Exploring Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

All right, gender trouble. Judith Butler, pretty seminal text in the domain of feminist theory, especially post-structuralist feminist theory, even though that association will be troubled in this text, and I'll explain what all that means so it's clear. You know, I think this is one of those texts that people posture about having a strong foundation with and, you know, not actually having read it, but instead feeding off of certain dominant interpretations of it. And then using those to forward the ideas present in the text, rather than reading it themselves, which there's nothing wrong with, obviously. but there are things present here that I think rubs up against some of the broader ideas present about Butler's thought. But with the hopes of getting through this in one shot here, let's just jump right into it. So. she has right off the bat uh or kind of sets up the foundations for what the book is going to do by suggesting that feminism is predicated primarily on an idea on the idea of the woman as being a thing that somehow precedes identity somehow precedes culture somehow precedes you know any political landscape and how feminist thought is about kind of revitalizing this idea of the woman to bring it back into fruition so the whole project that Butler undertakes here is problematizing this idea of woman, and by extension, you know, man as well. So one of the ways that feminist thought often takes this up, or at least what she was writing against, it would be wrong for me to say that, you know, this is what feminism does, because that is categorically false. She says that there is, among certain strands of feminism, a desire to try and evoke the image of woman. So take, you know, liberal feminist thinkers or even conservative feminist thinkers who say things that involve, you know, women being occupying more places in like multinational corporations and stuff like that, as though these are somehow good, you know, professions to have. Of this, Butler asks, how can we actually construct an image of woman unless we've somehow, you know, a priori? they priorly, establish the idea of woman as something, you know, concrete, as a kind of subject that doesn't change. So taking her cue from Foucault, she says that the only way subjects appear, or these identities, or this identity of woman appears, is via a very specific regimen of authority, or within the kind of Foucaultian paradigm, you know, power, and knowledge, and all that, that sets the stage. for what should be understood as woman. Therefore, anyone that emerges as a subject within that field is always already determined in advance. So it's not as though they're born into woman-ness naturally, because even the very idea of woman-ness... is a rather new concept, at least. That's what Butler is trying to get at here. So it is therefore a myth, and she uses Kafka for this, one of Kafka's texts dealing with the idea of being before the law. For Butler, there is neither a subject that precedes the law that comes before it, nor is there a subject that stands firmly in front of the law, prepared to take it on. Subjects are always determined by the law, and by virtue of that, are only able to operate... very, they are very confined within their realm of possibility. But we don't necessarily need to just take this as a kind of philosophical critique to propose that, you know, there's nothing that comes before, you know, culture itself. But even if we look within the domain of culture that we reside in, the idea of a woman is very ambiguous. There is not a single idea of what conscious woman, especially when we consider things like intersectionality, when we consider the ways that woman-ness or women-ness or woman-ness is demonstrated or performed by various different cultures. you get very different ideas or very different representations of what woman-ness is. So we can destabilize this idea of woman by performing a kind of rigorous philosophical analytic thing, or we can just look at, you know, what is present today to totally undermine this singular idea of woman. And Butler is very wary of any... attempt to try and homogenize or singularize this idea of woman, implying that it's a kind of neocolonialism to suggest that, you know, woman is this complete thing, and it can be found everywhere, and we have a kind of basic foundation from which to understand it. So she's really speaking against, you know, some of those feminist thinkers, especially these white feminist thinkers that go into different parts of the world and say, like, you know, women, you are oppressed because... We know what it means. We've done the research and we know what that means. And you should listen to us because we know exactly what is going on. houses a number of different problems. One of them being, as I just mentioned, this kind of reliance on a notion of woman-ness that isn't, you know, real. So the scope of even these problematic feminist projects reveals to us the extent to which this discourse is all-pervasive. which aligns itself well with a kind of Foucauldian idea. And we think of Foucault, we might think of the, you know, the panopticon, where, you know, everyone's all being watched. And there's like a kind of, those people being watched come to, or embody, I guess, in that it appears on their being, the very law that imposes its gaze upon them. So it becomes all pervasive in that way. And for that, we can really, or well, Butler, by stating that, sets the stage for her own project, where she wants to engage primarily in critique, and to point to the ways that the only way to challenge the system is by reimagining it from the inside. This isn't a project that can come from without, precisely because the system is too, is far too big, and encapsulates everything. So for her, it'd be a pipe dream, a kind of ideal. less fantasy to imagine us getting outside of the system to then change it from the outside. For Butler, we are always already within it, and by virtue of that, we must challenge it from within. So this will kind of set the stage for how she wants to criticize a number of other different feminists and post-structuralists and psychoanalytic thinkers that we'll go through here, that for her, risk perpetuating the system by failing to recognize how their own projects are. embedded within the very logic that they seek to usurp. But before we get into that, there are a few other things that she wants to set up, or she sets up, in terms of sex and gender. So what, and this was the case with me when I first started to learn about these things, the kind of classic way that it was introduced to me was in terms of the sex and gender dichotomy. So it was said to me and believed that sex is something that you're born with and then gender is something that you adopt. And gender is fluid, but sex is kind of restrained, right? Your sex determined by your anatomy, your genitalia. is something that is, you know, rigid, but that doesn't, shouldn't determine how you exist, you know, as a gender. You know, boys should, should, could, can, may, who cares, wear skirts. Women can wear pants. Like... these kinds of distinctions that emerge from the sex binary is totally arbitrary. So this was, you know, received by me and I think many others as being like a wake up call, right? Like, oh, wow, yeah, all these things are totally arbitrary, totally random. So while Butler agrees with that, she takes it a step further. And see, she suggests that even this idea of sex as being a kind of natural concept should be challenged. And the way that she does that is by turning to Foucault, and we'll get into this more later on, but this is just kind of some exposition into what's going to happen, to suggest that this reliance or this kind of investment of biology or anatomy with a kind of transcendent naturality. Transcendent naturality. Does that make sense? It might not make sense, but a kind of naturalness which is imbued with a privileged status. by virtue of its being natural. So because something's natural, you know, we bow down to it and say that, you know, it's a reality. So for Butler, this was only a new thing relative, relatively only emerging in the past two or three, 400 years, when people started to become fascinated with the idea of, you know, anatomy and tax, taxidermy, not taxidermy, whatever, digging into corpses, essentially, to find out how everything ticks a kind of rampant materialism that all all it really did was not only revealed more, revealed what was underneath the skin, that is, But it also sought to end a kind of superstitious realm of, you know, religious speculation in favor of a material truthfulness, which was kind of strange, because who's to say one houses more effective potential than the other. People have been reported to actually heal through the power of God. And who's to say God exists? Doesn't really matter here. What matters is that the effect was real. So it was to say that, you know, the scientific truth, that one, that pertaining to bodily, you know, scientific rationale, as opposed to a mystical or spiritual religious thing is any, you know, one is not necessarily better than the other. Now, with that being said, this shouldn't, this doesn't necessarily mean that these kind of spiritual alternatives can just be Taken up like by anyone, you know, that's pretty much the foundations for appropriation Rather I think that for my own part, you know, these things have to come with a history that cannot just simply be stripped away. Well, it can be stripped away, but it's difficult. And nor can it just be taken on. Rather, these things have to come about kind of organically. So all this to say that we shouldn't privilege one over the other. That is, we shouldn't privilege the kind of mystical spiritual realm over the physical biological scientific one and that is really important i think here for butler because that's how she destabilizes this privileging that sex receives over gender. So it is not simply that gender is artificial, but that sex itself is artificial. So as the narrative once went, or it still goes, you know, the idea that sex is natural and gender is a cultural thing that is imbued upon. the body, what that is essentially saying is that the body is like a blank slate, a kind of neutral zone onto which culture can propel itself. So Butler totally wants to problematize that idea of the body being this kind of neutral zone of a neutrality that is totally devoid of, you know, history, as though the body, even as neutral, was not in itself a creation, because the body wasn't always imbued with this kind of neutral status, right? You know, the body was endowed with a lot of different meanings across time, where this kind of neutral status is relatively new. So Butler... then gives this another name. She calls this the metaphysics of substance. That is the idea that underneath gender, so underneath the kind of ideological implications of