→pdf withpassword JB_GT_preface1999.pdf
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1 |
Ten years ago I
completed the manuscript of GendeTr roublaen d sent
it to Routledge for publication. I did not know that the text would
have as wide an audience as it has had, nor did I know that it
would constitute a provocative "intervention" in feminist theory
or be cited as one of the founding texts of queer theory. The life
of the text has exceeded my intentions, and that is surely in part
the result of the changing context of its reception. As I wrote it, I
understood myself to be in an embattled and oppositional relation
to certain forms of feminism, even as I understood the text
to be part of feminism itself. I was writing in the tradition of
immanent critique that seeks to provoke critical examination of
the basic vocabulary of the movement of thought to which it
belongs. There was and remains warrant for such a mode of
criticism and to distinguish between self-criticism that promises
a more democratic and inclusive life for the movement and criticism
that seeks to undermine it altogether. Of course, it is always
possible to misread the former as the latter, but I would hope that
that will not be done in the case of GenderT rouble. |
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| 2 |
In 1989 I was most
concerned to criticize a pervasive heterosexual
assumption in feminist literary theory. I sought to counter
those views that made presumptions about the limits and propriety
of gender and restricted the meaning of gender to
received notions of masculinity and femininity. It was and
remains my view that any feminist theory that restricts the
meaning of gender in the presuppositions of its own practice
sets up exclusionary gender norms within feminism, often with
homophobic consequences. It seemed to me, and continues to
seem, that feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain
expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy
and exclusion. In particular, I opposed those regimes of
truth that stipulated that certain kinds of gendered expressions
were found to be false or derivative, and others, true and original.
The point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of
life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text.
Rather, the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility
for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities
ought to be realized. One might wonder what use "opening
up possibilities" finally is, but no one who has understood
what it is to live in the social world as what is "impossible,"
illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose
that question. |
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| 3 |
GenderT roubleso
ught to uncover the ways in which the very
thinking of what is possible in gendered life is foreclosed by
certain habitual and violent presumptions. The text also sought
to undermine any and all efforts to wield a discourse of truth
to delegitimate minority gendered and sexual practices. This
doesn't mean that all minority practices are to be condoned or
celebrated, but it does mean that we ought to be able to think
them before we come to any kinds of conclusions about them.
What worried me most were the ways that the panic in the face
of such practices rendered them unthinkable. Is the breakdown
of gender binaries, for instance, so monstrous, so frightening,that it
must be held to be definitionally impossible and heuristically
precluded from any effort to think gender? |
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| 4 |
Some of these
kinds of presumptions were found in what was
called "French Feminism" at the time, and they enjoyed great
popularity among literary scholars and some social theorists.
Even as I opposed what I took to be the heterosexism at the core
of sexual difference fundamentalism, I also drew from French
poststructuralism to make my points. My work in Gender Trouble
turned out to be one of cultural translation. Poststructuralist
theory was brought to bear on U.S. theories of gender and the
political predicaments of feminism. If in some of its guises,
poststructuralism
appears as a formalism, aloof from questions of
social context and political aim, that has not been the case with
its more recent American appropriations. Indeed, my point was
not to "apply" poststructuralism to feminism, but to subject
those theories to a specifically feminist reformulation. Whereas
some defenders of poststructuralist formalism express dismay at
the avowedly "thematic" orientation it receives in works such as
GenderT roublet,h e critiques of poststructuralism within the cultural
Left have expressed strong skepticism toward the claim that
anything politically progressive can come of its premises. In both
accounts, however, poststructuralism is considered something
unified, pure, and monolithic. In recent years, however, that theory,
or set of theories, has migrated into gender and sexuality
studies, postcolonial and race studies. It has lost the formalism of
its earlier instance and acquired a new and transplanted life in
the domain of cultural theory. There are continuing debates
about whether my own work or the work of Homi Bhabha,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spival, or Slavoj Zizek belongs to cultural
studies or critical theory, but perhaps such questions simply
show that the strong distinction between the two enterprises has
broken down. There will be theorists who claim that all of
the above belong to cultural studies, and there will be cultural
studies practitioners who define themselves against all manner of
theory (although not , significantly, Stuart Hall, one of the
founders of cultural studies in Britain). But both sides of the
debate sometimes miss the point that the face of theory has
changed precisely through its cultural appropriations. There is a
new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in
and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the
displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization
of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more
generalizable claims. It is, rather, the emergence of theory at
the site where cultural horizons meet, where the demand for
translation is acute and its promise of success, uncertain. |
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| 5 |
Gender Trouble is
rooted in "French Theory," which is itself a
curious American construction. Only in the United States are so
many disparate theories joined together as if they formed some
kind of unity. Although the book has been translated into several
languages and has had an especially strong impact on discussions
of gender and politics in Germany, it will emerge in France, if it
finally does, much later than in other countries. I mention this to
underscore that the apparent Francocentrism of the text is at a
significant distance from France and from the life of theory in
France. Gender Trouble tends to read together, in a syncretic
vein, various French intellectuals (Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan,
Kristeva, Wittig) who had few alliances with one another and
whose readers in France rarely, if ever, read one another. Indeed,
the intellectual promiscuity of the text marks it precisely as
American and makes it foreign to a French context. So does its
emphasis on the Anglo-American sociological and anthropological
tradition of "gender" studies, which is distinct from the
discourse of "sexual difference" derived from structuralist
inquiry. If the text runs the risk of Eurocentrism in the U.S., it
has threatened an "Americanization" of theory in France for
those few French publishers who have considered it. 1 |
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| 6 |
Of course, "French
Theory" is not the only language of this text. It emerges from a long
engagement with feminist theory, with the debates on the socially
constructed character of gender,
with psychoanalysis and feminism, with Gayle Rubin's extraordinary
work on gender, sexuality, and kinship, Esther Newton's
groundbreaking work on drag, Monique Wittig' s brilliant theoretical
and fictional writings, and with gay and lesbian perspectives
in the humanities. Whereas many feminists in the 1980s
assumed that lesbianism meets feminism in lesbian-feminism,
GenderT roubles ought to refuse the notion that lesbian practice
instantiates feminist theory, and set up a more troubled relation ·
between the two terms. Lesbianism in this text does not represent
a return to what is most important about being a woman; it
does not consecrate femininity or signal a gynocentric world.
