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?
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7 comments:
Butler seems to be accusing MacKinnon of reinstating gender norms in a certain way -which Vanessa describes -because she (MacKinnon) doesn't account for instances that disturb the link between sexuality and gender (for example transgender and anyone who isn't heterosexual). In other words, by focusing too much on sexuality as the place where gender is formed, MacKinnon loses sight of other ways in which gender is produced. Is the accusation that MacKinnon's focus is too narrow? Perhaps we can accept MacKinnon's theories as too narrow, but nevertheless describing a certain way in which gender and sexuality are produced (one way among others).
Also, if the normative space "knows no outside" (53) as Butler claims, how can we theorize resistance to norms? If the "abnormal" isn't outside the norm, but part of reinstating the norm, why/how do transgressions of gender and sexuality deviate/resist/disrupt/trouble dominant structures?
Vanessa leaves us with the question: 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 be more all-inclusive?
Butler isn't broadening the scope of normalization to be more all-inclusive, however, my disagreement may lie in the issue of language and terminology. By outing the paradox of normalization Butler makes room for innumerable multiple genders. The key difference is that the norm is not the regulating force. The regulation is based on operations within fields of power such as discourse that conflates the male/female binary as the exclusive way of understanding gender which becomes the norm and is thus naturalized. It is through the defining of the terms norm and regulation and their relationship to power and symbolism in culture that Butler disables the use of norm as an exclusive concept.
As I have been so hard on Butler in my last three remarks I will here indicate a point where I feel she is very strong. On page 42 she writes: "To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the 'masculine' and 'feminine' is precisely to miss the critical point..." The point being that this binary is already the derivative of social regulations. I think that with this analytic filter we can return to the first writers of the semester and engage them with another perspective. Although we have remarked that Irigaray is not intending to speak on gender, we also know that she does not parse these terms. Perhaps Butler here gives us a method to nuance Irigaray and subsequently loosen her ontology.
Apologies for being a notorious sunday poster. This comment relates to the three first texts I have read so far:
Carolynn asks - if the normative space "knows no outside", how can we theorize resistance to norms? I've been interested in understanding the same thing. "What" is it that demands transformation, if we are constituted in and by the norm? There was one paragraph in Beside Oneself that I thought was revealing. On page 31, Butler says:
"I would say that it is not a question merely of producing a new future for genders that do not yet exist. The genders I have in mind have been in existence for a long time, but they have not been admitted into the terms that govern reality. [...] Because the norms governing reality have not admitted these forms to be real,.."
So there are genders that exist but are not real. To me, this indicates a strange relationship between the existential and the ontological in Butler's thinking. She later addresses this relationship on page 42 in Gender Regulations and calls it a paradox:
"The question of what it is to be outside the norm [unreal] poses a paradox for thinking, for if the norm renders the social field intelligible and normalizes that field for us, then being outside the norm is in some sense being defined still in relation to it [the real]."
The real and the unreal are related and that is why reality is thought of as a border phenomenon. This is also why the future requires a certain openness and unknowingness to what is real. "What" demands transformation is what has been excluded from the real and what demands inclusion. The boundary is therefore porous and fluctuating. Rather than talking about an ontology, Butler seems to be referring to an existentiality, when she talks about a dimension that exceeds or transcends reality as a limit to it. Ontology seems only to refer to categorical thinking, the symbolic and language. Existence houses a wider range of possibilities derived from fantasy - the articulation of the possible beyond the actual present - creativity and "a play of forces which are importantly unconscious" (p194 The End of Sexual Difference). It is also in this dimension that one becomes aware of something larger than oneself, that one is always beside oneself, ec-static. What precedes the subject is the social world to which one is at once dependent and attached. The body "upon which language falters" belongs to this realm too (p.198).
Since she never attempts to establish a different ontological thinking than the one we currently live in, we end up with a less encouraging promise for the future to "rearticulate or resignify the basic categories of ontology, of being human, of being gendered, of being recognizably sexual, to the extent that we submit ourselves to a process of cultural translation." (p.38 Beside Oneself)
And maybe we shouldn't hope for more?
Also in response to Carolynn's question and Jenny's comment, I think Butler means to articulate that within the dominant ontological framework, there is no place for resistance, no formulation of outside positions. Additionally, outside positions can't but frame themselves in relation to (and thus, to a certain extent, within) the dominant ontological framework. I agree with Anderson that Butler's analysis sheds new light on Irigaray's solution to this challenge.
In response to Jenny's last question, perhaps the best way to deconstruct the current normative ontology is to envision an alternative that challenges it at its core. This seems to be Irigaray's methodology: by speaking the feminine, we will move away from the old ontological framework to reveal new possibilities.
Subversion is always re-incorporated, in a sense, because its deviance is always measured in terms of its distance from the normal and is then used to further butress the idea of normal against being able to say, "thats NOT normal"- but I don't think recognizing that nessecarilly "broadens the normative scope". Butler does point to the fact that norms are reproduced by bodily practices- (by "us", she seems almost to say) and that because the norms only get reproduced as we act them out in our own practices, we can choose to "practice" differently and thus produce something different: "to the extent that gender norms are reproduced, they are invoked and cited by bodily practices that also have the capacity to to alter norms in the course of their citation"p52.
So, she is giving agency to our "bodily practices"- if the reproduction of gender norms is written there, then it can be unwritten there too?(.) Going back to "Beside Oneself", she seems to be saying that in order to stop reproducing gender norms as they are now, we have to be able to "sit" with the disorientation of things being up in the air, with the fear of "yeilding what is most fundemental" to what she calls a sense of self and world- to, me this means that everyone needs to meditate on the idea of "staying" with discomfort- inviting it in like a dinner guest, making room for it, sitting with it-
we are "undone" by eachother, and we need to learn how to be comfortable with being unraveled.
PS> Jenny, I really like how you connected the different peices in your post- it made me think about what is being said in a different way
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