gender, is this substance that is sex, this unchanging real thing that, you know, occupies a place of a metaphysic in that it's not really attainable because we're always determined by gender, but it's a kind of mystical point toward which we can propel ourselves, whether or not we can arrive there. there or not is not of great importance. But this is certainly a point onto which thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir... attach certain significance. So for Beauvoir, and this is one of the things that Butler critiques her for, where the body for Beauvoir, de Beauvoir, is sought as a kind of emancipatory ideal, a place that can break women away from the boundaries imposed by men, where, as I think I've said, Butler wants to disturb this idea or trouble this idea of the body as a kind of place. place for freedom. So in Beauvoir's project, she believes women are regarded primarily as other. So in relation to men who are considered the inside, who are considered free floating, I guess, with endless possibility, woman is not even allowed to enter that sphere, hence they're being kind of cast away to the realm of the other. So for Beauvoir, this is This is the idea that extends really far back in our history, that men are associated with the intellect, with the mind, whereas women are associated with the body, you know, the filthy, gross, disgusting body, the sinful body. Women are associated with that domain. So in that way, they are grounded, kind of territorialized by their bodies. Whereas men are, you know, free to pursue any kind of intellectual metaphysical domains they wish to. So women, as they historically have been for Beauvoir, and I think for anyone, they've been excluded from discourse. excluded from, you know, political possibility and social and cultural possibility. So in response to Beauvoir, Butler recounts another feminist thinker, Lucha Irigaray. I think they pronounce her name Lucha, but Irigaray, nevertheless, who Butler recounts on page 17, criticizes Beauvoir in the following way. On Irigaray's reading, Beauvoir's claim that woman is sex is reversed to mean that she is not the sex she is designated to be. but rather the masculine sex, encore, and encore, so that is again an in-body, parading in the mode of otherness. For a rigore, that phallogocentric mode of signifying the female sex perpetually reproduces phantasms of its own self-amplifying desire. Instead of a self-limiting linguistic gesture that grants alterity or difference to women, phallogocentrism offers a name to eclipse the feminine and take its place. So, what does that mean? For a rigore, Beauvoir participates in the same system because, and let's give the example here, one of Beauvoir's famous statements, the idea that, the statement that one is not born a woman, rather one becomes a woman, implies that there's a kind of real woman or a kind of real female sex. that is kind of thrown out the window through socialization. As you grow up, you know, you become this thing that you're not meant to be. So for Irigaray, she, you know, celebrates Beauvoir to some extent, but then says that by framing it as such, it is to suggest that women are just, you know, kind of helpless beings cast into this domain, that... privileges or that in a sense romanticizes a pre-gendered being, whereas Irigaray kind of takes that to be a little bit problematic. However, and this is where we'll go with rigore, especially in the next chapters, for rigore, that implies that women still belong to that sphere, that women still have a place within that sphere. Whereas for rigore, rigore. she believes that women are totally removed from that domain. So whereas for Beauvoir, women can actually challenge the system, you know, by recognizing their place within it, and by positing the possibility for this pre-gendered being, she is essentially framing the possibility of resistance as being almost too possible for Rigore. So for Origore, she takes a Lacanian perspective, which we'll get into more in the second chapter. And I should say, this text is kind of all over the place. Like, Butler presents kind of mini critiques of each of these thinkers in the first chapter, and then develops them more fully in the second and third. And I was not sure how to do it, if I should just present them all at once. And I decided to just present it chronologically. So I'm presenting kind of smaller critiques, but they'll get expanded in the next chapters. But I will say here about Irigaray is that she takes a primarily Lacanian perspective. So what does that mean? Well, that means that if we are dealing with language, which we always are, so a kind of totalizing thing called language, and that language for Lecomte, as for Rigore, is a kind of patriarchal construction. and we'll get into that more in the next section, but just for now, language is a patriarchal thing, then it is impossible for women to exert any kind of autonomy within that sphere. Okay? Fair enough. Now Butler takes issue with this. So Butler takes issue with a number of different thinkers, right? Like Beauvoir And as we'll get into even more of them But what she has a problem with with the rigore is that even though Butler self celebrates it to some extent and says like, yeah, it's important to point to the extent to which, you know, patriarchy has essentially infiltrated all walks of life. Butler suggests that it is limited because it implies that this is a totalizing thing, that women can't ever have a place ever in society because they are always already determined by the parameters of language. So Butler has a problem with that because while it might be true in a kind of Western context. What can be said then of, you know, matriarchal configurations all over the world currently? So Butler critiques Irigaray for failing to consider, you know, other cultures, or as she says it on page 18, although Irigaray clearly broadens the scope of feminist critique by exposing the epistemological, ontological, and logical structures of a masculine-masculinist signifying economy that is language. The power of her analysis is undercut precisely by its globalizing reach. Is it possible to identify a monolithic as well as monologic masculinist economy that traverses the array of cultural and historical contexts in which sexual difference takes place? is the failure to acknowledge the specific cultural operations of gender repression itself a kind of epistemological imperialism. So Butler obviously points to the way that a rigorous framework is limited, how it doesn't consider the specific needs, the specific voices of those women all over the globe. And by virtue of that is highly reductive. So that shares a very strong affinity with the other kind of projects by, you know, white feminists that go into all these different parts of the world to essentially establish what Butler criticizes as a coalitional politics, which she says is the insistence in advance, the insistence in advance on coalitional unity as a goal assumes that solidarity, whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action. So this insistence on unity implies that there have to be certain differences bracketed off to enter into a kind of perfect sphere of dialogue that can allow for political potential. Whereas Butler wants to celebrate difference and wants to celebrate the ruptures and the things that don't necessarily make people all the same. So for Butler instead, what a coalitional project would look like is where there's an open coalition then will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand. It will be an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure. So what does this normative structure look like? Well, here we enter in or adopt a number of other kind of Butlerian terms, like intelligibility, or the matrix of intelligibility, where for Butler, what essentially happens is that through various discourses of authority, through power, through the power associated with scientific rationality, with a kind of rampant materialism, with political authority, so on and so forth, what there is established is a broad domain of normativity. that all circulates around for Butler, heterosexual, compulsory heterosexuality, sorry. So compulsory heterosexuality is a cultural thing, right? We know that now. And at the time, it was known. However, what Butler wants to show is that you have this thing called compulsory heterosexuality, which everyone knows is a cultural thing, just because heterosexuality is just associated with some cultures as opposed to others. others, which actually works in reverse. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that this paradigm of compulsory heterosexuality actually affirms the idea of sex differences pertaining to anatomical differences between men and women, as though these things are natural. So it retroactively reaffirms the very narrative that sets the stage for it. Now I can't draw it out, but here I'll I'll try to make it as clear as I can. So for Butler, it's not as though sex comes before gender. In fact, it might actually be the opposite. So we might have gender as a cultural thing, because, you know, these things only emerge through culture, that then, in order to justify itself, and then in order to set the boundaries for what is normative, imbues the two. like anatomical differences that are supposed to exist with a transcendent status so a transcendent naturality if that can exist which then operates to affirm and to promote and justify and validate the gendered components that exist on top of it and the reason that this has happened is in an effort to maintain what butler calls the matrix of coherent gender norms or the matrix of intelligibility eligibility so what we come to know as being normative or to hearken back to another thinker i've done here sarah ahmed for what for her amounts to the being straight and not just straight as in heterosexual but straight as in like a straight line corresponding to the straight linear flows of this cultural paradigm and all of this sets the stage for what is to be known as the self Because the self is so inextricably linked with what it means to be gendered, where a self is reserved then, then we're all throughout history for, you know, the Cartesian male, classic liberal rational subject, you know, because these things are always associated with men, not to say that women can't also embody those things, but that the you know, the structures will exclude them by, you know, hearkening back to a naturalistic explanation, like, oh, women are just more emotional because of their brains or because of their vaginas. We have this real explanation as to why things are the way they are. So for that reason, Butler suggests that by critiquing gender, by performing what she calls a genealogy of gender as it exists in this world, destabilizes virtually everything we know about ourselves because it destabilizes our notion of the self. It destabilizes all the institutions we find