Judith Butler exhibits the new wave of Anglo-American academic feminism, a feminism that goes beyond the delusional categories of male and female, and wishes to confuse or trouble these categories all together. As well, Butler helped to create the discipline of queer theory. [1] Butlers feminism refuses the category of woman itself, exclaiming that it too participates in the hegemonic normative heterosexual matrix of identity, a binary system that enforces a comedic gender structure.
Thus, she is quite applicable to all areas of gender theory, especially gay issues and goals, which wish to destabalize the notions of gender for socio-political gains. In Butlers own questioning style she states in the Preface: I asked, what configuration of power constructs the subject and the Other, that binary relation between men and women, and the internal stability of those terms? What restriction is here at work? Are those terms untroubling only to the extent that they conform to a heterosexual matrix for conceptualizing gender and desire?
What happens to the subject and the stability of gender categories when the epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality is unmasked as that which produces and reifies these ostensible categories of ontology (italics mine)? [2] Butlers concern is epistemological and hermeneutical, even though she does not use the term hermeneutics as such. Butler is concerned with the interpretive power of heterosexual discourse in language and gender conception.
Thus, her inquiry questioning the binary conceptions of gender is primarily hermeneutical, if we take hermeneutical to mean a worldview process of interpreting reality. Butler starts her examination of the gender and feminism with reference to a universalizing notion of the feminist subject of woman (Chapter 1: Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire). Butler references to the limits of a universal woman subject, stating, Indeed, the fragmentation within feminism and the paradoxical opposition to feminism from women whom feminism claims to represent suggest the necessary limits of identity politics. ]
The preoccupation with a universalizing feminist subject has led to multiple refusals to accept the category. [4] If feminism cannot a assert a universal subject, which Butler later maintains as falling into the heterosexual and patriarchal discourse of language, how is feminism to assert any socio-political influence? Butler would not doubt answer, as she does by the end of the book, that feminism should be reconstituted into a forward-looking, troubling of gender/sex identities.
Butler seems to assert (and I say seems because Butler is rarely specific in her articulations) that the whole notion of a feminine subject falls into a compulsive heterosexual reproductive framework, one that assumes the categories of heterosexual identity, without troubling these pseudo-ontological binary distinctions. [5] While the concepts of gender, sex, female/male and woman/man, have undoubtedly led to some forms of oppression and subjection, one must question Butlers analysis of metaphysical substance. ]
Butlers deconstruction of sex, involves a critique of giving ontological significance to certain areas of the body-namely the penis, vagina, and breasts. According to Butler, the ontological significance of these organs has been created precisely because of the heterosexual reproductive matrix. Gender and sex have thus been divided along these precise lines of male/penis and female/vagina. [7] There seems to be a vast array of empirical evidence that would dispute the insignificance of both the vagina and penis.
First, nature shows a general sexual significance to males and females in all mammalian creatures. Sex differentiation is a fact. Some people do have penises and some do have vaginas. It seems vastly counter-sensory to suggest that these organs are insignificant. There significance is brought to light, in the fact that they (and the reproductive tissues that accompany them) are the only physical differences between the sexes. Second, Butler seems to suggest that the heterosexual identity has enforced an eroticizing of these physical attributes over others, thus enforcing heterosexual relations. ]
However, the human physical orgasm only happens through the stimulation of the sexual areas, exceptions being the few women who seem to reach orgasm through nipple stimulation alone. However, for the rest of us, the only recourse to the physical and mental state of orgasm is through contact with these organs. Perhaps, sexuality has been too constricted to only sexualizing the genital regions. If this is what Butler is attempting to say, then she has hit upon something that is very true. However, to simply assert that physical genitals have arisen in importance because of a heterosexual matrix is utterly ridiculous.
