{"id":2316,"date":"2009-03-13T09:19:30","date_gmt":"2009-03-13T14:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=2316"},"modified":"2009-05-27T11:00:43","modified_gmt":"2009-05-27T16:00:43","slug":"2316","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/03\/13\/2316\/","title":{"rendered":"butler gender regulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender<\/span>. New York: Routledge, 2004.<\/p>\n

But for gender to be regulated is not simply for gender to come under the exterior force of a regulation. If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to which it is subjected and the ways in which that subjection takes place. The problem, however, for us is more acute. After all, is there a gender that preexists its regulation<\/strong>, or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection? <\/strong>(41)<\/p>\n

It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from Foucaultian scholarship:<\/p>\n

1. regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect;<\/p>\n

2. to become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a subject precisely through being regulated<\/p>\n

The second point follows from the first in that the regulatory discourses which form the subject of gender are precisely those that require and induce the subject in question.<\/p>\n

To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent<\/strong>, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance. To conflate the definition of gender with its normative expression is inadvertently to reconsolidate the power of the norm to constrain the definition of gender … Whether one refers to “gender trouble” or “gender blending,” “transgender” or “cross-gender,” one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalized binary<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The conflation of gender with masculine\/feminine, man\/woman, male\/female, thus performs the very naturalization that the notion of gender is meant to forestall (42-43). Thus, a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a regulatory<\/em> operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

… the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices<\/strong>, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist suppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche (44).<\/p>\n

How does a shift from thinking of gender as regulated by symbolic laws to a conception of gender as regulated by social norms contest this indifference of the law to what it regulates? And how does such a shift open up the possiblity of a more radical contestation of the law itself (48).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. But for gender to be regulated is not simply for gender to come under the exterior force of a regulation. If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to … Continue reading “butler gender regulation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,86,87,24,55,96,97,94],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-2316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-gender","category-incest","category-lacan","category-normative","category-phallus-butler","category-psyche","category-sexual-difference","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2316"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3392,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316\/revisions\/3392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}