ourselves in. It destabilizes the transcendent naturality associated with the body, which then opens up infinite number of possibilities. But let it be clear though, Butler does not want to just simply enter women or give women the kind of status that has been associated with men. Because as has been presented so far, men have been associated with the universal, you know, the intellectual, the possible, all that. Butler doesn't just want to give women that. Because for her, that would simply replicate the very system that that, you know, she wants to criticize. One thinker that does propose that, Butler takes it. takes aim at. So this is Monique Wittig, I think that's how you pronounce it, who Butler says calls for the, this is on 27, who Butler says calls for the destruction of sex so that women can assume the status of a universal subject. On the way toward that destruction, women must assume both a particular and a universalist point of view as a subject who can realize concrete universality through freedom. Wittig's Lesbian confirms rather than contests the normative promise of humanist ideals premised on the metaphysics of substance. So for Wittig, it is the idea that the lesbian as a woman breaks down the limits imposed upon women to enter a kind of emancipatory stage, which for Butler, and this resonates with the other critiques she's had of Beauvoir and Irigaray, Butler suggests that where it seems that Wittig has subscribed to a radical project of lesbian emancipation and enforced the distinction between lesbian and woman, she does this through the Skip the page. Does this through the defense of the pre-gendered person characterized as freedom. So all that does for Butler is just reaffirm that very binary system between sex and gender that she wants to get away from. so thus far we have been dealing primarily with gender binaries or sex binaries between you know people who are supposed to or believed to have you know certain anatomy and then their gender is what exists on top of that and the other other side, same thing. So then Butler presents, you know, the kind of, I guess, somewhat rare case of hermaphroditism, which I think is a problematic term now, but just because it's the one she uses, I'll just use it. So she takes this time now to consider Foucault, who writes about, you know, a hermaphrodite in literature. So this hermaphrodite was by the name of Herculean, or sorry, not literary. This was a real person. I don't know why I said that. So the actual Wikipedia entry summarizes it well. So Herculean Balbaix was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law after an affair and physical examination. So that kind of sets the stage for what? what her story was, but we'll get into that a little bit more. So for Foucault, as Butler presents, this was a kind of opening up a possibility where the hermaphrodite, this Herculean, was someone who totally disturbed the limits set forth by sex and by gender, exploding them, if you will. So Butler kind of leaves it at that for us, that Foucault, it celebrates this, or what the possibility that is presented by this, which she'll come to criticism. this eyes later on, just kind of implying in this first chapter that his appreciation of it is suspect for her. But we'll get into that more as we go on. So at the closing, of this chapter, she reiterates that there is a broad rupture or schism between two big camps of thought. So there's the one emblematic of Wittig, as far as feminist thinking goes, which is a materialist language where language is considered a material thing, we'll get into that more, and can be changed from the inside. So this thing can be usurped. So she's the one that advocates for kind of lesbian politics, versus The Lacanians, so this is indicative of Erigiri, who she says that is not material, but that argues that, you know, there is no possibility for women to escape the domain of language, and therefore can't simply get out of it in ways that have been traditionally imagined, and then the project has to be considered from a, you know, psychoanalytic Lacanian one. So Butler argues that both of these thinkers end up romanticizing a kind of pre-sexed, pre-gendered, or pre-sexed individual, which is wrong. And she gives us a glimpse of of what the project should be like, where she says that our task, not only in terms of critique, but our task as a political project should be in the service of the repetition of the law, which is a really radical suggestion. And then to call this a kind of subversive repetition, sorry, a subversive repetition. So to kind of make a mockery of the law, to make a mockery of genders as they are believed to be, which she gets into more in the actual conclusion. conclusion of the book when she talks about parody. Parody is what will undo the law to that extent. But we'll get to that. Now let's move on to chapter two. See if we can get through this all in one shot. So chapter two, I didn't even say the name of the first chapter, whatever. Subjects of sex, gender, desire. That was the first chapter. And the second one, prohibition, psychoanalysis, and the heterosexual matrix, which is what we're getting into here. So Butler starts this one out by suggesting that feminists who associate a kind of biological reality with womanhood and that associate that reality with a kind of liberation or an emancipatory potential are... you know, they're coming from a good place. They're trying to do something good. But for Butler, the project needs to be much more self-reflexive in that it must be critiquing even this idea of the natural, as I think we've said, or I've said here a number of times already. But in, on the other hand, what we don't want to do either is think about things in terms of construction or constructionism or constructivism. You know, the idea that is often strawmanned about, quote unquote, post- modernists the idea that all they want to do is point to the ways that things aren't natural or real so that you know they can might is right and they can just swoop in and do whatever they want butler doesn't want to say that either in fact she wants to say that even this idea of construction itself is contingent where it's not as though there's just a smooth body onto which culture imbues itself but rather even you know different Different times and places, the body is endowed with a different meaning than in other ones. So it's important to consider that it's not simply as though humans are always already structured by their culture, by their society, or anything like that, because that implies too much of a neutrality of the body. So to set the stage for what she wants to do in this chapter, that is take on psychoanalysis or Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Freud too, for that matter, she goes back a little bit. So she thinks of things historically, where she presents the work of Levi Strauss. So Levi Strauss, Claude Levi Strauss, is the thinker kind of Figurehead for structuralism. So structuralism, as Butler defines it here for us, is the idea that there is a universal model of exchange, which is women. so often. So under this framework that Levi-Strauss identifies, which often takes the form of potlatch or kula, and this is the idea of the gift, you know, gift giving, where systems are not predicated upon a law of equivalence where there's a, you know, kind of paper money that can facilitate exchange, but rather through barter and other things. When what you end up seeing is things being reduced to a commodified form. commodified is the wrong word but kind of reduced to an objective form like women like slaves like children you know people that aren't that are considered subhuman which uh reveals for butler the extent to which maybe erigere has has a point in saying that women have no place within this sphere because looking at Far back as what Levi Strauss was talking about, so he was in the early 20th century, I guess, what he revealed was that, you know, women don't have that, or historically have not had that propensity for, or that potential to, engage in exchange in the way that men have. And they have been instead. been forced into the position of objects to be exchanged. So in this framework, women disappear. They're gone because they disappear as human. So there is a kind of homosocial bond that forms where it's always between women and men. men because of the disappearance of women. And in a kind of radical jump, Butler recounts Levi-Strauss'suggestion that all cultures are guided by a desire for incest. Now this is on page 57. Incest for Levi-Strauss is not a social fact, but a pervasive cultural fantasy. Presuming the heterosexual masculinity of the subject of desire, Levi Strauss maintains that the desire for the mother or the sister, the murder of the father, and the son's repentance undoubtedly do not correspond to any fact or group of facts occupying a given place in history, but perhaps they symbolically express an ancient and lasting dream. This is kind of the Freudian thing, you know, the Oedipal complex as well present here. But as we know, maybe, maybe we don't know, from Freud, this incest, this desire for incest, you know, because the first person of the opposite sex you ostensibly come in contact with or developed a strong relationship with are the people within your family, so that the first thing that people have to do is repress or suppress because they're doing it themselves. They have to suppress their own desire for their family member. So the incest taboo has to be prohibited, has to be shut away. So remember this is Levi Strauss thinking this and Freud has a very similar idea. For Lacan, however, Lacan says that this prohibition on incest has to be compensated in some way. So for Freud, it comes out in other ways. In Freud, let's take the sun, and this is the... Freudian narrative, the son has a desire for the mother, right? This is all Oedipus here. And then because of the father's wrath or the threat that the father is going to castrate the son, the son must then, you know, displace their desire. for the mother onto other women. And that's what a properly socialized person does. And then they go and fuck other women, secretly desiring that it was their, that woman was their mother. So for Lacan, he recognizes that this incest or this prohibition on incest is not a great thing for young people. You know, they, it's not a great thing for culture generally because it's a great prohibition placed on people. So for Lacan, another, um, another institution emerges to try and compensate for that prohibition. And as Butler identifies here, and I should preface this by saying that this is just my reading of Lacan through Butler. I'm not a Lacanian, so I'm just taking Butler at her word. For Lacan, according to Butler, people then erect language as a means to compensate for their inability to engage in this kind of prohibition. So, what does that mean? Well, it means that language is defined in terms of a