Category: incest

Butler disses Žižek’s sexual d Žižek responds

Tada: JB is critical of the way in which Žižek makes sexual d. ahistorical Real, traumatic and thus outside the struggle for hegemony, JB asks how it can both occasion the chain and is also a link in the chain. How’s that. Žižek replies by accepting this paradox. Further according to the Hegelian concrete universality and also JB’s own work Žižek argues that sexual d is a ‘concrete universality’ in that it attempt to be universal gets overdetermined by its very particular contents. Žižek uses the example of religion, I wish he just used sexual d as an example. But he’s saying I guess the universal difference male/female though universal, will be overtaken by its particular content that tries to fill out this universal. Žižek here cites JB and says that each particularity asserts its own mode of universality (JB’s ‘competing universalities’) Does Žižek’s response satisfy JB? I think not. The very frame male/female is still a sticking point for JB. Even though she understands fully Žižek’s point about how that universality gets differentially articulated. (Man I’m getting good at this eh?)

This problem … is related to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. If he is right, then sexual difference, in it most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony even as he claims with great clarity that its traumatic and non-symbolizable status occasions the concrete struggles over what its meaning should be. I gather that sexual difference is distinguished from other struggles within hegemony precisely because those other struggles — ‘class’ and ‘nation’, for instance — do not simultaneously name a fundamental and traumatic difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity. Both ‘class’ and ‘nation’ appear within the field of the symbolizable horizon on the occasion of this more fundamental lack, but one would not be tempted, as one is with the example of sexual difference, to call that fundamental lack ‘class’ or ‘nation’ (143).

Thus, sexual difference occupies a distinctive position within the chain of signifiers, one that both occasions the chain and is one link in the chain. How are we to think the vacillation between these two meanings, and are they always distinct, given that the transcendental is the ground, and occasions a sustaining condition for what is called the historical?

Žižek replies:

I fully assume this paradox … This overdetermination of universality by part of its content, this short circuit between the universal and particular, is the key feature of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’, and I am in total agreement with Butler who, it seems to me, also aims at this legacy of ‘concrete universality’ in her central notion of ‘competing universalities’: in her insistence on how each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality, she develops a point which I aslo try repeatedly to make in my own work (314-315).

… it is not enough to say that the genus Religion is divided into a multitude of species … the point, rather, is that each of these particular species involves its own universal notion of what religion is ‘as such’, as well as its own view on (how it differs from) other religions. Christianity is not simply different from Judaism and Islam; within its horizon, the very difference that separates it from the other two ‘religions of the Book’ appears in a way which is unacceptable for the other two. In other words when a Christian debates with a Muslim, they do not simply disagree — they disagree about their very disagreement: about what makes the difference between their religions … This is Hegel’s ‘concrete universality‘: since each particularity involves its own universality, its own notion of the Whole and its own part within it, there is no ‘neutral’ universality that would serve as the medium for these particular positions.

Thus Hegelian ‘dialectical development’ is not a deployment of a particular content within universality but the process by which, in the passage from one particularity to another, the very universality that encompasses both also changes: ‘concrete universality’ designates precisely this ‘inner life’ of universality itself, this process of passage in the course of which the very universality that aims at encompassing it is caught in it, submitted to transformations (316).


Antigone pt. 3 promiscuous obedience

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

—The mother of Oedipus is his wife. Antigone’s father is her brother, since they share a mother in Jocasta.

Her brothers are her nephews, sons of her brother-father, Oedipus. As Butler notes

The terms of kinship become irreversibly equivocal. Is this part of her tragedy? Does this equivocation of kinship lead to fatality?

Antigone is caught within a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror (Butler, Antigone’s Claim. 2000: 57)

The Curse of Kinship

And to the extent that the symbolic reiterates a “structural” necessity of kinship, does it relay or perform the curse of kinship itself? In other words, does the structuralist law report on the curse that is upon kinship or does it deliver that curse? Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms?

Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship?

From the presumption that one cannot —or ought not to— choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that ARE possible assume any particular form (66)

Antigone ch. 3

JB. “Promiscuous Obedience” (1998) The Judith Butler Reader 2003, pp. 278-301. originally appeared as Chapter 3 in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. 2000 (This blog post was originally published Jan 23/09)

Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And, moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms? Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship.

Incest taboo: prohibit sexual exchange among kin relations or rather, to establish kin relations precisely on the basis of those taboos.

The Antigonean revision of psychoanalytic theory might put into question the assumption that the incest taboo legitimates and normalizes kinship based in biological reproduction and the heterosexualization of the family (286).

