Category: gender

Butler’s definition of heterosexual matrix

Here is JB from footnote #6 page 151, Gender Trouble 1990. Routledge

I use the term heterosexual matrix throughout the text to designate that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion of the “heterosexual contract” and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” to characterize a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.

Wittig

JB’s section on Wittig in Gender Trouble 1990. page 121

As in Lacan, the idealization of heterosexuality appears even within Wittig’s own formulation to exercise a control over the bodies of practicing heterosexuals that is finally impossible, indeed, that is bound to falter on its own impossibility. Wittig appears to believe that only the radical departure from heterosexual contexts — namely becoming lesbian or gay — can bring about the downfall of this heterosexual regime. But this political consequence follows only if one understands all “participation” in heterosexuality to be a repetition and consolidation of heterosexual oppression. The possibilities of resignifying heterosexuality itself are refused precisely because heterosexuality is understood as a total system that requires a thoroughgoing displacement. The political options that follow from such a totalizing view of heterosexist power are (a) radical conformity or (b) radical revolution.

JB continues …

My own conviction [JB’s] is that the radical disjunction posited by Wittig between heterosexuality and homosexuality is simply not true, that there are structures of psychic homosexuality within heterosexual relations, and structures of psychic heterosexuality within gay and lesbian sexuality and relationships. Further, there are other power/discourse centres that construct and structure both gay and straight sexuality; heterosexuality is not the only compulsory display of power that informs sexuality. The ideal of a coherent heterosexuality that Wittig describes as the norm and standard of the heterosexual contract is an impossible ideal, a “fetish,” as she herself points out. A psychoanalytic elaboration might contend that this impossibility is exposed in virtue of the complexity and resistance of an unconscious sexuality that is not always already heterosexual. In this sense, heterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals heterosexuality itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into heterosexuality as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative gay/lesbian perspective.

Butler whoa

From JB’s Gender Trouble. 1990. page 64.

The young boy and young girl who enter into the Oedipal drama with incestuous heterosexual aims have already been subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions. Hence, the dispositions that Freud assumes to be primary or constitutive facts of sexual life are effects of a law which, internalized, produces and regulates discrete gender identity and heterosexuality.

– Far from foundational, these dispositions are the result of a process whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy.

– In other words, “dispositions” are traces of a history of enforced sexual prohibitions which is untold and which the prohibitions seek to render untellable.

The narrative account of gender acquisition that begins with the postulation of dispositions effectively forecloses the narrative point of departure which would expose the narrative as a self-amplifying tactic of the prohibition itself.

In the psychoanalytic narrative, the dispositions are trained, fixed, and consolidated by a prohibition which later and in the name of culture arrives to quell the disturbance created by an unrestrained homosexual cathexis.

Told from the point of view which takes the prohibitive law to be the founding moment of the narrative, the law both produces sexuality in the form of “dispositions” and appears disingenuously at a later point in time to transform these ostensibly “natural” dispositions into culturally acceptable structures of exogamic kinship.

In order to conceal the genealogy of the law as productive of the very phenomenon it later claims only to channel or repress, the law performs a third function: Instating itself as the principle of logical continuity in a narrative of causal relations which takes psychic facts as its point of departure, this configuration of the law forecloses the possibility of a more radical genealogy into the cultural origins of sexuality and power relations (64-65).

To be the Phallus

Woman is the phallus

To be the Phallus is to “embody” the Phallus as the place to which it penetrates, but also to signify the promise of a return to the preindividuated jouissance that characterizes the undifferentiated relation to the mother (note 13: 159).

