In “Reconfiguring Lesbian Desire”, Grosz begins by stating her problems with the way desire has been articulated. She critiques the ontology of lack as necessitating binarism. Grosz argues that the ontology of lack sexualizes desire in terms of the characteristics attributed to masculine/feminine opposition: presence and absence (177). She holds that “such a model…performs an act of violence: for any consideration of the autonomy of the two sexes, particularly the autonomy of women, is rendered impossible. It feminizes, heterosexualizes, and binarizes desire at an ontological and epistemological level. Its activity is merely a reaction to its perceived shortcomings, its own failure to sustain itself” (177).
Grosz explains that the psychoanalytic account of desire configure it as inherently masculine, as there is only the masculine libido: desire only exists as an activity, which is associated with the masculine, whereas the feminine is associated with passivity. Therefore, according to a Freudian model of desire, woman can only love and desire as a man (via female inversion); a woman cannot desire as a woman, as woman is characterized by a lack of desire. She thus reasons that women’s desire is inconceivable according formulations of desire as activity: women function within that system as objects of male desire (179). Such a model of desire makes it impossible to understand lesbian desire (180).
As a solution, Grosz calls for a reconfiguration of desire as, instead of a lack, an intensity, enervation, positivity, or force (179). She draws upon Spinoza’s model of desire “as the force of positive production, the action that creates things, makes alliances, and forges interactions” (179) and Deleuze and Guattari’s model of desire as experimental, creative, and fundamentally inventive (180). She then draws further upon Deleuze and Guattari to read lesbian sexuality and desire in terms of bodies, pleasures, surfaces, intensities (180). Grosz insists that sexual relations are, and should be formulated as, “contiguous with and a part of other relations" (181). She states that “the bedroom is no more the privileged site of sexuality than any other space; sexuality and desire are part of the intensity and passion of life itself” (181). She expounds that sites most invested in desire always occur at a conjunction or point of machinic connection between one thing and another (182). In order to understand this notion, she calls for the necessity of focusing on parts and elements outside of the context of their integration or organization (182). She holds that focus should thus not be limited to pre-designated erogenous zones, and should instead by concerned with “the coming together of two surfaces for their own sake and not for the benefit of the entity or organism as a whole” (182).
Grosz notes that “to use the machinic connections a body-part forms with another, whether it be organic or inorganic, to form an intensity, a investment of libido is to see desire, sexuality as productive…but in no way reproductive” (183). She postulates further that focus on intensities and surfaces instead of relations between an impulse and its absent other allows a conception of others, human subjects, and women as “not simply the privileged objects of desire”. She then draws upon Mary Fallon’s illustration of desire as “one ‘thing’ transmut[ing] into another; becom[ing] something else through its connections with something or someone outside” (184). She parallels this with the Deleuzian notion of becoming, which “entails…entry into an arrangement, an assemblage of other fragments, other things, becoming bound up in some other production, forming part of a machine” (184). Grosz states that it is not a question of being a certain entity (such as animal, woman, or lesbian), or of attaining a conclusive status, but of “moving, changing, being swept beyond one singular position into a multiplicity of flows, or what Deleuze and Guattari have described as ‘a thousand tiny sexes’: to liberate the myriad of flows, to proliferate connections, to intensify” (184). She elaborates that “the question is not am I…a lesbian, but rather, what kinds of lesbian connections, what kinds of lesbian-machine, we invest our time, energy, and bodies in, what other kinds of bodies, and to what effects?” (184). She continues to posit that this question is “what it is that together, in parts and bits, and interconnections, we can make that is new, exploratory, opens up further spaces, induces further intensities, speeds up, enervates, and proliferates production” (184).
Discussion Questions:
What do you think of Grosz’s model of desire, or of her critiques of the ways that (gay and lesbian) desire has been formulated? Do you think it’s an optimal solution to the problems posed by psychoanalysis and the ontology of lack?