satisfaction and a lack, because it satisfies in that it compensates for that lack of possibility to engage in this prohibited act, but at the same time, it never actually satisfies that craving, so it is therefore a lack in itself. Then, for Lacan, because everything is structured in terms of language or signification, all things like the law, institutions, anything, then emerge from this original compensation that came about through language. So this gives birth essentially to what he calls the symbolic. So the symbolic is defined by Butler as structures of language. Quite simply, just, you know, language itself is the symbolic for le camp, which then sets the stage for the law, which then is a masculine thing. So the prohibition on incest is primarily a masculine thing because it's throughout history, it's been recorded as being a thing that men suffer through, right? Like the edible complex. the opposite narrative around women is given a lot less smaller air time than the male one so the idea is then that the The emergence of the law, through language, which came about through that prohibition, is a masculine one. Thus, all systems are predicated around the idea of the masculine. So as a result, men are considered present being, whereas women are absent. The lack, you know, the lack narrative re-emerging here. Women lack a penis. Women lack autonomy. Women lack a kind of privileged place within that system, which is ironic because Lacan then says that that very lack of existence or kind of lack of being is in itself something to be desired. It is a privileged position because that that woman is not burdened with the system at hand or maintaining it, but they can then retreat into a non-space. But then if we think of this in properly Hegelian terms, it would be impossible to recognize the masculine as an in-group unless you had an out-group or a non-group. So the masculine as itself, as a privileged dominant position, is only possible if women, the feminine, its opposite, occupies a non-place. So the masculine is entirely predicated upon something that doesn't exist, a kind of non-thing. So this is what leads Butler, reading Lacan, to suggest that women are then a phallus. Whoa, what the hell does that mean? It means that for Butler, as for Lacan, I would assume, everything hinges upon women's not being in the system and therefore a lot of authority is then believed to be in the hands of women and this goes way back you know the idea that women have uh how's it kind of mystical potential in their uh seductive capacity and crap like that it's all the same thing here i i think so women by virtue of their being able to retreat from the system and then become the non-place from which the masculine place can kind of establish its authority. women then occupy a privileged position, and by virtue of that privilege, come to represent the phallus. So as Butler says on 62, men have a phallus, but women are a phallus. So to then become the representation of the phallus, Lacan suggests that women must take on the masquerade. So this is the idea, you know, often, so often assumed of women that they are like masters of deception through their, you know, their makeup and dress and all that type of crap, as though these things aren't imposed upon women from, you know, already dominant male position. But anyways, so then in a kind of complicated turn, Butler suggests that in Lacan, homosexuality is something that is, you know, often, so often worded off. So as she says, crap, because if women are, if women take on this kind of phallic I don't know. aura, this kind of phallic persona, then that troubles the idea of a smooth heterosexuality, because suddenly then you have a phallus, or a man who has a phallus, wanting to sleep with a phallus. So as Butler says on 72, femininity becomes a mask that dominates and resolves a masculine identification. For a masculine identification would, within the presumed heterosexual matrix of desire, produce a desire for a female object, the phallus. phallus. Hence, the dawning of femininity as a mask may reveal a refusal of a female homosexuality and, at the same time, the hyperbolic incorporation of the female other who is refused, an odd form of preserving and protecting that love within the circle of the melancholic and negative narcissism that results from the psychic inculcation of compulsory heterosexuality. Because of this very problem being presented by the woman internalizing and in embodying the idea of the phallus, because then that troubles the whole heterosexual matrix or compulsory heterosexuality onto which things are imbued. So masculinity and femininity then emerge as ways to compensate for that, where she says that we might then rethink the very notions of masculinity and femininity constructed here as rooted in unresolved homosexual catechesis, the melancholy refusal. slash domination of homosexuality culminates in the incorporation of the same-sexed object of desire and re-emerges in the construction of discrete sexual natures that require and institute their opposites through exclusion. So these things, I think if I'm understanding it, right then re-emerge that is the masculine and the feminine re-emerge or they emerge through their kind of exaggerated play kind of exaggerated performance to trouble to to veil the fact that there is a kind of prohibited homosexuality occurring, that is, the man with the phallus desiring the woman who has become phallus. So it might seem, and Butler certainly, you know, locates the benefit to a Lacanian approach, it might seem then that Lacan presents a radical alternative because none of this has to do with, like, ontology, where none of this has to do with kind of real attributes of the man. the masculine or the feminine, but rather how these things come about through a kind of a process of prohibition and repression and lack and all that. But of course, the problem that Butler has is that it relies still fundamentally on a kind of telos, so a process that is wholly linear, but also on the very distinction between the masculine and feminine, which Butler wants to move away from. So as you can see, So you still have these codes and conventions that guide, determine what it means to be, you know, belong to the masculine as opposed to the feminine. And that ultimately this framework forgets to include things like power, how power intervenes at various times in history and implements its own prerogative, its own agenda for how gender should be organized and constructed. And this doesn't mean that like a tyrant comes in and does it, but rather how various systems of organization, you know, slowly emerge. emerge to construct the matrix of intelligibility, like science, or like Foucault, like how the clinic performs that task, or prisons, or, you know, insert institution here. But there is also another prohibition that is found in the early stages. So where in Lacan, there was a prohibition on incest, we find a similar prohibition in Freud, of course, the prohibition of incest. But Butler then... identifies another prohibition, and that is a prohibition that precedes all others, and that is the prohibition of homosexuality. So in the case of heterosexuality, what must be repressed is not the desire for your mother, but the act. So you can't actually do it. You can keep desiring her, and then you can sublimate that desire onto another woman, in the case of the boy child, you know, of course. Whereas for Butler, she says that But primarily, what that portends, or what portends that, or what comes before that, is the prohibition on the desire to fuck the father as a young boy. So you don't, you are told you can neither desire nor act upon a homosexual desire. So in the case of homosexuality, there's a dual repression. You're not allowed to think it, and you're not allowed to act it. Whereas in heterosexuality, you're allowed to act it, but you're not allowed to think it. Or you're allowed to think. Sorry, but you're not allowed to act it. So boys then, for Butler, fear, sorry, they choose heterosexuality not because of fear of castration, but because fear of feminization, of being associated with the feminine. So more than just... critiquing Freudian psychoanalysis for that reason, Butler wants to criticize the very axiomatic foundations that set it up, you know, that boys act a certain way or think a certain way and young girls act a certain way and think a certain way. And that these, there are these various desires and drives, you know, things that can't be proved, but are taken as axiomatic truths, truths that, you know. are taken unquestioningly, that is that humans are always sexual from a very young age, and so on and so forth, Butler wants to trouble that by suggesting that they rely on fundamental axioms about gender that are wholly cultural. But this is isn't limited to Freud, however. Butler suggests that many feminist thinkers are plagued by an implicit privileging or naturalization of the heterosexual matrix. So these heterosexual assumptions from Lacan to Freud to these other feminist thinkers ultimately represent a very limiting framework for Butler, because then you're just dealing with male, female, and then whatever defines the two is very limited in and of themselves, let alone any other kind of gendered possibilities. What ultimately happens is you have this thing called the law, which intervenes at any point where people fall outside of the normative framework and then tries to get them back in. They become institutionalized or are simply excluded or killed or whatever. based off, you know, through any means necessary, be it direct or indirect. So you could have people like trans people being killed all the time, or, you know, you just have cut services so they just die on their own, you know, stuff like that. But what all this is in the service of for Butler is a desire to curb, to crush the possibility for multiplicity. So then that propels us into chapter three. And then the conclusion. I think I'll have to save it for next time. Yeah, I don't like doing that, but couldn't fit it all in one shot. So... Crap, I hate doing that. Anyways. See you next time. If you heard anything you don't like, tell me about it. I want to learn, um, you know, what's going on, you know, dealing with this kind of material. I'd hate for someone to have to put in the labor to teach me, especially if someone feels like, um, like they were, you know, attacked or their identity or their self was called into question, it would be terrible for them to have to put in that labor to teach me, you know, cis white guy. And I should... really know it myself. So obviously only if you have the capacity to, you know, I would welcome you putting in the labor to help me out and to learn, but if you can't, you can't and that's that's fine too. But if you can, let me know what's up. I prefer comments to anything else so do that. I don't care if you subscribe or whatever. But I hope you got something out of it.

