Tag: gendertrouble

nice take on Butler’s gender trouble

This is from Belsey’s Culture and the Real, but it sounds like what I wrote:

In 1990 Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble electrified cultural critics all over the world. Butler’s brilliant insight was that speech-act theory could be harnessed for feminism and queer studies to demonstrate the performativity of sexual identity. She countered essentialism and identity politics with sexuality as theatre, a display of ‘corporeal style’ (1999: 177), in which parody and the masquerade demonstrated the constructed character of gender as impersonation. Sexual disposition was not an origin but an effect of repeated social performances, none more ‘natural’ than any other. And just as gender is constituted by repeated acts, the idea of ‘an essential sex’ is culturally produced to mask gender’s contingent character (180).

The conventional feminist distinction between biological sex and cultural gender was regressive, Butler argued, leading to a naturalization of gender characteristics rooted in the body. For her, by contrast, sex and gender were one and the same (10– 11); what passed for nature was in practice a product of culture; nature was incorporated into culture. Butler’s anti-foundational feminism, and her opposition to heterosexual hegemony, which I wholeheartedly share, are secured by overriding the anxiety about the limits of culture that I have suggested is evident in culture itself.  Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. 2005, 11

🙂 But then Belsey goes on to critique Butler’s book Gender Trouble

Gender Trouble stressed the regulatory character of culture: heterosexuality was a discursive regime, and the possibilities for resistance were limited. But subversion could be read, in Butler’s account, as a matter of choice, as if, because it was purely cultural, sexual identity could be improvised from moment to moment, ‘enacted’ at will:  “The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.” (Butler 1999: 119)   At such moments Gender Trouble sounds remarkably close to the American dream.

In practice, norms are not so easily subverted, however, and this reading had to be corrected, along with the impression that physiology was reducible to mere discourse. Three years later, in Bodies that Matter, Butler insists on performativity rather than performance; the emphasis on theatricality is much reduced in the analysis (though it returns in the style of the writing); and the politics is less utopian, an issue of rearticulation and resignification.

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.

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).