anything unusual to “a horse of a different color.” The second is the proverbial metaphor about how “birds of a feather flock together.” However, by taking the two dead metaphors and combining them, the resulting image of “a horse of a different feather” truly emphasizes how bizarre and unlikely the resulting political alliance was. Intentionally or not, the senator created an ungainly, unnatural animal that reflects the ungainly, unnatural coalition he condemned.

Purists of languages often scowl at abusio with good reason. Too commonly abusio is the result of sloppy writing, such as the history student who wrote “the dreadful hand of totalitarianism watches all that goes on around it and growls at its enemies.” (It would have been better to stick with a single metaphor and state “the eye of totalitarianism watches all that goes on around it and glares at its enemies.” We should leave out the mixed imagery of watchful hands growling at people; it’s just stupid and inconsistent.) However, when used intentionally for a subtle effect, abusio and catachresis can be powerful tools for originality.

dubashed it here

Butler politics what makes a life livable

What moves me politically, and that for which I want to make room is the moment in which a subject — a person, a collective — asserts a right or entitlement to a livable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place. (Undoing Gender 2004, (2002) 224).

When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life. And so there are at least two senses of life, the one, which refers to the minimum biological form of living, and another, which intervenes at the start, which establishes the minimum conditions for a livable life with regard to human life. And this does not imply that we can disregard the merely living in favor of the “livable life,” but that we must ask, as we asked about gender violence, what humans require in order to maintain and reproduce the conditions of their own livability. And what are our politics such that we are in whatever way possible, both conceptualizing the possiblity of the livable life and arranging for its institutional support. There will always be disagreement about what this means, and those who claim that a single political direction is necessitated by virtue of this commitment will be mistaken. But this is only because to live it to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future … Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so (226).

One could say that for her (Anzaldua), the subject is “multiple” rather than unitary, and that would be to get the point in a way. But I think her point is more radical. She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question, and through that risk and openness to another way of knowing and of living in the world to expand our capacity to imagine the human. She is asking us to be able to work in coalitions across differences that will make a more inclusive movement. What she is arguing, then, is that it is only through existing in the mode of translation, constant translation, that we stand a chance of producing a multicultural understanding of women or, indeed, of society. The unitary subject is the one who knows already what it is, who enters the conversation the same way as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the encounter with the other, and so stays in place, guards its place, and becomes an emblem for property and territory, refusing self-transformation, ironically, in the name of the subject (228).

There is the possibility of appearing impermeable, of repudiating vulnerability itself. There is the possibility of becoming violent. But perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal death. Perhaps this other way to live requires a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it. Surely some norms will be useful for building such a world, but they will be norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor (231).