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
Grosz, "Animal Sex"
In “Animal Sex” Grosz deconstructs the connection between pleasure and death through analyzing the work of two theorist, Roger Caillois and Alphonso Lingis. Grosz is clearly aware of the work of the theorists we have studied up to this point. She addresses the importance of acknowledging the implications of erotic pleasure for understanding sexual difference, that male and female sexualities are not necessarily distinct different species, nor should they only be understood in relation to each other (p. 188). The point of this chapter is to addresses what seems entirely other to women’s pleasure and desire – at men, at insects. Grosz aims to at least say what female pleasure is not and to dispel accounts that connect women and women’s sexuality too closely with mens’ or animals’ sexualities (p. 189). The author chose Caillois and Lingis because of the huge gap between their precise studies and the subsequently vast area they cover.
Caillios work focuses on the connection between pleasure and death as a simple reality through studying the praying mantis, specifically the female praying mantis’ affinity for eating her partner before, after or during sex. A key concept for Caillois is the inherently excessive expenditure of structural, anatomical or behavior traits that go above and beyond the survival needs of an organism; for example, peacocks feathers or the camouflage of a caterpillar, or the libido of human sexuality and desire (p. 190). Praying mantises are particularly interesting to study because of their close association with femininity and female sexuality through myth and humans through appearance. In anthropomorphizing the insects behaviors, praying mantises become linked with fundamentally paranoid projections, the femme fatale, the mother who castrates her son, the reverse of the prominent masculine founded psychoanalysis; for the praying mantis is the female lover who threatens the phallus not the other way around (p.191). Pleasure and death are linked together by the praying mantis (and black widow spider) by making sex something to die for (for the praying mantis, something it can do while technically dead). This places woman in the category of non-human, or “the living threat of death” (p.194).
Lingis separates bodily needs with bodily desires, specifically lust or erotic desire. Body image created through corporeal gratification, a need, supplies the subject with an experience of its own body and the ways in which its body is perceived by others (p.194). The libido or erotic desire is a troubling of the body image. In Caillois’s world, it is the erotic desire that is the excess; it surpasses what is necessary for survival. Lingis describes desire as an ever increasing hunger that likes to maintain itself at the level of craving (p.195), insatiable equaling excess.
Lingis refers to carnal desire as horizontal-lateral contamination of one erotogenic zone to another (p. 197). The relations (of two or more interacting zones or regions on one or more people/things) can not be understood in the terms of complementary, unifying or the merger of the two because each remains in its site and functions in its own ways (p. 197). With the coming together of two or more surfaces (and there is be a coming together of some sort) results in an intensification of both surfaces. It is through this conjunction the body is given up to the intensities that overtake it, seeking the otherness to bring these intensities into play (p. 198). It is not about only giving the other pleasure, but always giving itself pleasure (p. 198).
Moving into sadomasochism specifically as pain being brought into the realm of erotic desire for the intense sensuality it produces, the processes of pleasurable intensities produced can not be differentiated by those by which painful intensity is produced (p. 199). The role of the other in erotic desire is nontrivial; it is not a passive object. The other “solicits, beckons, implores, provokes and demands. The other lures, oscillates, presenting everything it has to offer” (p. 199). Life/pleasure and death/un-pleasure are complementary in opposition. Organisms that split cells are reproducing asexually can be seen as immortal. Therefore sex necessitates the death experience, or death brings sex as the alternative (p. 201). Lingis understands the link between horror and lust; the transformative effects of erotic attachments are echoed in the seeping out beyond boundaries and the dissolution of lines of bodily organization prompted by orgasmic dissolution (p. 202). Grosz makes the connection of the abject through, “something about the compulsive incitements of sexuality that may bring one to the brink of disgust and to the abject, no only accepting but seeking out activities, objects and bodily regions one might in other contexts disdain” (p. 202). It is important to acknowledge and theorize how understanding subjectivity and desire goes beyond the opposition of pleasure and death (p. 203).
Saturday, March 10, 2007
The Question of Social Transformation
In “The Question of Social Transformation”, Butler discusses the place of gender trouble in feminist theory. She invokes various questions related to recognizability and survival for those outside the norm, and asserts, “we need norms in order to live…we are also constrained by norms in ways that do violence to us”. Norms, perhaps necessary points of reference, are defined by exclusion.
Feminist sociolinguistics/semiotics, though revolutionary, were predicated on the existence of sexual difference, and were therefore inherently heterosexist. Binary distinctions displaced from heteronormative circumstances articulated the question of the parentage of these roles: were they located in the primordial heterosexual couple? Butler argues that their displacement itself proved the alocality of originals and the performativity of gender in general.
