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.