Gender Theory Undoing Gender
Gender Theory - Undoing Gender
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist, born on February 24, 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio. She is an influential figure in the fields of philosophy, feminist theory, and gender studies. Her work focuses on issues related to gender identity, gender performativity, and the politics of sexuality. 1. Education: Butler studied Philosophy at Yale University. 2. Highlighted work: Her most influential work is the book “Gender Problems: Feminism and the subversion of identity” .1990., in which she develops the theory of gender performativity . In this book, she argues that gender is not something innate or biologically determined, but rather constructed through repeated, performative acts . 3. Gender performativity theory: Butler maintains that gender is a performance that is constantly repeated and that becomes a fundamental part of a person’s identity . This implies that gender is a social and cultural construct rather than a fixed characteristic.
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution .1988. Gender Trouble .1990. Imitation and Gender Insubordination .1991. Bodies That Matter .1993. Excitable Speech .1997. Precarious Life .2004. Undoing Gender .2004. Giving an Account of Oneself .2005. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly .2015. The Force of Nonviolence .2020.
Gender Trouble
Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire
I. “Women” as the Subject of Feminism
II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate
IV. Theorizing the Binary , the Unitary, and Beyond
V. Identity , Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement
Prohibition , Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix
I. Structuralism’s Critical Exchange
II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade
III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender
IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification
V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power
Subversive Bodily Acts
I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva
II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity
III. Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex
IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions
Conclusion: From Parody To Politics
Bodies That Matter
1 Bodies that Matter
2 The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary
3 Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex
4 Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion
5 “Dangerous Crossing ”: Willa Cather’s Masculine Names
6 Passing , Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
7 Arguing with the Real
8 Critically Queer
UndoingGender
Introduction: Acting in Concert 1. Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy 2. Gender Regulations 3. Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality 4. Undiagnosing Gender 5. Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual? 6. Longing for Recognition 7. Quandaries of the Incest Taboo 8. Bodily Confessions 9. The End of Sexual Difference ? 10. The Question of Social Transformation 11. Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?
Excerpts from Undoing Gender
If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and …
If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own.
But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself).
If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the condi…
If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do something with what is done with me. This does not mean that I can remake the world so that I become its maker. That fantasy of godlike power only refuses the ways we are constituted, invariably and from the start, by what is before us and outside of us.
My agency does not consist in denying this condition of my constitution. If I have any agency, it is…
My agency does not consist in denying this condition of my constitution. If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.
In fact, individuals depend on institutions of social support to exercise self-determination regardi…
In fact, individuals depend on institutions of social support to exercise self-determination regarding the body and gender they should have and maintain, so that self-determination becomes a plausible concept only in the context of a social world that supports and allows this exercise. of agency. On the other hand (and as a consequence), it turns out that changing the institutions through which humanly viable choice is established and maintained is a prerequisite for the exercise of self-determination. In this sense, individual agency is linked to social criticism and social transformation .
Who is imagining whom, and for what purpose
Terms such as “masculine” and “feminine” are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose.
Fantasy
It is important to remember that psychoanalysis can also serve as a critique of cultural adaptation as well as a theory for understanding the ways in which sexuality fails to conform to the social norms by which it is regulated. Moreover, there is no better theory for grasping the workings of fantasy construed not as a set of projections on an internal screen but as part of human relationality itself. It is on the basis of this insight that we can come to understand how fantasy is essential to an experience of one’s own body, or that of another, as gendered.
Not-knowing
Finally, psychoanalysis can work in the service of a conception of humans as bearing an irreversible humility in their relations to others and to themselves. There is always a dimension of ourselves and our relation to others that we cannot know, and this not-knowing persists with us as a condition of existence and, indeed, of survivability. We are, to an extent, driven by what we do not know, and cannot know, and this “drive” . Trieb. is precisely what is neither exclusively biological nor cultural, but always the site of their dense convergence. If I am always constituted by norms that are not of my making, then I have to understand the ways that constitution takes place. The staging and structuring of affect and desire is clearly one way in which norms work their way into what feels most properly to belong to me.
I am other to myself
The fact that I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself follows from the fact that the sociality of norms exceeds my inception and my demise, sustaining a temporal and spatial fieldof operation that exceeds my self-understanding. Norms do not exercise a final or fatalistic control, at least, not always. The fact that desire is not fully determined corresponds with the psychoanalytic understanding that sexuality is never fully captured by any regulation.