She summarizes several positions critiquing hers: the idea of a difference between the cultural symptoms of sexual difference and the sociological concept of gender; that sexual difference is necessary to expose patriarchy and to provide constraints in which gender is permuted; that heterosexism is inherent to the human psyche.
Where can sociality intervene in the symbolic order? Homologous to her discussion of butch/femme categories, she brings up the transferability of the attribute, the displacement of gender in drag that exposes it as not having a firm locus. The assumed ontology of gender is constantly displaced at a material level.
The arbiter in power decides recognizable behavior by a rubric of attributes, and the coherence of this rubric makes it visible. Drag enacts a resignification intelligible in the public signs of a gender. How does this cooption enter the political? The existence of acts of gender in a coherent field also means the restructuring of that field. Symbolic violence defines the border of humanness in the name of real and unreal. A livable life for all consists in “a new legitimating lexicon” of gender.
She considers Habermas’ point that norms are necessary for masses to orient themselves in order to participate. These norms create normalizing drives. She asks how these norms could exist without constantly producing the non-normative, the excluded. In the discourse of what is human, she concludes, participation is universally involuntary.
Resignification as politics entails performing acts that demand new recognition within the coherent field. She incidentally disclaims that creating livable life does not mean that we should all have to be anti-choice; democracy is not a unified field, anyhow; restructuring occurs productively at sites of difference and suffering, but we shouldn’t be paternalistic; love is a good solution; violence is bad.
Feminist sociolinguistics/semiotics, though revolutionary, were predicated on the existence of sexual difference, and were therefore inherently heterosexist. Binary distinctions displaced from heteronormative circumstances articulated the question of the parentage of these roles: were they located in the primordial heterosexual couple? Butler argues that their displacement itself proved the alocality of originals and the performativity of gender in general.
She summarizes several positions critiquing hers: the idea of a difference between the cultural symptoms of sexual difference and the sociological concept of gender; that sexual difference is necessary to expose patriarchy and to provide constraints in which gender is permuted; that heterosexism is inherent to the human psyche.
Where can sociality intervene in the symbolic order? Homologous to her discussion of butch/femme categories, she brings up the transferability of the attribute, the displacement of gender in drag that exposes it as not having a firm locus. The assumed ontology of gender is constantly displaced at a material level.
The arbiter in power decides recognizable behavior by a rubric of attributes, and the coherence of this rubric makes it visible. Drag enacts a resignification intelligible in the public signs of a gender. How does this cooption enter the political? The existence of acts of gender in a coherent field also means the restructuring of that field. Symbolic violence defines the border of humanness in the name of real and unreal. A livable life for all consists in “a new legitimating lexicon” of gender.
She considers Habermas’ point that norms are necessary for masses to orient themselves in order to participate. These norms create normalizing drives. She asks how these norms could exist without constantly producing the non-normative, the excluded. In the discourse of what is human, she concludes, participation is universally involuntary.
Resignification as politics entails performing acts that demand new recognition within the coherent field. She incidentally disclaims that creating livable life does not mean that we should all have to be anti-choice; democracy is not a unified field, anyhow; restructuring occurs productively at sites of difference and suffering, but we shouldn’t be paternalistic; love is a good solution; violence is bad.
Friday, March 9, 2007
The End of Sexual Difference
Productive Conflicts
Disputes are intrinsic to all democratic enterprises. Instead of trying to settle them once and for all, one should understand how crucial they are to a forward momentum. Behind this view lies the idea that human beings are irreversibly complex and can never truly be united under any one paradigm.
What Is Sexual Difference?