Lesbianism is not the erotic consummation of a set of political
beliefs (sexuality and belief are related in a much more complex
fashion, and very often at odds with one another). Instead, the
text asks, how do non-normative sexual practices call into question
the stability of gender as a category of analysis? How do
certain sexual practices compel the question: what is a woman,
what is a man? If gender is no longer to be understood as consolidated
through normative sexuality, then is there a crisis of
gender that is specific to queer contexts? |
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| 7 |
The idea that
sexual practice has the power to destabilize gen -
der emerged from my reading of Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in
Women" and sought to establish that normative sexuality fortifies
normative gender. Briefly, one is a woman, according to this
framework, to the extent that one functions as one within the
dominant heterosexual frame and to call the frame into question
is perhaps to lose something of one's sense of place in gender. I
take it that this is the first formulation of" gender trouble" in this
text. I sought to understand some of the terror and anxiety that
some people suffer in "becoming gay," the fear oflosing one's
place in gender or of not knowing who one will be if one sleeps
with someone of the ostensibly "same" gender . This constitutes
a certain crisis in ontology experienced at the level of both sexuality
and language. This issue has become more acute as we
consider various new forms of gendering that have emerged in
light of transgenderism and transsexuality, lesbian and gay parenting,
new butch and femme identities. When and why, for
instance, do some butch lesbians who become parents become
"dads" and others become "moms"? |
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| 8 |
What about the
notion, suggested by Kate Bornstein, that a
transsexual cannot be described by the noun of "woman" or
"man," but must be approached through active verbs that attest
to the constant transformation which "is" the new identity
or, indeed, the "in-betweenness" that puts the being of gendered
identity into question? Although some lesbians argue that
butches have nothing to do with "being a man," others insist
that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a
man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years,
offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself
did not anticipate. 2 |
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| 9 |
But what is the
link between gender and sexuality that I
sought to underscore? Certainly, I do not mean to claim that
forms of sexual practice produce certain genders, but only
that under conditions of normative heterosexuality, policing
gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality.
Catharine MacKinnon offers a formulation of this problem that
resonates with my own at the same time that there are, I believe,
crucial and important differences between us. She writes: Stopped as an attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women.3 |
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| xii |
10 |
In this view,
sexual hierarchy produces and consolidates
gender. It is not heterosexual normativity that produces and
consolidates gender, but the gender hierarchy that is said to
underwrite heterosexual relations. If gender hierarchy produces
and consolidates gender, and if gender hierarchy presupposes
an operative notion of gender, then gender is what causes
gender, and the formulation culminates in tautology. It may be
that MacKinnon wants merely to outline the self-reproducing
mechanism of gender hierarchy, but this is not what she
has said. |
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| 11 |
Is "gender
hierarchy" sufficient to explain the conditions for
the production of gender? To what extent does gender hierarchy
serve a more or less compulsory heterosexuality, and how often
are gender norms policed precisely in the service of shoring up
heterosexual hegemony? |
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| 12 |
Katherine Franke,
a contemporary legal theorist, makes
innovative use of both feminist and queer perspectives to note
that by assuming the primacy of gender hierarchy to the production
of gender, MacKinnon also accepts a presumptively heterosexual
model for thinking about sexuality. Franke offers an
alternative model of gender discrimination to MacKinnon's,
effectively arguing that sexual harassment is the paradigmatic
allegory for the production of gender. Not all discrimination can
be understood as harassment. The act of harassment may be one
in which a person is "made" into a certain gender. But there are
others ways of enforcing gender as well. Thus, for Franke, it is
important to make a provisional distinction between gender and
sexual discrimination. Gay people, for instance, may be discriminated
against in positions of employment because they fail
to "appear" in accordance with accepted gendered norms. And
the sexual harassment of gay people may well take place not in
the service of shoring up gender hierarchy, but in promoting
gender normativity. |
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| xiv |
13 |
Whereas MacKinnon
offers a powerful critique of sexual harassment,
she institutes a regulation of another kind: to have
a gender means to have entered already into a heterosexual
relationship of subordination. At an analytic level, she makes an
equation that resonates with some dominant forms of homophobic
argument. One such view prescribes and condones the
sexual ordering of gender, maintaining that men who are men
will be straight, women who are women will be straight. There
is another set of views, Franke's included, which offers a critique
precisely of this form of gender regulation. There is thus a
difference between sexist and feminist views on the relation
between gender and sexuality: the sexist claims that a woman
only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in
which her subordination becomes her pleasure (an essence
emanates and is confirmed in the sexualized subordination of
women); a feminist view argues that gender should be overthrown,
eliminated, or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely
because it is always a sign of subordination for women. The