If anything, genital preoccupation and idolization, has come about precisely because of the physical pleasure associated with it. Granted, womens physical pleasure has been conveniently absent for millennia in Western society. Female sexuality, as Butler shows, has been predominantly interpreted through a reproductive framework, instead of focusing on the aspects of sexual pleasure. If all Butler is attempting to say, is that these genitals have defined in terms of a heterosexual identity and function, which is built on unstable foundations, she is correct.
Only if one holds reproduction as an absolute can one possibly formulate the idolization of heterosexuality. However, Butler may seem to have an ally in technology itself, in the form of contraceptives, which trouble the perceived naturalness of heterosexual gender categories. Butler is too dismissive of reason and empirical enquiry as part of the heterosexual matrix. [9] Butler would do well to recognize that science has done much to destabalize sexual relations and categories. Contraceptives have allowed an unparalleled level of freedom to women to pursue a more open sexuality, one not constrained to reproduction.
Butlers lack of regard for empirical, scientific concerns is a major flaw in her analysis. While not being a scientist, and much more of a philosopher, Butler cannot be so dismissive of certain axiomatic metaphysical claims, claims that at their root (the validity of shared sensory perception) are necessary for any reasonable discourse to take place. Butler, in her second chapter, Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix, analyzes the heterosexual matrix using psychoanalytic theory and various radical gender theorists. Butler employs such authors as Freud, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Riviere.
Her interweaving analysis is painstakingly complex. Often times these authors are presented to contradict one another, but Butler rarely provides any means to resolution or in the least a dialectical synthesis of their thought. Butler ponderously formulates the heterosexual matrix through both the incest taboo and the homosexual prohibition that logically precedes it. The incest taboo operates to maintain heterosexual relations by using a veiled homosexual intercourse between men, in which women are traded to men, thus maintaining a masculinist hierarchy.
It is ironic to note that a compulsive heterosexuality requires a passive homosexuality. Indeed, Butler maintains the heterosexual matrix requires an intelligible conception of homosexuality[10] and its prohibition of that conception[11] to preserve its intelligibility. This would seem to follow along the same methodological lines as good being only conceivable with its antithesis of evil. However, are ethical and sociological phenomena only perceivable and enforceable, when their antitheses exist?
While Augustine answered this question saying that evil is merely the privation of the good, instead of existent in itself, it does not seem intuitively correct to merely assert that evil is in fact illusionary or the good privated or misapplied. A compulsive heterosexuality would seem to need an unethical homosexuality to maintain any coherence. For how could one speak of heterosexuality without it? Language is built on referencing, and without the antithesis of homosexuality, heterosexuality would cease to even exist as a word and perhaps as a behavior.
However, Butler is also speaking to a more sociological and cultural phenomenon than just philosophical talk. Butler uses the concept of melancholia[12] to explain how early libidinal homosexual drives are subverted into a heterosexual framework. This melancholia is hard to exactly define because of Butlers annoying preoccupation with wordiness and ambiguous language. However, melancholia seems to operate by the internalization of the tabooed object of desire. [13] By internalizing an object of same-sex love, the person can move beyond the object to the proper culturalized heterosexual object.
The prohibition of the object leads to its internalization. [14] The internalization, thus acts as a preservation mechanism, allowing both the preservation of the same-sex love-object and the supposed proper mode of heterosexual ontology. The heterosexual matrix is thus completed, through the displacing of early homosexual libidinality by the egos use of melancholia. The above paragraph may seem needlessly complex. The reader is right. In this second chapter, even more than the first and last chapters, Butler barrages the reader with terms, theorists, and ideas, using long sentences and words of the academy.
The reader is so intimidated by the complexity of the thought that one is almost forced into acquiescence. Martha C. Nussbaum provides an excellent critique of this aspect of Butler, stating: In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding.
When the bullied readers of Butler’s books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t [sic] go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument. [15] Butlers thought is curiously devoid of a holistic approach. Instead, it seems to focus primarily on abstract notions of thought, with little connection to reality.
