Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

In this unnamed introductory section, Butler discusses the use of the myth of a time before patriarchy and the concept of transcultural patriarchy, which almost always plays a role in these imaginary pasts. Feminists' use of an imaginary time before patriarchy is dangerous because it takes the focus away from contemporary struggles over gender and because it reinforces the culture/nature and mind/body binaries that have so subordinated women. Transcultural patriarchy has some of the same issues but has the added danger of reinforcing the Othering of other cultures.

Appeals to an imaginary pre-patriarchal historical moment are generally motivated by a desire to show that gender construction is arbitrary, rather than given, but one need not appeal to an imaginary past in which sex was transformed into gender to argue this point. Butler examines the role of “gender-instituting prohibitions” (52) (also referred to as “the Law”) in structuralist and psychoanalytic theory to offer just such an alternate approach.

Structuralism is a theory that views language and culture as systems in which each part of the system can only be understood in relation to the whole of the system, and vice versa. Important structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss focuses on the system of kinship in his examination of culture. Lévi-Strauss argues that all systems of kinship, regardless of culture, are based on men’s exchanges of women to avoid incestuous relationships within a kinship group. This exchange of women is also critical to the development of symbolic thought and language.

The kinship group’s identity, the identity of individual men, and the distinction of one kinship group from another are all based on this exchange. While men and kinship groups’ identities are secured by this exchange, women are simply absences and objects of exchange in such a system. Butler asks the reader to consider how one can get outside such an all-encompassing system to find an alternate account by which women are not simply objects of exchange.

Poststructuralists would argue that the distinctions between parts and wholes and between men and women conceal the ambiguity between the two sides of each binary. Butler asks the reader to consider how it is that men as people who engage in exchange are differentiated from women as objects of exchange to begin with. Irigaray’s insight is that these distinctions likely cover over “‘homosocial desire’” (55): male-male bonds that are repressed and prohibited within patriarchal societies.

Also repressed are any possible exchanges between men and women and women and women. An alternative account of gender is possible once one accepts that heterosexuality as the norm depends on the suppression of other sexualities. Naming these repressed sexualities and offering an account of their history will undercut the argument that there is something universal about the exchange of women by men as the source of gender differentiation.

Butler next pivots to psychoanalytic perspectives on gender by examining Lévi-Strauss’s argument that the taboo against incest in Freud’s account of gender is an important point of intersection between their respective disciplines. According to Butler, Lévi-Strauss argues that the incest taboo works: incest is not an actual act that occurs and its prevalence as a fantasy proves that the prohibition works. Butler dismisses this argument. Instead, she wonders how such prohibitions generate these fantasies and produce a space within which they can multiply. Lévi-Strauss is just assuming the incest taboo is universal, when the reality is that “the naturalization of both heterosexuality and masculine sexual agency are discursive constructions nowhere accounted for but everywhere assumed within this founding structuralist frame” (58).

Butler then shifts to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who argues that the prohibition against incest is the means by which the infant first engages in culture, and the dissatisfaction of the infant at not being able to stay as one with the mother is the impetus for speech, the entrance into the Symbolic order by which the infant becomes capable of signifying meanings. Culture and language, by this account, are a series of displacements designed to conceal this incestuous desire.

Butler opens her discussion of Lacan by cautioning that looking at Lacan’s theory of language with an eye toward defining the being of gender is wrongheaded. Lacan is not interested in defining the being of anything. Instead, his interest is in exploring how a “thing takes on the characterization of ‘being’ and becomes mobilized by that ontological gesture only within the structure of signification that, as the Symbolic, is itself pre-ontological” (59). In other words, we can’t get at the thing (gender/gender differentiation) itself, but we can look at the language, power, or relations around it.

By Lacan’s account, there are two sexual positions: being the Phallus and having the Phallus (not be confused with the penis: the phallus is the place the organ plays in discourse). Men have the Phallus, but they only have it by virtue of women reflecting back to men men’s own sexuality, doing so in the context of discourse, through their lack of the Phallus.

Butler points out that this set-up means that these gender identities are interdependent. If men are dependent upon women for gender identification, however, masculinity is just an “illusory autonomy” (61). If women were to fail to maintain this masquerade of male autonomy, it would unravel the whole system of gender differentiation. Heterosexuality is based on just such an illusion, according to Lacan, but Butler wonders about the nature of the masquerade. What is it that women do when they engage in masquerade? What is the masquerade masking? Lacan talks about masquerade as a strategy whereby the subject incorporates aspects of the Other after a refusal of love from that other (also known as melancholia). While Lacan uses female homosexuality to examine the impact of the refusal of love on heterosexual sexual differentiation, Butler asks why this formulation cannot be flipped on its head: perhaps heterosexuality is “disappointed homosexuality” (67).