The idea of productive conflicts plays into Irigaray’s saying that sexual difference is the question of our time. Sexual difference is not a given or a premise; it is a question that prompts feminist inquiry, "...[it is] that which is not yet or not ever formulated in terms of an assertion.” (p.177)
Importantly, Butler does not argue for the end of sexual difference or give reasons for why we shouldn't pursue this framework/reality. For Butler, it isn’t productive to wish away or argue against such a fundamental structuring principle as sexual difference. Sexual difference is a “...necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world.” (p.176)
This brings her to reflect on how sexual difference registers ontologically. She finds that sexual difference is both given and constructed. It resists a clear sense of partition. Sexual difference operates as a chiasm "...but the terms that overlap and blur are perhaps less importantly masculine and feminine than the problematic of construction itself;...” (p.186) Here, sexual difference becomes absorbed in a general problematic of construction. It is that which troubles the constructed, which makes it problematic. “Perhaps… sexual difference registers ontologically in a way that is permanently difficult to determine.” (p.185-6)
Ontologically, sexual difference is not a facticity, nor an effect of facticity but rather a site of contestation in a certain time. (p.185)
Border Phenomena
The problematic of construction evokes a notion of sexual difference as a vacillating border phenomenon demanding re-articulation. The psychic, the somatic and the social dimensions of sexual difference never fully collapse into one and other, nor are they completely distinct. The same goes for “the human” and “the universal”. The admittance of the lesbian into the realm of the universal might indeed undo the human in its present form. But, she argues, this will also be the first step in order to imagine the human beyond its conventional limits. In this way “universality” becomes an antifoundationalism. It both destroys a concept of the universal as eternal and admits what has been its “constitutive outside”.
The Question as a Historical Trajectory
For Butler (and for Irigaray), it isn't desirable to come up with the “correct” answer to the question of sexual difference, but rather to explore the historical trajectory it forms. This is true for the definitions of gender, sex, sexuality, as well. In this way, the question of sexual difference inaugurates a problematic of time. The problematic of time ties into Butler’s belief in language’s progressive possibilities.
Revitalization of Modernity and its Terminology
She looks at the term “universal” as used in a UN platform for NGO meetings. There the term is considered dependent on a consensus, which at first seems to undo the whole idea of universality, in that it comes to mean universal to some people. But perhaps not, she says. Maybe the meaning of “the universal” can never be all-inclusive and maybe it varies culturally? If so, then a field of progressive possibilities opens up between the articulation and the demand for re-articulation of the term.
Can We Use the Term We Question?
Just because we call a term into question doesn’t mean we can’t use it. But why is it that we sometimes feel that way? “Why is it that… [when] a term is dislodged from its foundational place, we will no longer be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves?” (p.181)
Typically Butlerian style she answers her own questions with other rhetorically posed questions; is this because the sense in which terms are assumed is a moral one? Which takes the form of an imperative? A defense against what terrifies us most?? (Yes, yes, yes!)
According to Butler, the human “…must become strange to itself, even monstrous, to reachieve the human on another plane.” This human will not have one, fixed form but continue to change, to vacillate, as gender, sex and sexual difference continue to be negotiated. (p.191-2)
In Response to Rosi Braidotti
⁃ Braidotti thinks that femininity today is associated with a pejorative understanding of its meaning, but that it should be “released into a different future”.
⁃ Butler: But is it fair to say that those who oppose this framework therefore demean femininity, or believe that it can only have a debased meaning?
⁃ They agree that femininity will have multiple possibilities in a future symbolic.
⁃ Butler: Must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this feminine multiplicity to emerge?
⁃ Is butch desire a permutation of feminine desire (Braidotti) or is it a way in which masculinity emerges in women (Butler)?
⁃ Butler: Why is it that Braidotti holds on to the binary frame when it comes to the construction of desire, whereas, on other occasions, she accepts the play of multiple forces? In the case of butch desire, why shouldn’t we be at an edge of sexual difference, for which the language of sexual difference might not suffice?
My questions:
• How does Butler’s notion of sexual difference as vacillating border phenomenon relate to Irigaray’s critique of the ontology of the solid? Does Butler’s notion of an indeterminate status of sexual difference originate from an ontology of the solid or does it fundamentally challenge it? Is this a failure to deal with the question of sexual difference ontologically, or, is this a way to overcome a compulsion to master/appropriate/make known what is real?
Disputes are intrinsic to all democratic enterprises. Instead of trying to settle them once and for all, one should understand how crucial they are to a forward momentum. Behind this view lies the idea that human beings are irreversibly complex and can never truly be united under any one paradigm.
What Is Sexual Difference?
