Prof. Mary Klages's lecture notes on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
Bricolage is perhaps the best term to use to think about what Judith Butler does
to and with Freud's psychoanalysis. She uses bits and pieces of Freud in order
to think about gender in a postmodern form, to problematize gender as category
of essence. She wants to question the idea that a person IS male or female, masculine
or feminine, which are the fundamental ideas Freud started with. Butler wants
to show that gender is not just a social construct, but rather a kind of performance,
a show we put on, a set of signs we wear, as costume or disguise--hence as far
from essence as can be. She starts by asking questions about the category "woman:"
who does it include, and how do we know who it includes? And who decides what's
in this category anyway? We've already gone over this: in phallogocentric western
discourse, "woman" is always the other of "man", hence excluded
from culture or the Symbolic. In feminist theory, "woman" is universal
category, which thus excludes ideas of differences among women (differences of
race, class, or sexuality, for example). Both types of theory--psychoanalytic
and feminist--rely on a notion of "woman" as referring to an essence,
a fact, a biological given, hence a universal.Given the pomo emphasis on discarding
universals, "grand narratives," comprehensive categories, Butler says
we need to think about "woman" as multiple and discontinuous, not as
a category with "ontological integrity." She turns to psychoanalytic
theory to do so. She gives an overview of Freud and Lacan (pp. 326-327) as setting
up "woman" as eternal abstract universal category, and implicates Irigaray
in doing same thing.Then she points to the poststructuralist theoretical feminists
who destabilize the concept of the subject as masculine/male by saying that the
female isn't a subject, isn't fully in the Symbolic, that "woman" is
on the margins, in the body, and is thus more free to play than man. But, if "woman"
is not a subject, can she have agency? And if there is no normative or unitary
concept of "woman," can we have feminism as movement/theory? If there's
no single "woman," then there can be no single feminism.Thus the problem
is to think about woman as fragmentations, and about feminism without a single
unitary concept of woman.Butler then looks at psychoanalysis as a "grand
narrative," about how "woman" as a unitary category is formed.
Psychoanalysis is a story about origins and ends, which includes some aspects,
and excludes others, as Butler notes on p. 329. The story starts with a utopian
nondifferentiation of the sexes, which is ended by enforced separation and the
creation of difference. This narrative "gives a false sense of legitimacy
and universality to a culturally specific and, in some cases, culturally oppressive
version of gender identity."In a way, Butler is asking the question about
what happens in a psychoanalytic paradigm if you don't have a mom and dad and
no one else; if you're raised by single parent, or two parents of the same sex,
or by a grandmother, etc. She looks at how the Freudian "grand narrative"
privileges a certain story, certain pattern of identifications, that supposedly
produce a coherent unified gendered self (man, woman, masculine, feminine), and
says no, that's not how it really works--you could have variations, fragmented
identities, discontinuous or provisional understandings of our gender identities
based on wider variety of identifications, beyond just mother/father/child.Freud
sets up a system where certain identifications are primary in forming a (gendered)
self, and others are secondary; the primary identifications have more power to
shape a self than the secondary ones, and are subordinated/subsumed within the
primary ones. Hence relations with the mother are primary (for both sexes), while
relations with siblings, eg., are secondary, not as important in the narrative
of how the gendered self is formed. The primary/secondary identifications are
temporal: the primary ones happen first, the secondary are added on. Without that
temporal placement (first this happens, then this happens), you couldn't tell
which identifications were more important than others--which were substance and
which were attributes. If we could redesign the Oedipal narrative so it wasn't
linear/temporal, we'd have all the identifications going on at once, or without
ranking--so that all would be equally important, all would be attributes without
one being substance (or all would be copies without one being original).Butler
wants to understand gendered subjectivity "as a history of identifications,
parts of which can be brought into play in given contexts and which, precisely
because they encode the contingencies of personal history, do not always point
back to an internal coherence of any kind" (331).She then presents the idea
that the concept of the unconscious makes any idea of coherence or unity suspect--whether
we're talking about a slip of the tongue, or any narrative/story--including the
"grand narrative" of psychoanalysis. Freud's story works hard to be
unitary and coherent, to tell a connected story about how gender is formed. It
does so by repressing certain elements, excluding them from the story. One of
the ways it achieves this is to repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity
in gender and sexual identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a
sex OR you desire it; only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible
to desire the sex you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for
instance, Freud would say that's because you REALLY identify with women.Butler
looks at how Freud tells the story of how fantasy identifications (identifications
that happen in the unconscious) shape our identity (who we are). When we identify
with someone else, we create an internal image of that person, or, more precisely,
who we want that person to be, and then we identify with that internalized and
idealized image. Our own identity, then, isn't modeled on actual others but on
our image of their image, on what we want the other to be, rather than what the
other really is. Gender, then, as the identification with one sex, or one object
(like the mother) is a fantasy, a set of internalized images, and not a set of
properties governed by the body and its organ configuration. Rather, gender is
a set of signs internalized, psychically imposed on the body and on one's psychic
sense of identity. Gender, Butler concludes, is thus not a primary category, but
an attribute, a set of secondary narrative effects.Gender is thus a fantasy enacted
by "corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations." In other
words, gender is an act, a performance, a set of manipulated codes, costumes,
rather than a core aspect of essential identity. Butler's main metaphor for this
is "drag," i.e. dressing like a person of the "opposite sex."
All gender is a form of "drag," according to Butler; there is no "real"
core gender to refer to.
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Klages, Associate Professor, English Dept., University of Colorado, Boulder. You
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