Butler turns to Joan Reviere’s “notion of femininity as a masquerade in terms of a theory of aggression and conflict resolution” (68). Butler notes that Riviere’s work relies on assumptions about gender and gender expression that prevailed during the period when she wrote her work (during the early 20th century). In Riviere’s account, women and men of the “intermediate type” (69) are constantly engaged in plays to avoid retribution for failing at heterosexuality. Homosexual men exaggerate masculinity to mask from themselves the desire to be feminine. A lesbian uses masking to avoid retribution from men for the desire to become “a user of signs rather than a sign-object, an item of exchange. This castrating desire might be understood as a desire to relinquish the status of woman as sign in order to appear as a subject within language” (70).

Butler points out that Reviere assumes that lesbian gender identification is somehow asexual and thus covers over the rage that is actually being masked, while in men, what is assumed to be masked is libido. The ultimate aim seems to be avoid acknowledging homosexual desire.

Butler then shifts once again to Lacan’s account of gender differentiation as a “divide” (74) by which identity emerges from a split that divides the subject. Butler wonders why Lacan insisted on making the split a binary one, however. She then offers a reading of theorist Jacqueline Rose, who argues that “‘for both sexes, sexuality will necessarily touch on the duplicity which undermines its fundamental divide,’” suggesting that sexual division, effected through repression, is invariably undermined by the very ruse of identity” (74). Any attempt at being an identity may always be bound to fail as a result. If all efforts to have the appearance of an identity are bound to fail, there is something “suspect” about Lacan’s account of gender identity (76). 

Butler next turns to Sigmund Freud’s work in order to examine gender identity formation. Her particular focus is to “understand the melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame” (78). In Freud’s work, a key moment in the formation of the ego (the part of the psyche formed as a result of external pressures) is the loss of someone important to the person—the love-object.

In an attempt to deal with that loss, aspects of the lost one are incorporated into the ego through an act of identification—melancholia. This act of identification “becomes a new structure of identity; in effect, the other becomes part of the ego through the permanent internalization of the other’s attributes” (78). That other may well be “internalized as a self-critical or self-debasing disposition in which the role of the other is not occupied and directed by the ego itself” (78), if the relationship with the lost loved one was ambivalent.

While Freud focuses on how this process comes to form character, Butler points out that his work also has implications for gender-identity formation. Once a child comes to understand the prohibition against incest with the mother or father, that child responds by internalizing the lost “love-object” (79)—the mother or the father. By Freud’s account, gender consolidation occurs when a boy gives up his mother and becomes ambivalent towards his father, which Butler takes to imply that the “the boy must not only choose between the two objects choices, but the two sexual dispositions, masculine and feminine” (80). These acts of repudiation can lead either to homosexuality or heterosexuality in both boys and girls, depending upon with whom the child ultimately identifies.

The existence of homosexuality suggests that at some point there is within the child a “primary bisexuality” (80), despite Freud's insistence that desire for the father is a pre-existing feminine disposition and desire for the mother is a pre-existing masculine disposition. Freud's insistence on these mysterious dispositions is the result of his heterosexual blinders, falling into line with what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix.

In examining Freud’s work, Butler concludes that the acts of repression, sublimation, and deflection required for a child to accept the prohibitions of the heterosexual matrix occasion a loss: “gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition” (86-87). There is nothing “natural” or necessary about the way the internalization of the prohibition plays out, according to Butler. That process is imposed by culture but hidden from view. This concealment occurs because dispositions are assumed to be foundational and causal so as to make the prohibitions seem natural and homosexuality seem unnatural, “illegitimate,” and “unspeakable” (89).

Butler next considers the implications of differences in the way Lacan, Riviere, and Freud theorize gender identification. Gender identifications are so complex and varied that it’s hard to believe that gender identification is as fixed as some of these theorists might imagine. For Lacan, gender identification is articulated in terms of a having/being binary, in which “the excluded term” of the binary disrupts the gender order (90). Feminist theorists have largely focused on maternal identification, so much so that this dominant focus has become a form of heterosexism that threatens to silence attempts to theorize gay and lesbian identifications.

What alternative accounts of gender identification might be productive? Butler starts by pushing against Lacan’s argument that the origins of gender identifications are simply unnamable because “language bars the speaking subject from the repressed libidinal origins of its speech” (91). Butler believes that we must find the language to talk about these origins, however.

The first line of attack Butler uses is to engage in speculation about the psychic space where the identifications are located. Butler believes this space is imagined, rather than literal, perhaps even on the surface of the body. Returning to the concepts of melancholia and mourning (and their place in gender identification), Butler focuses on Abraham and Torok’s distinction between introjection and incorporation.