The idea of productive conflicts plays into Irigaray’s saying that sexual difference is the question of our time. Sexual difference is not a given or a premise; it is a question that prompts feminist inquiry, "...[it is] that which is not yet or not ever formulated in terms of an assertion.” (p.177)
Importantly, Butler does not argue for the end of sexual difference or give reasons for why we shouldn't pursue this framework/reality. For Butler, it isn’t productive to wish away or argue against such a fundamental structuring principle as sexual difference. Sexual difference is a “...necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world.” (p.176)
This brings her to reflect on how sexual difference registers ontologically. She finds that sexual difference is both given and constructed. It resists a clear sense of partition. Sexual difference operates as a chiasm "...but the terms that overlap and blur are perhaps less importantly masculine and feminine than the problematic of construction itself;...” (p.186) Here, sexual difference becomes absorbed in a general problematic of construction. It is that which troubles the constructed, which makes it problematic. “Perhaps… sexual difference registers ontologically in a way that is permanently difficult to determine.” (p.185-6)
Ontologically, sexual difference is not a facticity, nor an effect of facticity but rather a site of contestation in a certain time. (p.185)
Border Phenomena
The problematic of construction evokes a notion of sexual difference as a vacillating border phenomenon demanding re-articulation. The psychic, the somatic and the social dimensions of sexual difference never fully collapse into one and other, nor are they completely distinct. The same goes for “the human” and “the universal”. The admittance of the lesbian into the realm of the universal might indeed undo the human in its present form. But, she argues, this will also be the first step in order to imagine the human beyond its conventional limits. In this way “universality” becomes an antifoundationalism. It both destroys a concept of the universal as eternal and admits what has been its “constitutive outside”.
The Question as a Historical Trajectory
For Butler (and for Irigaray), it isn't desirable to come up with the “correct” answer to the question of sexual difference, but rather to explore the historical trajectory it forms. This is true for the definitions of gender, sex, sexuality, as well. In this way, the question of sexual difference inaugurates a problematic of time. The problematic of time ties into Butler’s belief in language’s progressive possibilities.
Revitalization of Modernity and its Terminology
She looks at the term “universal” as used in a UN platform for NGO meetings. There the term is considered dependent on a consensus, which at first seems to undo the whole idea of universality, in that it comes to mean universal to some people. But perhaps not, she says. Maybe the meaning of “the universal” can never be all-inclusive and maybe it varies culturally? If so, then a field of progressive possibilities opens up between the articulation and the demand for re-articulation of the term.
Can We Use the Term We Question?
Just because we call a term into question doesn’t mean we can’t use it. But why is it that we sometimes feel that way? “Why is it that… [when] a term is dislodged from its foundational place, we will no longer be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves?” (p.181)
Typically Butlerian style she answers her own questions with other rhetorically posed questions; is this because the sense in which terms are assumed is a moral one? Which takes the form of an imperative? A defense against what terrifies us most?? (Yes, yes, yes!)
According to Butler, the human “…must become strange to itself, even monstrous, to reachieve the human on another plane.” This human will not have one, fixed form but continue to change, to vacillate, as gender, sex and sexual difference continue to be negotiated. (p.191-2)
In Response to Rosi Braidotti
⁃ Braidotti thinks that femininity today is associated with a pejorative understanding of its meaning, but that it should be “released into a different future”.
⁃ Butler: But is it fair to say that those who oppose this framework therefore demean femininity, or believe that it can only have a debased meaning?
⁃ They agree that femininity will have multiple possibilities in a future symbolic.
⁃ Butler: Must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this feminine multiplicity to emerge?
⁃ Is butch desire a permutation of feminine desire (Braidotti) or is it a way in which masculinity emerges in women (Butler)?
⁃ Butler: Why is it that Braidotti holds on to the binary frame when it comes to the construction of desire, whereas, on other occasions, she accepts the play of multiple forces? In the case of butch desire, why shouldn’t we be at an edge of sexual difference, for which the language of sexual difference might not suffice?
My questions:
• How does Butler’s notion of sexual difference as vacillating border phenomenon relate to Irigaray’s critique of the ontology of the solid? Does Butler’s notion of an indeterminate status of sexual difference originate from an ontology of the solid or does it fundamentally challenge it? Is this a failure to deal with the question of sexual difference ontologically, or, is this a way to overcome a compulsion to master/appropriate/make known what is real?
Butler's Beside Oneself
Butler makes the claim that the problem with violence is twofold; it is a violence which devastates the lives of humans, and it is a violence which is often not recognized as such because of pre-existing conceptions of who is a human. Her solution is thus also twofold; we need to recognize more bodies as human and we need to redefine the norm, ie we need to redefine 'human' to be inclusive of more permutations of it.