Although to be fair, the very conception of reality is disputed by Butler as part of the heterosexual matrix. However, the reader still longs for some empirical verification that would connect the text to some sort of ontological certainty. The reader finds none of this and is left in an intellectual quandary. Butlers convoluted style impinges its comprehension. The whole book suffers from simplistic views wrapped in sophistry. Recognizing this fact, the journal Philosophy and Literature, awarded Butler with first prize in the annual Bad Writing contest, for the following sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. 6]
One wonders if Butler ever took a first year writing class in college. The sentence, typical of her style, is so long, that by the time one finishes it and defines all the terms, one is exhausted to even analyze the truth of her claims. Complex terms, concepts, and words, such as: structuralist, capital, homologous, hegemony, power relations, convergence, rearticulation, temporality, Althusserian theory, and totalities, all evidence her outrageousness.
German continental philosophy has often been accused of very much the same thing, but Butler takes these absurdities to new heights. Butler begins her third chapter, Subversive Body Acts, with a thorough deconstruction of the heterosexual matrix. This chapter and her conclusion, From Parody to Politics, explore what gender is or could be, envisioning an antifoundationalism. [17] Like her coalitional politics, which do not presuppose an outcome, Butlers gender theory is a forward looking one, with the only criteria seeming to be the troubling of the binary categories.
Butler deconstructs this binary interpretive device as not naturalistic or having ontological significance, but rather as a self-fulfilling foundation, that operates in a circular fashion, maintaining its own coherence and viability by its structures of identity. [18] Butlers somewhat fascinating approach to gender is evidenced in her multiplicity of genders. Instead of a binary conception, she asks, why not three, four, or five?
Western philosophy has remained famous for its excessive dichotomizing and dualizing nature, whether it is mind-body, fact-value, spirit-flesh, God-man, gay-straight, feminine-masculine, or nature-nurture. Butlers refreshing multiplicity allows for an open-ended conception of gender that strays away from the heterosexual need to polarize reality. While dichotomies will always exist and are not always wrong, Butler shows these dichotomies to be hurtful and illusionary in gender formation.
Obviously, the whole of Butlers book is trying to assert that gender is a social artifice. She has quite adequately deconstructed the circular notions of the heterosexual matrix that keeps its intelligibility. Butler uses gay and lesbian notions of gender and sexuality to show that their very presence and articulation allows for a troubling of these gender categories. An acceptable homosexuality by its nature subverts the heterosexual matrix, by giving new ontological significance to differing body parts and locales.
The presence of gay and lesbian activity destroys the heterosexual matrix of identity, constituting an almost political act. Stating as much, Butler writes: The structuring presence of heterosexual constructs within gay and lesbian sexuality does not mean that those constructs determine gay and lesbian sexuality nor that gay and lesbian sexuality are derivable or reducible to those constructs. Indeed, consider the dis-empowering and denaturalizing effects of a specifically gay deployment of heterosexual constructs.
The presence of these norms not only constitute a site of power that cannot be refused, but they can and do become the site of parodic contest and display that robs compulsory heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality. [19] An example of this parodic and comedic homosexual display of heterosexual norms can be found in the common usage of top and bottom in gay culture. These terms parallel the male and female terms employed in heterosexual culture. The top is said to be the sexually aggressive partner who penetrates the submissive bottom partner.
The appropriation of heterosexual norms within a homosexual matrix shows the foolishness of a compulsory heterosexuality. Butlers analysis in this regard is quite insightful. Social conservatives, who see homosexuals as ontological political revolutionaries, would seem to have an ally in Butler. The crucial difference is that Butler applauds the revolution, while the conservatives rally against it. Butlers main political argument is contained in her gender as performative.
Gender is not a specific psychological identity, rooted in the ontological essence of a person. Rather, gender is created through the performance of the adherents. [20] People establish the categories of gender by continuously upholding and acting upon the accepted norms of the respective gender categories. In essence, one acts like a man and thus is one. Paradoxically, the troubling of these binary gender categories takes place through the very means that institute them. Through acts, gestures, and speech, we have the power to trouble the gender categories.