But with the hopes of getting through this in one shot here, let's just jump right into it. So. she has right off the bat uh or kind of sets up the foundations for what the book is going to do by suggesting that feminism is predicated primarily on an idea on the idea of the woman as being a thing that somehow precedes identity somehow precedes culture somehow precedes you know any political landscape and how feminist thought is about kind of revitalizing this idea of the woman to bring it back into fruition so the whole project that Butler undertakes here is problematizing this idea of woman, and by extension, you know, man as well. So one of the ways that feminist thought often takes this up, or at least what she was writing against, it would be wrong for me to say that, you know, this is what feminism does, because that is categorically false.

She says that there is, among certain strands of feminism, a desire to try and evoke the image of woman. So take, you know, liberal feminist thinkers or even conservative feminist thinkers who say things that involve, you know, women being occupying more places in like multinational corporations and stuff like that, as though these are somehow good, you know, professions to have. Of this, Butler asks, how can we actually construct an image of woman unless we've somehow, you know, a priori?

they priorly, establish the idea of woman as something, you know, concrete, as a kind of subject that doesn't change. So taking her cue from Foucault, she says that the only way subjects appear, or these identities, or this identity of woman appears, is via a very specific regimen of authority, or within the kind of Foucaultian paradigm, you know, power, and knowledge, and all that, that sets the stage. for what should be understood as woman.

Therefore, anyone that emerges as a subject within that field is always already determined in advance. So it's not as though they're born into woman-ness naturally, because even the very idea of woman-ness... is a rather new concept, at least.

That's what Butler is trying to get at here. So it is therefore a myth, and she uses Kafka for this, one of Kafka's texts dealing with the idea of being before the law. For Butler, there is neither a subject that precedes the law that comes before it, nor is there a subject that stands firmly in front of the law, prepared to take it on. Subjects are always determined by the law, and by virtue of that, are only able to operate... very, they are very confined within their realm of possibility.

But we don't necessarily need to just take this as a kind of philosophical critique to propose that, you know, there's nothing that comes before, you know, culture itself. But even if we look within the domain of culture that we reside in, the idea of a woman is very ambiguous. There is not a single idea of what conscious woman, especially when we consider things like intersectionality, when we consider the ways that woman-ness or women-ness or woman-ness is demonstrated or performed by various different cultures. you get very different ideas or very different representations of what woman-ness is. So we can destabilize this idea of woman by performing a kind of rigorous philosophical analytic thing, or we can just look at, you know, what is present today to totally undermine this singular idea of woman.

And Butler is very wary of any... attempt to try and homogenize or singularize this idea of woman, implying that it's a kind of neocolonialism to suggest that, you know, woman is this complete thing, and it can be found everywhere, and we have a kind of basic foundation from which to understand it. So she's really speaking against, you know, some of those feminist thinkers, especially these white feminist thinkers that go into different parts of the world and say, like, you know, women, you are oppressed because... We know what it means.

We've done the research and we know what that means. And you should listen to us because we know exactly what is going on. houses a number of different problems.

One of them being, as I just mentioned, this kind of reliance on a notion of woman-ness that isn't, you know, real. So the scope of even these problematic feminist projects reveals to us the extent to which this discourse is all-pervasive. which aligns itself well with a kind of Foucauldian idea. And we think of Foucault, we might think of the, you know, the panopticon, where, you know, everyone's all being watched.

And there's like a kind of, those people being watched come to, or embody, I guess, in that it appears on their being, the very law that imposes its gaze upon them. So it becomes all pervasive in that way. And for that, we can really, or well, Butler, by stating that, sets the stage for her own project, where she wants to engage primarily in critique, and to point to the ways that the only way to challenge the system is by reimagining it from the inside.

This isn't a project that can come from without, precisely because the system is too, is far too big, and encapsulates everything. So for her, it'd be a pipe dream, a kind of ideal. less fantasy to imagine us getting outside of the system to then change it from the outside. For Butler, we are always already within it, and by virtue of that, we must challenge it from within.

So this will kind of set the stage for how she wants to criticize a number of other different feminists and post-structuralists and psychoanalytic thinkers that we'll go through here, that for her, risk perpetuating the system by failing to recognize how their own projects are. embedded within the very logic that they seek to usurp. But before we get into that, there are a few other things that she wants to set up, or she sets up, in terms of sex and gender.

So what, and this was the case with me when I first started to learn about these things, the kind of classic way that it was introduced to me was in terms of the sex and gender dichotomy. So it was said to me and believed that sex is something that you're born with and then gender is something that you adopt. And gender is fluid, but sex is kind of restrained, right?

Your sex determined by your anatomy, your genitalia. is something that is, you know, rigid, but that doesn't, shouldn't determine how you exist, you know, as a gender. You know, boys should, should, could, can, may, who cares, wear skirts.

Women can wear pants. Like... these kinds of distinctions that emerge from the sex binary is totally arbitrary.

So this was, you know, received by me and I think many others as being like a wake up call, right? Like, oh, wow, yeah, all these things are totally arbitrary, totally random. So while Butler agrees with that, she takes it a step further. And see, she suggests that even this idea of sex as being a kind of natural concept should be challenged. And the way that she does that is by turning to Foucault, and we'll get into this more later on, but this is just kind of some exposition into what's going to happen, to suggest that this reliance or this kind of investment of biology or anatomy with a kind of transcendent naturality.

Transcendent naturality. Does that make sense? It might not make sense, but a kind of naturalness which is imbued with a privileged status.

by virtue of its being natural. So because something's natural, you know, we bow down to it and say that, you know, it's a reality. So for Butler, this was only a new thing relative, relatively only emerging in the past two or three, 400 years, when people started to become fascinated with the idea of, you know, anatomy and tax, taxidermy, not taxidermy, whatever, digging into corpses, essentially, to find out how everything ticks a kind of rampant materialism that all all it really did was not only revealed more, revealed what was underneath the skin, that is, But it also sought to end a kind of superstitious realm of, you know, religious speculation in favor of a material truthfulness, which was kind of strange, because who's to say one houses more effective potential than the other.

People have been reported to actually heal through the power of God. And who's to say God exists? Doesn't really matter here. What matters is that the effect was real. So it was to say that, you know, the scientific truth, that one, that pertaining to bodily, you know, scientific rationale, as opposed to a mystical or spiritual religious thing is any, you know, one is not necessarily better than the other.

Now, with that being said, this shouldn't, this doesn't necessarily mean that these kind of spiritual alternatives can just be Taken up like by anyone, you know, that's pretty much the foundations for appropriation Rather I think that for my own part, you know, these things have to come with a history that cannot just simply be stripped away. Well, it can be stripped away, but it's difficult. And nor can it just be taken on. Rather, these things have to come about kind of organically. So all this to say that we shouldn't privilege one over the other.

That is, we shouldn't privilege the kind of mystical spiritual realm over the physical biological scientific one and that is really important i think here for butler because that's how she destabilizes this privileging that sex receives over gender. So it is not simply that gender is artificial, but that sex itself is artificial. So as the narrative once went, or it still goes, you know, the idea that sex is natural and gender is a cultural thing that is imbued upon.

the body, what that is essentially saying is that the body is like a blank slate, a kind of neutral zone onto which culture can propel itself. So Butler totally wants to problematize that idea of the body being this kind of neutral zone of a neutrality that is totally devoid of, you know, history, as though the body, even as neutral, was not in itself a creation, because the body wasn't always imbued with this kind of neutral status, right? You know, the body was endowed with a lot of different meanings across time, where this kind of neutral status is relatively new.

So Butler... then gives this another name. She calls this the metaphysics of substance. That is the idea that underneath gender, so underneath the kind of ideological implications of gender, is this substance that is sex, this unchanging real thing that, you know, occupies a place of a metaphysic in that it's not really attainable because we're always determined by gender, but it's a kind of mystical point toward which we can propel ourselves, whether or not we can arrive there.

there or not is not of great importance. But this is certainly a point onto which thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir... attach certain significance.

