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?