From the presumption that one cannot — or ought not to — choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that are possible assume any particular form (286).

Tada: Now here is what drives me nuts about JB, trying to disentangle phrases like the following, yet I know, this is also her absolute, impeccable genius:

To the extent that the incest taboo contains its infraction within itself, it does not simply prohibit incest but rather sustains and cultivates incest as a necessary specter of social dissolution, a specter without which social bonds cannot emerge … one that works precisely through proliferating through displacement the very crime that it bars. The taboo, and its threatening figuration of incest, delineates lines of kinship that harbor incest as their ownmost possibility, establishing “aberration” at the heart of the norm. Indeed, my question is whether it can also become the basis for a socially survivable aberration of kinship in which the norms that govern legitimate and illegitimate modes of kin association might be more radically redrawn (286) (Antigone’s Claim: 67).

[…] other forms of social life, inadvertent possibilities produced by the prohibition that come to undermine the conclusion that an invariant social organization of sexuality follows of necessity from the prohibitive law. What happens when the perverse or the impossible emerges in the language of the law and makes its claim precisely there in the sphere of legitimate kinship that depends on its exclusion or pathologization?

For a woman who is a single mother and has her child without a man, is the father still there, a spectral “position” or “place” that remains unfilled, or is there no such “place” or “position”? Is the father absent, or does this child have no father, no position, and no inhabitant. Is this a loss, which assumes the unfulfilled norm, or is it another configuration of primary attachment whose primary loss is not to have a language in which to articulate its terms? And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? Or is that a way of reinstating a heterosexual organization of parenting at the psychic level that can accommodate all manner of gender variation at the social level? Here it seems that the very division between the psychic or symbolic, on the one hand, and the social, on the other, occasions this preemptory normalization of the social field (288) (AC: 69)

The question, however, is whether the incest taboo has also been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and livable ones (288).

Consider the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some, is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of voluntary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several states in the United States).

These various modes in which the oedipal mandate fails to produce normative family all risk entering into the metonymy of that moralized sexual horror that is perhaps most fundamentally associated with incest (289).

What in her [Antigone’s] act is fatal for heterosexuality in its normative sense? And to what other ways of organizing sexuality might a consideration of that fatality give rise? (290)

In the 1970s socialist feminists sought to make use of the unwaveringly social analysis of kinship to show that there is no ultimate basis for normative heterosexual monogamous family structure in nature, and we might now add that it has no similar basis in language (290).

Lacanian Formalists: insist on fundamental notions of sexual difference, which are based on rules that prohibit and regulate sexual exchange, rules we can break only to find ourselves ordered by them anew.

The subsequent turn to Lacan seemed to be a turn away from a highly constructivist and malleable account of social law informing matters of sexual regulation to one that posits a presocial law, what Juliet Mitchell once called a “primordial law” (something she no longer does), the law of the Father, which sets limits upon the the variability of social forms and which in its most conservative form, mandates an exogamic, heterosexual conclusion to the oedipal drama. That this constraint is understood to be beyond social alteration, indeed, to constitute the condition and limit of all social alterations, indicates something of the theological status it has assumed. And though this position often is quick to claim that although there is a normative conclusion for the oedipal drama, the norm cannot exist without perversion, and only through perversion can the norm be established. We are all supposed to be satisfied with this apparently generous gesture by which the perverse is announced to be essential to the norm. The problem as I see it is that the perverse remains entombed precisely there, as the essential and negative feature of the norm, and the relation between the two remains static, giving way to no rearticulation of the norm itself (Butler, AC: 75).

[…] Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure. Certainly, she does not achieve another sexuality, one that is NOT heterosexuality, but she does seem to deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do what is necessary to stay alive for Haemon, by refusing to become a mother and a wife, by scandalizing the public with her wavering gender, by embracing death as her bridal chamber and identifying her tomb as a “deep dug home”. If the love toward which she moves as she moves toward death is a love for her brother and thus, ambiguously, her father, it is also a love that can only be consummated by its obliteration, which is no consummation at all.

When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode. What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love, where the lack of institutional sanction forces language into perpetual catachresis, showing not only how a term can continue to signify outside its conventional constraints but also how that shadowy form of signification takes its toll on a life by depriving it of its sense of ontological certainty and durability within a publicly constitute political sphere (294).

To accept those norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility is to accept a doctrine that becomes the very instrument by which this melancholia is produced and reproduced at a cultural level. And it is overcome, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence (294-5).