Butler's systematic operates under an assumption of ethics which she defines as the question of not, 'what makes my own life more bearable, but when we ask, from a position of power and from the point of view of distributive justice, what makes or ought to make, the lives of others bearable (27)."
The reason we should be concerned with this kind of ethics is that we are each already constituted by being socially situated. "...we are from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own (21)." So we are each concerned with one another because we must be, because our body places us in relation to one another so that we become partially an expression of that relation.
It is the body that both makes it necessary to be in contact with one another and makes us vulnerable to one another. "In a sense, to be a body is to be given over to others even as a body is emphatically 'one's own", that over which we must claim rights of autonomy (20)"
This essential tension between myself and others is echoed in the discourses of power and truth which define relations of self and other through conceptions of humanness which are centered on the body. These discourses make violence either inaccessible to change by creating invisibility of bodies or create the visibility of a subject who can be depicted as oppressed. 'To be oppressed you must first become intelligible (30)." furthermore, "if there are no norms of recognition by which we are recognizable, then it is not possible to persist in one's own being (31)."
Therefore, we need to reconceive the standards of measurement for who counts so that the wrongs done against all can be redressed. 'if we consider that human bodies are not experienced without recourse to some ideality some frame of experience itself...and if we accept that that ideality and frame are socially articulated, we can see how it is that embodiment is not thinkable without a relation to a norm, or a set of norms (28)."
Butler then posits her strategy by continuing, saying "possibilities beyond the norm or, indeed, a different future for the norm itself." thus, "The embodied relation to the norm exercises a transformative potential." Here's how we can actualize that potential:
1) embodiment- 'where the body is not understood as a static...fact but as...a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm (29)"
2) establishing non-nromative sexualities as already present and constituting of sociality which in turn constitutes each of us, as a “defining feature of the social world in its very intelligibility (29).”
3) “Expand notions of kinship beyond heterosexual frame (26)”
4) "to make grief a resource for politics...to allow oneself to extrapolate from this experience of vulnerability to the vulnerability that others suffer (23)."
One other element of this article is a pre-emptive defense against "reductive relativism" which argues that "generalizations themselves do violence to the specificity of the meanings in question (37)." Th defense calls for a "critical democratic project (37)." In other words, Butler reiterates classic liberal arguments for using rights discourse as a liberatory strategy.
1) I cannot exist or survive outside of society- 'I cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me. in this sense, I am outside myself from the outset, and must be in order to survive, and in order to enter into the realm of the possible (32).'
2) I must constitute myself to be legible within society, "to be conceived as persons (32)."
3) I must appeal to society because "we are also dependent on the protection of public and private spaces, on legal sanctions that protect us from violence, on safeguards o various institutional kinds (33)."
4) "to live suggests that life itself requires a set of sheltering norms, and that to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death (34)."
The essential question then-
How can an advocation for the re-articulation of normativity within a paradigm of universalistic legibility of individuals as parts of the total of humanity be compatible with a conception of singularity and difference?
Or in a less biased and more affirmative manner-
How can the notion of recognition, of subjectivity as partially constituted by relationality, be conceived as fluid?
and
How important is recognition to an ontology of change?
Butler's systematic operates under an assumption of ethics which she defines as the question of not, 'what makes my own life more bearable, but when we ask, from a position of power and from the point of view of distributive justice, what makes or ought to make, the lives of others bearable (27)."
The reason we should be concerned with this kind of ethics is that we are each already constituted by being socially situated. "...we are from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own (21)." So we are each concerned with one another because we must be, because our body places us in relation to one another so that we become partially an expression of that relation.
It is the body that both makes it necessary to be in contact with one another and makes us vulnerable to one another. "In a sense, to be a body is to be given over to others even as a body is emphatically 'one's own", that over which we must claim rights of autonomy (20)"
This essential tension between myself and others is echoed in the discourses of power and truth which define relations of self and other through conceptions of humanness which are centered on the body. These discourses make violence either inaccessible to change by creating invisibility of bodies or create the visibility of a subject who can be depicted as oppressed. 'To be oppressed you must first become intelligible (30)." furthermore, "if there are no norms of recognition by which we are recognizable, then it is not possible to persist in one's own being (31)."
