Imitation and Gender Insubordination - Essay Example

Introduction Judith Butler is at the forefront of the queer theorists who have advanced past post-modernist feminist theorist, via French deconstructionists and recent concepts developed in philosophy to define philosophical positions of “queer”. I believe one must first understand and appreciate this purpose to review Butler’s position. She is not a feminist. She departs from feminist theory to do other things. Drawing ideas from other writers and philosophers, her methods are rich and interesting and many feminists are struck and excited about her work. But other writers and thinkers see her ideas as taking away from the real and practical needs of women. Discussion Butler (1989) tries to ask essential questions. For example, she asks, once the subject "outs" her- or himself, is that person "free of its subjection and finally in the clear?” (308). Or does the the subjection continue? But what does the following mean, characteristic of Butlers writing: "Can sexuality even remain sexuality once it submits to a criterion of transparency and disclosure .." (309) For something to determine itself, some other must exist to make this determination, and what is it this other? This other is a "prior to" and it is the most interesting thing which Butler says, I believe. Her thought is easily confusing unless one grabs hold of that idea. She is looking for the prior and I believe she is asking does whatever the prior is establish sexuality or is the prior already a sexually determined object. There is a danger that coming out "reinscribes the power domains that it resists" and that it is part of the "heterosexual matrix that it seeks to displace" (309). One must try to locate the "framework that privileges heterosexuality as origin". Butler would like to use the concept of the speech act (from philosopher John Austin) to say the way one creates being is the way in which one may create herself or himself. There is a difficulty perhaps always in this activity as one must ask who it doing the creating? From what position is the creating done, that of homosexuality or heterosexuality? I think it is important for Butler, because she wants to produce an original, defensible "I that is thoroughly lesbian or homosexual, without the pejorative connotation. But that is her very problem. the pejorative connotation is already tied into the words and their origin from the heterosexual point of view. Butler would like to reach a non-reflexive position that perhaps is neither heterosexual nor homosexual. Butler has to establish, more or less a "private language", one that is not derived from the present language, because the present language already has the power relationships of sexual identities established in it - that is a man, and that is a woman. But Butler seeks "that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the real and the nameable (312). Lesbian exists as an abiding falsehood in present discourse Hence as a falsehood, the being of lesbianism is denied, it has been erased from discourse. She and others must place it back, but it cannot be done under present existing regulatory regimes. These regimes had wrongly created the category in the first place. There must be a prior for Butler. For example there is no prior to gender, hence the concept of ‘drag’ itself is an original model, “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original “ (her italics 333). Butler goes further and even makes heterosexuality a model for which there is no original. Her supporting writers then say that concepts of sexuality are socially constructed and not original forms that are necessary in some accepted way. She argues, "...there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively confirm the originality" of the original model (313). Because heterosexuality must always be in the act of replicating and emulating itself, there is always the risk that it will lose itself. I have a friend who says he must always prove to himself ‘not homosexual by always repeating it or comparing himself to heterosexuals or not-homosexuals. This is because he feels he is always at risk. I believe that such is the essential argument that Butler wants to make to defend her position or, rather, her being as a lesbian. The position is that there is always a risk that the heterosexual fears being a homosexual because there is really no prior. "There is no volitional subject behind the mime who decides, as it were, which gender it will be today", she says (p. 314). The prior is psychic excess that is being denied, and it includes, probably both homosexuality and heterosexuality. But one must commit and one must act. However to act the wrong way, because of language, because language already has the words, the rules and the hates and dislikes, is to be crushed. And to act means to repeat over and over again the identity because "identity is not self-identity" (315). Lesbian sexuality includes both frames, characteristics, of sexuality, male and female. And further, "both are jointly constituted by the very sexual possibilities that they exclude". Language like that may be confusing. Susan Nussbaum makes a harsh indictment of Butler for using it. But Butler must find the prior. It could even be something preceding identity and that exists "other to itself". Using Platos concept of memory, "mimetism", as developed by psychoanalytic theorists Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Ruth Leys, Butler reaches for the "non-self identity of the psychic subject" (316). For there to be a self then there must be a loss. Aretha cannot be guaranteed the "you" will make "her" feel like a "woman". Because in the unconscious, Arethas, there may be a disconnect between every performance of identity expression. Butlers thoughts on the matter of sexuality are sometimes confusing, but they are always rich and provocative. She seeks to reach a point of neutrality from where sexual roles are formed, the prior point. But she has this difficulty that she must use the language that has already defined those roles. Hence such philosophers as Nussbaum become particularly unsupportive of her, because Butlers searching takes her away from the usual feminist concerns. Butler seeks simply to define gay/lesbian being. If one keeps this in mind in reading her then one can begin to understand her extreme manner of thought, or even, better, the creativity of her thought. Feminist philosopher Carole A. Stable writes (1997) that Butler is an anti-essentialist feminist who argues that "the real" does not exist as a concrete, objective reality. This view occurred says Stable, when women of color began to criticize feminists location of women as a category, in effect, erasing the factors of color and class. In her defense of Butler, Fiona Jenkins (2010) argues that Butler seeks a "radical constructivism" such that the role of natural sexes becomes uncertain (94). She explains how the image on the cover of Butlers seminal Gender Troubles troubled and confused her such that she didn’t have a frame of reference upon which to ascertain what the image was of: boy or girl, or girl or boy? Violence had to be involved. Jenkins believes Butler opens up important questions of how image and representation which are not normally viewed with clear reference may have to have their boundaries of reference extended, and what this extension means without violence. Martha Nussbaum speaks of how feminist theory has turned away from the real problems of women in the world toward "toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women" xxx She writes that Butler appears to argue from the positions of such a wide array of conflicting thinkers, thinkers who are normally seen as refuting each other’s philosophies and thought, that it is hard to understand what position Butler is coming from. Nussbaum locates Butlers as positing ideas to create plateaus of "high-concept abstractness", but that have nothing to do with women who are "hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped" (Nussbaum). She notes Butlers ability to confuse and to sound overly obscure, as if there are jewels buried somewhere in the complexity of thoughts. And "since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on" says Nussbaum. She is teasing Butler, daring her to say something clear. But as Stable notes above, since Butler has divorced feminist theory from purview of color and class, from the real problems of women in the world, then what is Butlers significance? Conclusion Butler is simply saying that gender is socially constructed and that there should be a way to establish a social legitimate queer identity and not, perhaps in Nussbaum view, a simple analysis of "discrimination against gays and lesbians as a form of sex discrimination." A use of Foucault by women psychologists and biologists have argued that the power that the male attitude has maintained over sexual social relations have simply made it impossible to question these relations outside of the male point of view. The female point of view, instead of existing on its own, is simply a derivative of and hence controlled by the male point of view. Hence Butler task of locate the "prior" becomes one of creating being. Works Sited Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," 1989. From The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michele A. Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 307-320. Jenkins, Fiona. "Judith Butler: Disturbance, Provocation and the Ethics of Non-Violence." Humanities Research XVI:2 (2010). Accessed at http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Humanities+Research+Vol+XVI.+No.+2.+2010/1331/jenkins.xhtml Nussbaum, Martha C. "The Professor of Parody." The New Republic 22 Feb. 22, 1999: 37-46. Online. Stabile, Carole A. "Feminism and The Ends of Postmodernism." From Materialist Feminism: A Reader. Ed. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham. New York: Routledge, 1997. Accessed at http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/stabile.html, Read More