So for Beauvoir, and this is one of the things that Butler critiques her for, where the body for Beauvoir, de Beauvoir, is sought as a kind of emancipatory ideal, a place that can break women away from the boundaries imposed by men, where, as I think I've said, Butler wants to disturb this idea or trouble this idea of the body as a kind of place. place for freedom. So in Beauvoir's project, she believes women are regarded primarily as other.

So in relation to men who are considered the inside, who are considered free floating, I guess, with endless possibility, woman is not even allowed to enter that sphere, hence they're being kind of cast away to the realm of the other. So for Beauvoir, this is This is the idea that extends really far back in our history, that men are associated with the intellect, with the mind, whereas women are associated with the body, you know, the filthy, gross, disgusting body, the sinful body. Women are associated with that domain. So in that way, they are grounded, kind of territorialized by their bodies. Whereas men are, you know, free to pursue any kind of intellectual metaphysical domains they wish to.

So women, as they historically have been for Beauvoir, and I think for anyone, they've been excluded from discourse. excluded from, you know, political possibility and social and cultural possibility. So in response to Beauvoir, Butler recounts another feminist thinker, Lucha Irigaray. I think they pronounce her name Lucha, but Irigaray, nevertheless, who Butler recounts on page 17, criticizes Beauvoir in the following way.

On Irigaray's reading, Beauvoir's claim that woman is sex is reversed to mean that she is not the sex she is designated to be. but rather the masculine sex, encore, and encore, so that is again an in-body, parading in the mode of otherness. For a rigore, that phallogocentric mode of signifying the female sex perpetually reproduces phantasms of its own self-amplifying desire. Instead of a self-limiting linguistic gesture that grants alterity or difference to women, phallogocentrism offers a name to eclipse the feminine and take its place. So, what does that mean?

For a rigore, Beauvoir participates in the same system because, and let's give the example here, one of Beauvoir's famous statements, the idea that, the statement that one is not born a woman, rather one becomes a woman, implies that there's a kind of real woman or a kind of real female sex. that is kind of thrown out the window through socialization. As you grow up, you know, you become this thing that you're not meant to be.

So for Irigaray, she, you know, celebrates Beauvoir to some extent, but then says that by framing it as such, it is to suggest that women are just, you know, kind of helpless beings cast into this domain, that... privileges or that in a sense romanticizes a pre-gendered being, whereas Irigaray kind of takes that to be a little bit problematic. However, and this is where we'll go with rigore, especially in the next chapters, for rigore, that implies that women still belong to that sphere, that women still have a place within that sphere. Whereas for rigore, rigore. she believes that women are totally removed from that domain.

So whereas for Beauvoir, women can actually challenge the system, you know, by recognizing their place within it, and by positing the possibility for this pre-gendered being, she is essentially framing the possibility of resistance as being almost too possible for Rigore. So for Origore, she takes a Lacanian perspective, which we'll get into more in the second chapter. And I should say, this text is kind of all over the place.

Like, Butler presents kind of mini critiques of each of these thinkers in the first chapter, and then develops them more fully in the second and third. And I was not sure how to do it, if I should just present them all at once. And I decided to just present it chronologically.

So I'm presenting kind of smaller critiques, but they'll get expanded in the next chapters. But I will say here about Irigaray is that she takes a primarily Lacanian perspective. So what does that mean?

Well, that means that if we are dealing with language, which we always are, so a kind of totalizing thing called language, and that language for Lecomte, as for Rigore, is a kind of patriarchal construction. and we'll get into that more in the next section, but just for now, language is a patriarchal thing, then it is impossible for women to exert any kind of autonomy within that sphere. Okay?

Fair enough. Now Butler takes issue with this. So Butler takes issue with a number of different thinkers, right? Like Beauvoir And as we'll get into even more of them But what she has a problem with with the rigore is that even though Butler self celebrates it to some extent and says like, yeah, it's important to point to the extent to which, you know, patriarchy has essentially infiltrated all walks of life.

Butler suggests that it is limited because it implies that this is a totalizing thing, that women can't ever have a place ever in society because they are always already determined by the parameters of language. So Butler has a problem with that because while it might be true in a kind of Western context. What can be said then of, you know, matriarchal configurations all over the world currently?

So Butler critiques Irigaray for failing to consider, you know, other cultures, or as she says it on page 18, although Irigaray clearly broadens the scope of feminist critique by exposing the epistemological, ontological, and logical structures of a masculine-masculinist signifying economy that is language. The power of her analysis is undercut precisely by its globalizing reach. Is it possible to identify a monolithic as well as monologic masculinist economy that traverses the array of cultural and historical contexts in which sexual difference takes place? is the failure to acknowledge the specific cultural operations of gender repression itself a kind of epistemological imperialism.

So Butler obviously points to the way that a rigorous framework is limited, how it doesn't consider the specific needs, the specific voices of those women all over the globe. And by virtue of that is highly reductive. So that shares a very strong affinity with the other kind of projects by, you know, white feminists that go into all these different parts of the world to essentially establish what Butler criticizes as a coalitional politics, which she says is the insistence in advance, the insistence in advance on coalitional unity as a goal assumes that solidarity, whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action.

So this insistence on unity implies that there have to be certain differences bracketed off to enter into a kind of perfect sphere of dialogue that can allow for political potential. Whereas Butler wants to celebrate difference and wants to celebrate the ruptures and the things that don't necessarily make people all the same. So for Butler instead, what a coalitional project would look like is where there's an open coalition then will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand. It will be an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure. So what does this normative structure look like?

Well, here we enter in or adopt a number of other kind of Butlerian terms, like intelligibility, or the matrix of intelligibility, where for Butler, what essentially happens is that through various discourses of authority, through power, through the power associated with scientific rationality, with a kind of rampant materialism, with political authority, so on and so forth, what there is established is a broad domain of normativity. that all circulates around for Butler, heterosexual, compulsory heterosexuality, sorry. So compulsory heterosexuality is a cultural thing, right?

We know that now. And at the time, it was known. However, what Butler wants to show is that you have this thing called compulsory heterosexuality, which everyone knows is a cultural thing, just because heterosexuality is just associated with some cultures as opposed to others. others, which actually works in reverse.

Now what do I mean by that? I mean that this paradigm of compulsory heterosexuality actually affirms the idea of sex differences pertaining to anatomical differences between men and women, as though these things are natural. So it retroactively reaffirms the very narrative that sets the stage for it.

Now I can't draw it out, but here I'll I'll try to make it as clear as I can. So for Butler, it's not as though sex comes before gender. In fact, it might actually be the opposite.

So we might have gender as a cultural thing, because, you know, these things only emerge through culture, that then, in order to justify itself, and then in order to set the boundaries for what is normative, imbues the two. like anatomical differences that are supposed to exist with a transcendent status so a transcendent naturality if that can exist which then operates to affirm and to promote and justify and validate the gendered components that exist on top of it and the reason that this has happened is in an effort to maintain what butler calls the matrix of coherent gender norms or the matrix of intelligibility eligibility so what we come to know as being normative or to hearken back to another thinker i've done here sarah ahmed for what for her amounts to the being straight and not just straight as in heterosexual but straight as in like a straight line corresponding to the straight linear flows of this cultural paradigm and all of this sets the stage for what is to be known as the self Because the self is so inextricably linked with what it means to be gendered, where a self is reserved then, then we're all throughout history for, you know, the Cartesian male, classic liberal rational subject, you know, because these things are always associated with men, not to say that women can't also embody those things, but that the you know, the structures will exclude them by, you know, hearkening back to a naturalistic explanation, like, oh, women are just more emotional because of their brains or because of their vaginas. We have this real explanation as to why things are the way they are.

So for that reason, Butler suggests that by critiquing gender, by performing what she calls a genealogy of gender as it exists in this world, destabilizes virtually everything we know about ourselves because it destabilizes our notion of the self. It destabilizes all the institutions we find ourselves in. It destabilizes the transcendent naturality associated with the body, which then opens up infinite number of possibilities.

But let it be clear though, Butler does not want to just simply enter women or give women the kind of status that has been associated with men. Because as has been presented so far, men have been associated with the universal, you know, the intellectual, the possible, all that. Butler doesn't just want to give women that. Because for her, that would simply replicate the very system that that, you know, she wants to criticize.