On page 45, JB states:

Women are said to “be” the Phallus in the sense that they maintain the power to reflect or represent the “reality” of the self-grounding postures of the masculine subject, a power which, if withdrawn would break up the foundational illusions of the masculine subject position. In order to “be” the Phallus, the reflector and guarantor of an apparent masculine subject position, women must become, must “be” (in the sense of “posture as if they were”) precisely what men are not and, in their very lack, establish the essential function of men. Hence, “being” the Phallus is always a “being for” a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his identity through the recognition of that “being for”. … The division and exchange between this “being” and “having” the Phallus is established by the Symbolic, the paternal law.

nature culture

As feminism has sought to become integrally related to sruggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy (35).

Butler, J. Gender Trouble. 1990, Routledge

incest taboo foucault

From Butler’s Gender Trouble 1990 p. 73

The incest taboo, then, would repress no primary dispositions, but effectively create the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” dispositions to describe and reproduce the distinction between a legitimate heterosexuality and an illegitimate homosexuality. Indeed, if we conceive of the incest taboo as primarily productive in its effects, then the prohibition that founds the “subject’ and survives as the law of its desire becomes the means by which identity, particularly gender identity, is constituted.

Gender refuses a loss

JB, Gender Trouble. 1990. page 60.

Boys repudiation of the mother is the founding moment of what Freud calls gender “consolidation”

Forfeiting the mother as object of desire, the boy either internalizes the loss through identification with her, or displaces his heterosexual attachment, in which case he fortifies his attachment to his father and thereby “consolidates” his masculinity. As the metaphor of consolidation suggests, there are clearly bits and pieces of masculinity to be found within the psychic landscape, dispositions, sexual trends, and aims, but they are diffuse and disorganized, unbounded by the exclusivity of a heterosexual object choice. Indeed, if the boy renounces both aim and object and, therefore, heterosexual cathexis altogether, he internalizes the mother and sets up a feminine superego which dissolves and disorganizes masculinity, consolidating feminine libidinal dispositions in its place (60).

Gender as an identity refusal of a loss (the maternal body) that encrypts itself in the body

antimetaphorical activity, 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 (68).

Melancholia

Notes from JB’s Gender Trouble 1990, Routledge

little effort has been made so far to look at the melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame (57).

melancholia does not oppose the work of mourning

identification

incest taboo: internalizes the tabooed object of desire, in prohibited heterosexual union object is denied but not modality of desire

prohibited homosexual union: both desire and object of desire require renunciation and so become subject to internalizing strategies of melancholia

Freud cites bisexual dispositions which should mean that an original sexual love of son for father should not be denied but Freud denies this.

The boy however does sustain a primary cathexis for the mother

That the boy usually chooses the heterosexual would, then, be the result, not of the fear of castration by the father, but of the fear of castration — that is, the fear of “feminization” associated within heterosexual cultures with male homosexuality. In effect, it is not primarily the heterosexual lust for the mother that must be punished and sublimated, but the homosexual cathexis that must be subordinated to a cultually sanctioned heterosexuality (59).

The melancholic refuses the loss of the object and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt towards the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled (61).

The question

Thus the question is no longer, How is gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a question that leaves the “matter” of sex untheorized), but rather, Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? And how is it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates the normative conditions of its own emergence (10).

Butler questions ‘lack’

Here it seems crucial to ask whether the notion of lack taken from psychoanalysis as that which secures the contingency of any and all social formations is itself a presocial principle universalized at the cost of every consideration of power, sociality, culture, politics, which regulates the relative closure and openness of social practices. Can Žižekian psychoanalysis respond to the pressure to theorize the historical specificity of trauma, to provide texture for the specific exclusions, annihilations, and unthinkable losses that structure the social phenomena mentioned above [the family, concentration camps, the Gulag] (Butler 1993: 202).

Paradoxically, the assertion of the real as the constitutive outside to symbolization is meant to support anti-essentialism, for if all symbolization is predicated on a lack, then there can be no complete or self-identical articulation of a given social identity. And yet, if women are positioned as that which cannot exist, as that which is barred from existence by the law of the father, then there is a conflation of women with that foreclosed existence, that lost referent, that is surely as pernicious as any form of ontological essentialism (Butler 1993: 218).