Gender Trouble

Subversive Bodily Acts, Gender Trouble: Judith Butler
0018922

OK first, I want to applaud the author on the use of the term "trouble." I like this term because it makes sense for average people and is a lot better than hermeneutics, signifier, and gestalt. It subverts a lot of binaries. I can both "make some trouble" [fun], but also "be in trouble" [bad]. Trouble can be both a cause and an effect. Trouble usually means change, as in "stirring up trouble," but trouble can also be a place of stagnation: "I don't know where to go now, we're in trouble." It always implies an interaction of the social with the individual. Trouble is a group situation, usually with personal consequences. Even if trouble only affects an individual, there must be hiding of the trouble required to prevent a social repurcussion, otherwise it would be easystreet, not trouble. To apply trouble to gender is subversive; trouble is such a great magical word! We use it in common speech; therefore, it's likely to have more resonance than an imposed academic word. I wish this term was used more in the essay, rather than just the beginning.

Butler's essay is way too long in my opinion. I was very excited at the beginning of reading it but as the pages went on I was grew impatient. I think her words must have been very prophetic at the time they were written, 1990. It seems like her ideas about gender are very modern and accepted now among activists and academics. Perhaps because we have moved so much in her direction, her ideas are so much in the air. To read them now explained as if for the first time, way back in 1990, is kind of bland. Overexplained anyway.

• ontology - philosophically looking at very basic ways of being and very fundamental relationships

• genealogy - she pretty much explains Foucault's use of this word which is a lot more exciting than DNA and I never appreciated his use of the term before. I like the idea of the story of what makes truth rather than some supposed divine empirical reality. In politics and power, any other approach is naive

• synecdochal - use of a term figuratively or metaphorically. A material or characteristic such as 'Plastic' may be used to indicate a credit card, the general may indicate the specific as 'Police' for a couple of officers, or vice versa specific to general 'head' for cattle.

Butler is basically trying to break down our binary understandings of gender, sex and sexuality. She does this from a feminist perspective. Nowadays with various queer movements front and centre, a lot of this stuff is the focus of public debate. But our bathrooms are still segregated. I find myself reading this backwards as a history connecting how queer issues were eventually embraced by academic feminism. Feminism has not always been an open and inclusive movement. Role playing butch/femme and cross-dressing forms of gender-bending were once thought of as antagonistic to feminism, which was certainly a mistake.

I like how Butler comes across the parody and satire trickster themes now and then. "Laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensable to feminism." She does give some credit to early cross-dressers as troublemakers. She does pose the very important question of the role humour can play. She distinguishes between Pastiche and parody, which is useful. How can we use parody to be subversive and not just reinforce bad stereotypes; such as racist jokes; calling weakness pussy? Context is fundamental and therefore community. Humour is not an absolute isolated Western atom of The Truth.

Much of the essay deals with various binaries: true/false, body/polluting other, natural/profane, civilisation/primative, other/self, cause/effect, order/chaos, active/passive, change and tradition. The "implicit hierarchies" are all dismantled and questioned with the theme of sexuality being exploded from the gay/straight, man/woman, masculine/feminine. She combines Cixous's terms and calls it phallogocentrism! While I agree with all of this and I suppose it is important to lay it all down in writing, that part is what dragged on for me too much.

The 'body' is one of the main themes in this essay. Butler questions the role our relationship to our bodies does play, and the binary of spirit/body as oppressive. It is a very useful personal level of understanding and also a fertile metaphor. Our bodies are very much constructed by our minds and ideas, by our culture and social self-image. She tries to find some kind of origin for the myth of body as totally separated from everything else. Significantly she notes the Christian and other political causes for this. I think the future implications of realising that our bodies are not mute is more important than that history. The history she outlines is too abstract to be a new perspective on her own opinion.

Taking the perspective of feminism and then debunking the notion of the feminine leaves her essay in a very exciting space. She is questioning the very foundational principles that unite women as feminists, but also opens it up to others. For a movement, it's quite exciting to imagine what are the principles behind feminism beyond all the focus on who is and is not a women. Leslie Feinberg is a transgendered activist I was listening to on CiTR as she spoke at SFU on the 30th birthday of the Women's' Studies Department. This part of the essay reminded me of Feinberg who was such an incredibly inspiring speaker. She talked about Frederick Douglas as a feminist/ally. There is a long history of equal rights way beyond and before Stonewall. If I think of a feminist movement that is not just about advancing women, because women are no longer seen as an isolated category, I can make some of the political/philosophical connections. It's an ideology of embracing the body and not being separate from it. It's a movement using the power of sex in a positive way, not hiding or condemning it. It's beyond the idiotic binary of materialism versus spirit, towards useful hybrids and non-static truths. It's about motherhood, therefore fatherhood, everything inbetween and beyond nuclear family. Basically Feinberg's message was that movements do well when they are inclusive, they are powerful. The history of social progress is plagued with sexist unions, racist feminists, and heterosexist communists bringing down the thing from the inside. Academics' support for the invasions of Afganistan was made in the name of 'liberating' women there. But it's also an inspiring story of people moving beyond that. Feinberg and Butler both breath new life into feminism. Movements that gain power often get trapped by power and it takes this kind of inclusive energy to renew.

Some of the other bodily exciting ideas Butler brought up, points of departure for me, were:
She suddenly dived into gay sex, out of the abstract, on page 2493. That was abrupt. The metaphors were a bit too "compelling" about orifices. She was negative about that stuff. When I read it, I thought of a joke: that the anus is holy because it transcends the interior/exterior; holy anus! Butler made a comment about shitting on others here in the text, which was not nearly as fun.

The idea of AIDS played such a significant role in the concept of gay people in the mainstream. It's a very obvious bodily form of repression. How successful queer rights groups have been to turn the idea of AIDS from being a weakness into a strength! AIDS kills, but it also brought people together and focusing efforts.

The part about rejecting milk, rejecting self, reminds me of kids 'science' books from the 1990s, like Grossology, which were very popular in breaking taboos. Our mainstream culture has embraced these bodily functions in humour in the past decade but it may be in the problematic Pastiche kind of way. In any case, Butler is right-on to focus on this cultural topic back then.

When she gets into Foucault and talks about incarceration, she brings up writing on the very body, the State's oppressive laws. The mind is indoctrinated but so too the body. Isn't it apt that tattoo's, imprinting on the body, is so often done in prison?

Anyway, I liked this article. The ideas are very significant to now. I think she is wise in repeating how repetition of action is how we live life. We need to look at all these binary assumptions in the everyday.

Q: Could Feminism be like the new Socialism?