Therefore, we need to reconceive the standards of measurement for who counts so that the wrongs done against all can be redressed. 'if we consider that human bodies are not experienced without recourse to some ideality some frame of experience itself...and if we accept that that ideality and frame are socially articulated, we can see how it is that embodiment is not thinkable without a relation to a norm, or a set of norms (28)."
Butler then posits her strategy by continuing, saying "possibilities beyond the norm or, indeed, a different future for the norm itself." thus, "The embodied relation to the norm exercises a transformative potential." Here's how we can actualize that potential:
1) embodiment- 'where the body is not understood as a static...fact but as...a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm (29)"
2) establishing non-nromative sexualities as already present and constituting of sociality which in turn constitutes each of us, as a “defining feature of the social world in its very intelligibility (29).”
3) “Expand notions of kinship beyond heterosexual frame (26)”
4) "to make grief a resource for politics...to allow oneself to extrapolate from this experience of vulnerability to the vulnerability that others suffer (23)."
One other element of this article is a pre-emptive defense against "reductive relativism" which argues that "generalizations themselves do violence to the specificity of the meanings in question (37)." Th defense calls for a "critical democratic project (37)." In other words, Butler reiterates classic liberal arguments for using rights discourse as a liberatory strategy.
1) I cannot exist or survive outside of society- 'I cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me. in this sense, I am outside myself from the outset, and must be in order to survive, and in order to enter into the realm of the possible (32).'
2) I must constitute myself to be legible within society, "to be conceived as persons (32)."
3) I must appeal to society because "we are also dependent on the protection of public and private spaces, on legal sanctions that protect us from violence, on safeguards o various institutional kinds (33)."
4) "to live suggests that life itself requires a set of sheltering norms, and that to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death (34)."
The essential question then-
How can an advocation for the re-articulation of normativity within a paradigm of universalistic legibility of individuals as parts of the total of humanity be compatible with a conception of singularity and difference?
Or in a less biased and more affirmative manner-
How can the notion of recognition, of subjectivity as partially constituted by relationality, be conceived as fluid?
and
How important is recognition to an ontology of change?
Gender Regulations - Judith Butler
Intro to Gender Regulations:
Butler’s intro to Gender Regulations broadly outlines the finer points to be further enunciated and begins by posing the question of gender’s origin: whether it precedes or follows the formation of regulation and at what point subjection is engendered. She early on invokes Foucaultian concepts of regulatory power’s ability to legislate and produce subjects. She begins to speak to the phrase “gender is a norm” and continues to define a norm as distinct from a law and a rule and that it lends an individual social intelligibility. Though norms demarcate that which is un/acceptable within social bounds, one can never escape these classifications and exist outside of the norm since individuals are defined by its terms. Butler determines that “gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes” (42). Restrictive notions of gender that create a binary system of masculine/feminine endeavor to naturalize such distinctions and to eradicate any sort of disruptions to the system as transgender and gender blending. She concludes that this attempt to undermine the binary system has been met with resolutions that provide for a multitudinous array of gender as well as the Irigarayian (sp?) notion of gender escaping quantitative description
Symbolic positions and social norms :
Butler defines the symbolic according to Levi-Strauss and Lacan as the:
-model for kinship relations and prohibitions (Oedipal)
-wants to establish itself as universal primordial law
-inalterable
-irreducible to varying social/biological forms
-linguistic (elementary structures that allow one to enter into language and thus intelligibility within kinship relations)
-impossible to contest in its tautology
Butler argues against the ways in which Lacanian psychoanalysis’ staid rules don’t allow for a transformation of gender and further ignore the “radical alterations of kinship”, thus denying a rewriting of psychoanalysis. She also locates the symbolic system’s prohibitions, namely incest taboo, as the self-inscribed foil to psychoanalysis. In contrast the social, like the norm, is subject to self-scrutiny and revision though it is heavily embedded and disguised within the instantiation of each act. Taking up a discourse between Foucault and Ewald, Butler elaborates on the extent to which norms operate within juridical (implementation) and legislative (laws) instances. Though laws define norms, it is their implementation that allows for their normalization and transformation.