One thinker that does propose that, Butler takes it. takes aim at. So this is Monique Wittig, I think that's how you pronounce it, who Butler says calls for the, this is on 27, who Butler says calls for the destruction of sex so that women can assume the status of a universal subject.

On the way toward that destruction, women must assume both a particular and a universalist point of view as a subject who can realize concrete universality through freedom. Wittig's Lesbian confirms rather than contests the normative promise of humanist ideals premised on the metaphysics of substance. So for Wittig, it is the idea that the lesbian as a woman breaks down the limits imposed upon women to enter a kind of emancipatory stage, which for Butler, and this resonates with the other critiques she's had of Beauvoir and Irigaray, Butler suggests that where it seems that Wittig has subscribed to a radical project of lesbian emancipation and enforced the distinction between lesbian and woman, she does this through the Skip the page. Does this through the defense of the pre-gendered person characterized as freedom.

So all that does for Butler is just reaffirm that very binary system between sex and gender that she wants to get away from. so thus far we have been dealing primarily with gender binaries or sex binaries between you know people who are supposed to or believed to have you know certain anatomy and then their gender is what exists on top of that and the other other side, same thing. So then Butler presents, you know, the kind of, I guess, somewhat rare case of hermaphroditism, which I think is a problematic term now, but just because it's the one she uses, I'll just use it.

So she takes this time now to consider Foucault, who writes about, you know, a hermaphrodite in literature. So this hermaphrodite was by the name of Herculean, or sorry, not literary. This was a real person. I don't know why I said that. So the actual Wikipedia entry summarizes it well.

So Herculean Balbaix was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law after an affair and physical examination. So that kind of sets the stage for what? what her story was, but we'll get into that a little bit more.

So for Foucault, as Butler presents, this was a kind of opening up a possibility where the hermaphrodite, this Herculean, was someone who totally disturbed the limits set forth by sex and by gender, exploding them, if you will. So Butler kind of leaves it at that for us, that Foucault, it celebrates this, or what the possibility that is presented by this, which she'll come to criticism. this eyes later on, just kind of implying in this first chapter that his appreciation of it is suspect for her.

But we'll get into that more as we go on. So at the closing, of this chapter, she reiterates that there is a broad rupture or schism between two big camps of thought. So there's the one emblematic of Wittig, as far as feminist thinking goes, which is a materialist language where language is considered a material thing, we'll get into that more, and can be changed from the inside. So this thing can be usurped.

So she's the one that advocates for kind of lesbian politics, versus The Lacanians, so this is indicative of Erigiri, who she says that is not material, but that argues that, you know, there is no possibility for women to escape the domain of language, and therefore can't simply get out of it in ways that have been traditionally imagined, and then the project has to be considered from a, you know, psychoanalytic Lacanian one. So Butler argues that both of these thinkers end up romanticizing a kind of pre-sexed, pre-gendered, or pre-sexed individual, which is wrong. And she gives us a glimpse of of what the project should be like, where she says that our task, not only in terms of critique, but our task as a political project should be in the service of the repetition of the law, which is a really radical suggestion. And then to call this a kind of subversive repetition, sorry, a subversive repetition. So to kind of make a mockery of the law, to make a mockery of genders as they are believed to be, which she gets into more in the actual conclusion.

conclusion of the book when she talks about parody. Parody is what will undo the law to that extent. But we'll get to that. Now let's move on to chapter two. See if we can get through this all in one shot.

So chapter two, I didn't even say the name of the first chapter, whatever. Subjects of sex, gender, desire. That was the first chapter. And the second one, prohibition, psychoanalysis, and the heterosexual matrix, which is what we're getting into here. So Butler starts this one out by suggesting that feminists who associate a kind of biological reality with womanhood and that associate that reality with a kind of liberation or an emancipatory potential are...

you know, they're coming from a good place. They're trying to do something good. But for Butler, the project needs to be much more self-reflexive in that it must be critiquing even this idea of the natural, as I think we've said, or I've said here a number of times already.

But in, on the other hand, what we don't want to do either is think about things in terms of construction or constructionism or constructivism. You know, the idea that is often strawmanned about, quote unquote, post- modernists the idea that all they want to do is point to the ways that things aren't natural or real so that you know they can might is right and they can just swoop in and do whatever they want butler doesn't want to say that either in fact she wants to say that even this idea of construction itself is contingent where it's not as though there's just a smooth body onto which culture imbues itself but rather even you know different Different times and places, the body is endowed with a different meaning than in other ones. So it's important to consider that it's not simply as though humans are always already structured by their culture, by their society, or anything like that, because that implies too much of a neutrality of the body. So to set the stage for what she wants to do in this chapter, that is take on psychoanalysis or Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Freud too, for that matter, she goes back a little bit.

So she thinks of things historically, where she presents the work of Levi Strauss. So Levi Strauss, Claude Levi Strauss, is the thinker kind of Figurehead for structuralism. So structuralism, as Butler defines it here for us, is the idea that there is a universal model of exchange, which is women.

so often. So under this framework that Levi-Strauss identifies, which often takes the form of potlatch or kula, and this is the idea of the gift, you know, gift giving, where systems are not predicated upon a law of equivalence where there's a, you know, kind of paper money that can facilitate exchange, but rather through barter and other things. When what you end up seeing is things being reduced to a commodified form.

commodified is the wrong word but kind of reduced to an objective form like women like slaves like children you know people that aren't that are considered subhuman which uh reveals for butler the extent to which maybe erigere has has a point in saying that women have no place within this sphere because looking at Far back as what Levi Strauss was talking about, so he was in the early 20th century, I guess, what he revealed was that, you know, women don't have that, or historically have not had that propensity for, or that potential to, engage in exchange in the way that men have. And they have been instead. been forced into the position of objects to be exchanged. So in this framework, women disappear. They're gone because they disappear as human.

So there is a kind of homosocial bond that forms where it's always between women and men. men because of the disappearance of women. And in a kind of radical jump, Butler recounts Levi-Strauss'suggestion that all cultures are guided by a desire for incest.

Now this is on page 57. Incest for Levi-Strauss is not a social fact, but a pervasive cultural fantasy. Presuming the heterosexual masculinity of the subject of desire, Levi Strauss maintains that the desire for the mother or the sister, the murder of the father, and the son's repentance undoubtedly do not correspond to any fact or group of facts occupying a given place in history, but perhaps they symbolically express an ancient and lasting dream. This is kind of the Freudian thing, you know, the Oedipal complex as well present here.

But as we know, maybe, maybe we don't know, from Freud, this incest, this desire for incest, you know, because the first person of the opposite sex you ostensibly come in contact with or developed a strong relationship with are the people within your family, so that the first thing that people have to do is repress or suppress because they're doing it themselves. They have to suppress their own desire for their family member. So the incest taboo has to be prohibited, has to be shut away.

So remember this is Levi Strauss thinking this and Freud has a very similar idea. For Lacan, however, Lacan says that this prohibition on incest has to be compensated in some way. So for Freud, it comes out in other ways.

In Freud, let's take the sun, and this is the... Freudian narrative, the son has a desire for the mother, right? This is all Oedipus here. And then because of the father's wrath or the threat that the father is going to castrate the son, the son must then, you know, displace their desire. for the mother onto other women.

And that's what a properly socialized person does. And then they go and fuck other women, secretly desiring that it was their, that woman was their mother. So for Lacan, he recognizes that this incest or this prohibition on incest is not a great thing for young people.

You know, they, it's not a great thing for culture generally because it's a great prohibition placed on people. So for Lacan, another, um, another institution emerges to try and compensate for that prohibition. And as Butler identifies here, and I should preface this by saying that this is just my reading of Lacan through Butler. I'm not a Lacanian, so I'm just taking Butler at her word. For Lacan, according to Butler, people then erect language as a means to compensate for their inability to engage in this kind of prohibition.

So, what does that mean? Well, it means that language is defined in terms of a satisfaction and a lack, because it satisfies in that it compensates for that lack of possibility to engage in this prohibited act, but at the same time, it never actually satisfies that craving, so it is therefore a lack in itself. Then, for Lacan, because everything is structured in terms of language or signification, all things like the law, institutions, anything, then emerge from this original compensation that came about through language.