If she is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage. And to the extent that she occupies the language that can never belong to her, she functions as a chiasm [crossing over] within the vocabulary of political norms. If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws (297).

Antigone ch. 2 Lacan kinship

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

Does Antigone’s death signal a necessary lesson about the limits of cultural intelligibility, the limits of intelligible kinship, one that restores us to our proper sense of limit and constraint? Does Antigone’s death signal the supersession of kinship by the state, the necessary subordination of the former to the latter? Or is her death precisely a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives can be countenanced as living?

In Lacan, kinship, as a function of the symbolic, becomes rigorously dissociated from the sphere of the social, and yet it constitutes the structural field of intelligibility within which the social emerges. My reading of Antigone, in brief, will attempt to compel these distinctions into productive crisis.

Antigone represents neither kinship nor its radical outside but becomes the occasion for a reading of a structurally constrained notion of kinship in terms of its social iterability, the aberrant temporality of the norm (Butler, Antigone: 29).

kinship as symbolic

To recast positions of kinship as “symbolic” is precisely to posit them as preconditions of linguistic communicability and to suggest that these “positions” bear an intractability that does not apply to contingent social norms. It is, however, not enough to trace the effects of social norms on the thinking of kinship, a move that would return the discourse on kinship to a sociologism devoid of psychic significance. Norms do not unilaterally act upon the psyche; rather, they become condensed as the figure of the law to which the psyche returns.

The psychic relation to social norms can, under certain conditions, posit those norms as intractable, punitive, and eternal, but that figuration of norms already takes place within what Freud called “the culture of the death drive.”

In other words, the very description of the symbolic as intractable law takes place within a fantasy of law as insurpassable authority. In my view, Lacan at once analyzes and symptomizes this fantasy. I hope to suggest that the notion of the symbolic is limited by the description of its own transcendentalizing function, that it can acknowledge the contingency of its own structure only by disavowing the possibility of any substantial alteration in its field of operation. My suggestion will be that the relation between symbolic position and social norm needs to be rethought, and in my final chapter, I hope to show how one might reapproach the kinship-founding function of the incest taboo within psychoanalysis with a conception of a contingent social norm at work (Butler Antigone: 30).

Here I am less interested in what the taboo constrains than the forms of kinship to which it gives rise and how their legitimacy is established precisely as the normalized solutions to the oedipal crisis.

The point, then, is not to unleash incest from its constraints but to ask what forms of normative kinship are understood to proceed as structural necessities from that taboo.

sub specie aeternitatis: In its essential or universal form or nature

prounce it like this

Antigone

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and sexual theory (Butler, Antigone 2000: 19).

Those who disagree with me then claim, with some exasperation, “but it is the law!” but what is the status of such an utterance?

“It is the law!” becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise. “It is the law” is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law, a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself.

Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status given to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable. The theory exposes its own tautological defense. The law beyond laws will finally put an end to the anxiety produced by a critical relation to final authority that clearly does not know when to stop: a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power. Its defenders claim that to be without such a law is pure voluntarism or radical anarchy! Or is it? And to accept such a law as a final arbiter of kinship life? Is that not to resolve by theological means the concrete dilemmas of human sexual arrangements that have no ultimate normative form? (Butler, Antigone: 21)

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).

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)

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”.

Incest taboo reconfiguration

JB’s Gender Trouble 1990. page 72. JB states:

Can the prohibition against incest that proscribes and sanctions hierarchical and binary gendered positions be reconceived as a productive power that inadvertently generates several cultural configurations of gender? Is the incest taboo subject to the critique of the repressive hypothesis that Foucault provides?

melancholic heterosexuality

JB’s Gender Trouble page 71. JB states:

disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” The loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation fully forgotten and repressed. The sexed surface of the body thus emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. The loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex.

Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of forgetfulness, which, in the case of a literalized sexual anatomy, “forgets” the imaginary and, with it, an imaginable homosexuality.

In the case of the melancholic heterosexual male, he never loved another man, he is a man, and he can seek recourse to the empirical facts that will prove it. But the literalization of anatomy not only proves nothing, but is a literalizing restriction of pleasure in the very organ that is championed as the sign of masculine identity. The love of the father is stored in the penis, safeguarded through an impervious denial, and the desire which now centers on that penis has that continual denial as its structure and its task. Indeed, the woman-as-object must be the sign that he not only never felt homosexual desire, but never felt the grief over its loss. Indeed, the woman-as-sign must effectively displace and conceal that preheterosexual history in favor of one that consecrates a seamless heterosexuality.

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).

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.