Norms and the Problem of Abstraction:
Here Butler questions what exactly shapes the disciplinary discourse and outlines how the quantitative commonality through comparisons within the relation and context of others constitutes a norm. The norm thus cannot be realized as an abstraction preceding the norm but constituted within the action in reality. The abstraction of which Butler speaks is the tacit underlying power of norms that determine the bounds of acceptability.
Gender Norms:
Butler explains further how gender is normalized through regulation by institutionalization, surgical “correction”, and law. Following from seemingly protective laws pertaining to sexual harassment [male/agressors female/victims] MacKinnon concludes that the stance taken within such laws solidifies a “hierarchical structure of heterosexuality and for butler the mechanism that produces gender. This rationale equates gender with sexuality within a heterosexual world and produces the model feminine woman and masculine male. However, Butler holds that sexual practice and the presence of transgender breakdown the causal link btwn gender and sexuality.
Butler contests MacKinnon’s heterosexual hegemonic system that inadvertently institutes a gender norm, and too escapes essentialism by qualifying individuals according to sexuality (sexual relations) beyond male and female coupling. However, if one can never escape the norm and must always be defined by its terms, is Butler really just broadening the scope of normalization to be more all-inclusive?
Butler’s intro to Gender Regulations broadly outlines the finer points to be further enunciated and begins by posing the question of gender’s origin: whether it precedes or follows the formation of regulation and at what point subjection is engendered. She early on invokes Foucaultian concepts of regulatory power’s ability to legislate and produce subjects. She begins to speak to the phrase “gender is a norm” and continues to define a norm as distinct from a law and a rule and that it lends an individual social intelligibility. Though norms demarcate that which is un/acceptable within social bounds, one can never escape these classifications and exist outside of the norm since individuals are defined by its terms. Butler determines that “gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes” (42). Restrictive notions of gender that create a binary system of masculine/feminine endeavor to naturalize such distinctions and to eradicate any sort of disruptions to the system as transgender and gender blending. She concludes that this attempt to undermine the binary system has been met with resolutions that provide for a multitudinous array of gender as well as the Irigarayian (sp?) notion of gender escaping quantitative description
Symbolic positions and social norms :
Butler defines the symbolic according to Levi-Strauss and Lacan as the:
-model for kinship relations and prohibitions (Oedipal)
-wants to establish itself as universal primordial law
-inalterable
-irreducible to varying social/biological forms
-linguistic (elementary structures that allow one to enter into language and thus intelligibility within kinship relations)
-impossible to contest in its tautology
Butler argues against the ways in which Lacanian psychoanalysis’ staid rules don’t allow for a transformation of gender and further ignore the “radical alterations of kinship”, thus denying a rewriting of psychoanalysis. She also locates the symbolic system’s prohibitions, namely incest taboo, as the self-inscribed foil to psychoanalysis. In contrast the social, like the norm, is subject to self-scrutiny and revision though it is heavily embedded and disguised within the instantiation of each act. Taking up a discourse between Foucault and Ewald, Butler elaborates on the extent to which norms operate within juridical (implementation) and legislative (laws) instances. Though laws define norms, it is their implementation that allows for their normalization and transformation.
Norms and the Problem of Abstraction:
Here Butler questions what exactly shapes the disciplinary discourse and outlines how the quantitative commonality through comparisons within the relation and context of others constitutes a norm. The norm thus cannot be realized as an abstraction preceding the norm but constituted within the action in reality. The abstraction of which Butler speaks is the tacit underlying power of norms that determine the bounds of acceptability.
Gender Norms:
Butler explains further how gender is normalized through regulation by institutionalization, surgical “correction”, and law. Following from seemingly protective laws pertaining to sexual harassment [male/agressors female/victims] MacKinnon concludes that the stance taken within such laws solidifies a “hierarchical structure of heterosexuality and for butler the mechanism that produces gender. This rationale equates gender with sexuality within a heterosexual world and produces the model feminine woman and masculine male. However, Butler holds that sexual practice and the presence of transgender breakdown the causal link btwn gender and sexuality.
Butler contests MacKinnon’s heterosexual hegemonic system that inadvertently institutes a gender norm, and too escapes essentialism by qualifying individuals according to sexuality (sexual relations) beyond male and female coupling. However, if one can never escape the norm and must always be defined by its terms, is Butler really just broadening the scope of normalization to be more all-inclusive?
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