latter accepts the power of the former' s orthodox description,
accepts that the former' s description already operates as powerful
ideology, but seeks to oppose it. |
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| 14 |
I belabor this
point because some queer theorists have drawn
an analytic distinction between gender and sexuality, refusing a
causal or structural link between them. This makes good sense
from one perspective: if what is meant by this distinction is that
heterosexual normativity ought not to order gender, and that
such ordering ought to be opposed, I am firmly in favor of this
view.4 If, however, what is meant by this is that ( descriptively
speaking), there is no sexual regulation of gender, then I think
an important, but not exclusive, dimension of how homophobia
works is going unrecognized by those who are clearly most
eager to combat it. It is important for me to concede, however,
that the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing
about sexuality or sexual practice. Gender can be rendered
ambiguous without disturbing or reorienting normative sexuality
at all. Sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to
contain or deflect non-normative sexual practice and thereby
work to keep normative sexuality intact. 5 Thus, no correlation can be
drawn, for instance, between drag or transgender and
sexual practice, and the distribution of hetero-, bi-, and
homoinclinations
cannot be predictably mapped onto the travels of
gender bending or changing |
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| 15 |
Much of my work in
recent years has been devoted to clarifying
and revising the theory of performativity that is outlined in
GendeTr roubl6e .I t is difficult to say precisely what performativity
is
not only because my own views on what "performativity" might
mean have changed over time, most often in response to excellent
criticisms, 7 but because so many others have taken it up and
given it their own formulations. I originally took my clue on
how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida's
reading of Kafka's "Before the Law." There the one who waits for
the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force
to the law for which one waits. The anticipation of an authoritative
disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority
is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object. I
wondered whether we do not labor under a similar expectation
concerning gender, that it operates as an interior essence that
might be disclosed, an expectation that ends up producing the
very phenomenon that it anticipates. In the first instance, then,
the performativity of gender revolves around this metalepsis, the
way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces
that which it posits as outside itself. Secondly, performativity is
not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves
its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body,
understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration. 8 |
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| 16 |
Several important
questions have been posed to this doctrine,
and one seems especially noteworthy to mention here. The view
that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to
be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained
set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the
body. In this way, it showed that what we take to be an
"internal" feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce
through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory
effect of naturalized gestures. Does this mean that everything
that is understood as "internal" about the psyche is
therefore evacuated, and that internality is a false metaphor?
Although GenderT roublec learly drew upon the metaphor of an
internal psyche in its early discussion of gender melancholy, that
emphasis was not brought forward into the thinking of performati
vity itself.9 Both The Psychic Life of Power and several of my
recent articles on psychoanalytic topics have sought to come to
terms with this problem, what many have seen as a problematic
break between the early and later chapters of this book . Although
I would deny that all of the internal world of the psyche is but an
effect of a stylized set of acts, I continue to think that it is a
significant theoretical mistake to take the "internality" of the
psychic world for granted. Certain features of the world, includ ing
people we know and lose, do become "internal" features of
the self, but they are transformed through that interiorization,
and that inner world, as the Kleinians call it, is constituted
precisely
as a consequence of the interiorizations that a psyche performs.
This suggests that there may well be a psychic theory of
performativity at work that calls for greater exploration. |
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| 17 |
Although this text
does not answer the question of whether
the materiality of the body is fully constructed, that has been the
focus of much of my subsequent work, which I hope will prove
clarifying for the reader. 10 The question of whether or not the
theory of performativity can be transposed onto matters of race
has been explored by several scholars. 11 I would note here not
only that racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse
on gender in ways that need to be made explicit, but that
race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies. I
would therefore suggest that the question to ask is not whether
the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what
happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with
race. Many of these debates have centered on the status of
"construction," whether race is constructed in the same way as
gender. My view is that no single account of construction will
do, and that these categories always work as background for one
another, and they often find their most powerful articulation
through one another. Thus, the sexualization of racial gender
norms calls to be read through multiple lenses at once, and the
analysis surely illuminates the limits of gender as an exclusive
category of analysis. 12 |
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Copyleft, CC, Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j, 1997-2099