Introjection is associated with mourning, while incorporation is associated with melancholia. The loss of the love-object serves mourning by introjection of an empty space—the literal mouth—from which speech and meaning-making occur. Incorporation, on the other hand, is associated with melancholia, characterized not only by the loss of the love object but also by the refusal to acknowledge the loss. In melancholia, the loss is “radically unnameable” and “erodes the condition of metaphorical signification itself” (92), which means the loss of the mother’s body is never displaced with words. Incorporation is the mechanism by which gender identification is accomplished in this account, and “incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body” (93) as pleasure that is “determined or prohibited through the compulsory effects of the gender-differentiating law” (93). Incorporation on or in the body is, however, a kind of fantasy.

The incest and homosexuality prohibitions do not act with equal force on this process of incorporation. Per Freud, the incest taboo requires renunciation of the love-object (mother/father), while the homosexuality taboo requires renunciation of both the love-object and the denial of the desire for the object. Irigaray describes this double denial as “characteristic of a fully developed femininity” (94) and sees melancholia as the norm for women, with the implication that the loss is unnamable within (masculinist) language. This double denial is culturally enforced for the sake of stable, heterosexual gender identities.

Incorporation is a “literalizing fantasy” (95) in which gender differentiation is naturalized and pleasures are imagined to “reside in the penis, vagina, and the breasts or to emanate from” parts of a body that has already been labeled as “gender-specific” (95). The predetermination of which body parts are acceptable as sources of pleasure reinforces heterosexual gender norms. Everyone—not just transsexuals—ultimately engages in acts of imagination centered on these body parts as sources of pleasure. The body is a “cultural sign” (96) that is never free of this construction. The body and desires may seem real, but they are only sensible as fantasies. The loss resulting from the homosexual taboo is forgotten, repressed, and concealed once the construction of the body and desires take hold.

Butler next examines Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis—the idea that the prohibitions that serve such a central role in heterosexual gender differentiation ironically lead to a proliferation of genders that exceed heterosexuality. Feminists have been fascinated with psychoanalytic accounts of gender differentiation because they seem to offer a route to subversion of heterosexual norms.

Butler now turns to Gayle Rubin’s famous 1975 essay “The Traffic of Women: ‘The Political Economy’ of Sex” as an example of a feminist reading that attempts this route and dovetails nicely with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis. In Freud, sublimation of desires in response to repressive prohibitions is seen as a source of discontent, but in the work of critics of Freud, like theorist Herbert Marcuse, sublimation results in culture, artifacts, and even the “human spirit” (98).

Foucault’s perspective contrasts with these because he takes no recourse to some original desire that is repressed by prohibitions against incest or homosexuality. According to Butler, Foucault posits that “the operation of this law is justified and consolidated through the construction of a narrative account of its own genealogy which effectively masks its own immersion in power relations” (98)—that is, power conceals its operations.

According to Rubin, the incest taboo in particular serves the need of cultures to reproduce themselves by delegitimizing anything—incest or homosexuality, for example—that gets in the way of that reproduction. Before this prohibition has its way, the child “‘contains all of the sexual possibilities available to human expression’” (100; Rubin qtd. in Butler). Rubin argues that moving away from renunciation of the mother as the love-object can create a culture in which compulsory heterosexuality is no longer the norm, thus accomplishing the “overthrow of gender” (101), a concept that is ambiguously articulated according to Butler.

Butler debunks the idea of a prediscursive (prior to discourse) reality before the imposition of the prohibitions by noting that there is really no way for this moment before the imposition of the law to name itself as anything other than something that legitimates the needs of what comes after the Law. Butler notes that Rubin’s focus on the subversive possibilities of this moment “before” the imposition of the prohibitions can be displaced with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, meaning that the law is responsible for both heterosexuality and its transgression (homosexuality).

Lastly, Butler critiques the commonly-accepted idea that the taboos against incest and homosexuality are universal in all cultures and (more important) in how they are enacted. There is nothing about the prohibitions that require they produce compulsory heterosexuality. In fact, the law that operates to impose these prohibitions produces both heterosexuality and homosexuality in that conceiving of homosexuality is necessary for the construction of heterosexuality, even as the law constructs homosexuality as something unintelligible or unnamable. “Within psychoanalysis,” concludes Butler, “bisexuality and homosexuality are taken to be primary libidinal dispositions, and heterosexuality is the laborious construction based upon their gradual repression” (105).

All of these genders are constructed within the heterosexual matrix, so Butler rejects the possibility of a time before the law and, by extension, its subversive potential. Homosexuality may well be a marginalized identity within a predominantly heterosexual culture, but it lives inside of that culture, attempting to locate this identity in a “before,” in the service of subversion, is a “futile gesture” (105).