So this gives birth essentially to what he calls the symbolic. So the symbolic is defined by Butler as structures of language. Quite simply, just, you know, language itself is the symbolic for le camp, which then sets the stage for the law, which then is a masculine thing. So the prohibition on incest is primarily a masculine thing because it's throughout history, it's been recorded as being a thing that men suffer through, right? Like the edible complex.

the opposite narrative around women is given a lot less smaller air time than the male one so the idea is then that the The emergence of the law, through language, which came about through that prohibition, is a masculine one. Thus, all systems are predicated around the idea of the masculine. So as a result, men are considered present being, whereas women are absent. The lack, you know, the lack narrative re-emerging here. Women lack a penis.

Women lack autonomy. Women lack a kind of privileged place within that system, which is ironic because Lacan then says that that very lack of existence or kind of lack of being is in itself something to be desired. It is a privileged position because that that woman is not burdened with the system at hand or maintaining it, but they can then retreat into a non-space.

But then if we think of this in properly Hegelian terms, it would be impossible to recognize the masculine as an in-group unless you had an out-group or a non-group. So the masculine as itself, as a privileged dominant position, is only possible if women, the feminine, its opposite, occupies a non-place. So the masculine is entirely predicated upon something that doesn't exist, a kind of non-thing.

So this is what leads Butler, reading Lacan, to suggest that women are then a phallus. Whoa, what the hell does that mean? It means that for Butler, as for Lacan, I would assume, everything hinges upon women's not being in the system and therefore a lot of authority is then believed to be in the hands of women and this goes way back you know the idea that women have uh how's it kind of mystical potential in their uh seductive capacity and crap like that it's all the same thing here i i think so women by virtue of their being able to retreat from the system and then become the non-place from which the masculine place can kind of establish its authority.

women then occupy a privileged position, and by virtue of that privilege, come to represent the phallus. So as Butler says on 62, men have a phallus, but women are a phallus. So to then become the representation of the phallus, Lacan suggests that women must take on the masquerade.

So this is the idea, you know, often, so often assumed of women that they are like masters of deception through their, you know, their makeup and dress and all that type of crap, as though these things aren't imposed upon women from, you know, already dominant male position. But anyways, so then in a kind of complicated turn, Butler suggests that in Lacan, homosexuality is something that is, you know, often, so often worded off. So as she says, crap, because if women are, if women take on this kind of phallic I don't know. aura, this kind of phallic persona, then that troubles the idea of a smooth heterosexuality, because suddenly then you have a phallus, or a man who has a phallus, wanting to sleep with a phallus.

So as Butler says on 72, femininity becomes a mask that dominates and resolves a masculine identification. For a masculine identification would, within the presumed heterosexual matrix of desire, produce a desire for a female object, the phallus. phallus.

Hence, the dawning of femininity as a mask may reveal a refusal of a female homosexuality and, at the same time, the hyperbolic incorporation of the female other who is refused, an odd form of preserving and protecting that love within the circle of the melancholic and negative narcissism that results from the psychic inculcation of compulsory heterosexuality. Because of this very problem being presented by the woman internalizing and in embodying the idea of the phallus, because then that troubles the whole heterosexual matrix or compulsory heterosexuality onto which things are imbued. So masculinity and femininity then emerge as ways to compensate for that, where she says that we might then rethink the very notions of masculinity and femininity constructed here as rooted in unresolved homosexual catechesis, the melancholy refusal. slash domination of homosexuality culminates in the incorporation of the same-sexed object of desire and re-emerges in the construction of discrete sexual natures that require and institute their opposites through exclusion. So these things, I think if I'm understanding it, right then re-emerge that is the masculine and the feminine re-emerge or they emerge through their kind of exaggerated play kind of exaggerated performance to trouble to to veil the fact that there is a kind of prohibited homosexuality occurring, that is, the man with the phallus desiring the woman who has become phallus.

So it might seem, and Butler certainly, you know, locates the benefit to a Lacanian approach, it might seem then that Lacan presents a radical alternative because none of this has to do with, like, ontology, where none of this has to do with kind of real attributes of the man. the masculine or the feminine, but rather how these things come about through a kind of a process of prohibition and repression and lack and all that. But of course, the problem that Butler has is that it relies still fundamentally on a kind of telos, so a process that is wholly linear, but also on the very distinction between the masculine and feminine, which Butler wants to move away from. So as you can see, So you still have these codes and conventions that guide, determine what it means to be, you know, belong to the masculine as opposed to the feminine. And that ultimately this framework forgets to include things like power, how power intervenes at various times in history and implements its own prerogative, its own agenda for how gender should be organized and constructed. And this doesn't mean that like a tyrant comes in and does it, but rather how various systems of organization, you know, slowly emerge.

emerge to construct the matrix of intelligibility, like science, or like Foucault, like how the clinic performs that task, or prisons, or, you know, insert institution here. But there is also another prohibition that is found in the early stages. So where in Lacan, there was a prohibition on incest, we find a similar prohibition in Freud, of course, the prohibition of incest.

But Butler then... identifies another prohibition, and that is a prohibition that precedes all others, and that is the prohibition of homosexuality. So in the case of heterosexuality, what must be repressed is not the desire for your mother, but the act.

So you can't actually do it. You can keep desiring her, and then you can sublimate that desire onto another woman, in the case of the boy child, you know, of course. Whereas for Butler, she says that But primarily, what that portends, or what portends that, or what comes before that, is the prohibition on the desire to fuck the father as a young boy.

So you don't, you are told you can neither desire nor act upon a homosexual desire. So in the case of homosexuality, there's a dual repression. You're not allowed to think it, and you're not allowed to act it.

Whereas in heterosexuality, you're allowed to act it, but you're not allowed to think it. Or you're allowed to think. Sorry, but you're not allowed to act it.

So boys then, for Butler, fear, sorry, they choose heterosexuality not because of fear of castration, but because fear of feminization, of being associated with the feminine. So more than just... critiquing Freudian psychoanalysis for that reason, Butler wants to criticize the very axiomatic foundations that set it up, you know, that boys act a certain way or think a certain way and young girls act a certain way and think a certain way.

And that these, there are these various desires and drives, you know, things that can't be proved, but are taken as axiomatic truths, truths that, you know. are taken unquestioningly, that is that humans are always sexual from a very young age, and so on and so forth, Butler wants to trouble that by suggesting that they rely on fundamental axioms about gender that are wholly cultural. But this is isn't limited to Freud, however. Butler suggests that many feminist thinkers are plagued by an implicit privileging or naturalization of the heterosexual matrix.

So these heterosexual assumptions from Lacan to Freud to these other feminist thinkers ultimately represent a very limiting framework for Butler, because then you're just dealing with male, female, and then whatever defines the two is very limited in and of themselves, let alone any other kind of gendered possibilities. What ultimately happens is you have this thing called the law, which intervenes at any point where people fall outside of the normative framework and then tries to get them back in. They become institutionalized or are simply excluded or killed or whatever.

based off, you know, through any means necessary, be it direct or indirect. So you could have people like trans people being killed all the time, or, you know, you just have cut services so they just die on their own, you know, stuff like that. But what all this is in the service of for Butler is a desire to curb, to crush the possibility for multiplicity. So then that propels us into chapter three.

And then the conclusion. I think I'll have to save it for next time. Yeah, I don't like doing that, but couldn't fit it all in one shot.

So... Crap, I hate doing that. Anyways.

See you next time. If you heard anything you don't like, tell me about it. I want to learn, um, you know, what's going on, you know, dealing with this kind of material. I'd hate for someone to have to put in the labor to teach me, especially if someone feels like, um, like they were, you know, attacked or their identity or their self was called into question, it would be terrible for them to have to put in that labor to teach me, you know, cis white guy. And I should...

really know it myself. So obviously only if you have the capacity to, you know, I would welcome you putting in the labor to help me out and to learn, but if you can't, you can't and that's that's fine too. But if you can, let me know what's up.

I prefer comments to anything else so do that. I don't care if you subscribe or whatever. But I hope you got something out of it.

Transcript for:Exploring Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

Transcript for:
Exploring Judith Butler's Gender Trouble