Improvisational possibility within a field of constraints…
Improvisational possibility within a field of constraints
It emerges precisely as an improvisational possibility within a field of constraints. Sexuality, though, is not found to be “in” those constraints as something might be “in” a container: it is extinguished by constraints, but also mobilized and incited by constraints, even sometimes requiring them to be produced again and again.
The subject as an effect of the signifier
Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan or project, larger than one’s own knowing. Something takes hold, but is this something coming from the self, from the outside, or from some region where the difference between the two is indeterminable? What is it that claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?
We are done, undone, redone by each other
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do .and as we must. we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of another.
Are not quite ever only our own
The body can be the agency and instrument of all these as well, or the site where “doing” and “being done to” become equivocal. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, bearing their imprint, formed within the crucible of social life, the body is only later, and with some uncertainty, that to which I lay claim as my own. Indeed, if I seek to deny the fact that my body relates me—against my will and from the start—to others I do not choose to have in proximity to myself .the subway or the tube are excellent examples of this dimension of sociality., and if I build a notion of “autonomy” on the basis of the denial of this sphere or a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then do I precisely deny the social and political conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy?
If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others, impressing them as well, and in ways that are not always clearly delineable, in forms that are not fully predictable?
Transmission, inheritance, social ties
I make the argument in “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual” in this volume that kinship ties that bind persons to one another may well be no more or less than the intensification of community ties, may or may not be based on enduring or exclusive sexual relations, may well consist of ex-lovers, non-lovers, friends, and community members. The relations of kinship cross the boundaries between community and family and sometimes redefine the meaning of friendship as well. When these modes of intimate association produce sustaining webs of relationships, they constitute a “breakdown” of traditional kinship that displaces the presumption that biological and sexual relations structure kinship centrally. In addition, the incest taboo that governs kinship ties, producing a necessary exogamy, does not necessarily operate among friends in the same way or, for that matter, in networks of communities.
Enduring Ties
On the contrary, sexuality outside the field of monogamy well may open us to a different sense of community, intensifying the question of where one finds enduring ties, and so become the condition for an attunement to losses that exceed a discretely private realm.
Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread
Language Game
Improvisation and authorship
Me and the Other
Agency
Social Transformation, Possibility, Participate, Reiterate, transform
Symbols, signs, circulation, use, function
Fantasy
Not knowing, not all, not all
I am another to myself
Possibility of improvisation within a field of restrictions
Subject and its significant determination
We are made, unmade, remade by each other
Public dimension of the body
Transmission, inheritance, social ties
Surplus Jouissance
Surplus Jouissance: improvisation, obtaining something that is useless in a logical game. Performance.
Indeed, individuals rely on institutions of social support in order to exercise self-determination w…
Indeed, individuals rely on institutions of social support in order to exercise self-determination with respect to what body and what gender to have and maintain, so that self-determination becomes a plausible concept only in the context of a social world that supports and enables that exercise of agency. Conversely (and as a consequence), it turns out that changing the institutions by which humanly viable choice is established and maintained is a prerequisite for the exercise of self-determination. In this sense, individual agency is bound up with social critique and social transformation. One only determines “one’s own” sense of gender to the extent that social norms exist that support and enable that act of claiming gender for oneself. One is dependent on this “outside” to lay claim to what is one’s own. The self must, in this way, be dispossessed in sociality in order to take possession of itself.
A concurrent operation of gender norms can be seen in the DSM IV’s Gender Identity Disorder diagnosi…
A concurrent operation of gender norms can be seen in the DSM IV’s Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis. This diagnosis that has, for the most part, taken over the role of monitoring signs of incipient homosexuality in children assumes that “gender dysphoria” is a psychological disorder simply because someone of a given gender manifests attributes of another gender or a desire to live as another gender. This imposes a model of coherent gendered life that demeans the complex ways in which gendered lives are crafted and lived. The diagnosis, however, is crucial for many individuals who seek insurance support for sex reassignment surgery or treatment, or who seek a legal change in status. As a result, the diagnostic means by which transsexuality is attributed implies a pathologization, but undergoing that pathologizing process constitutes one of the important ways in which the desire to change one’s sex might be satisfied. The critical question thus becomes, how might the world be reorganized so that this conflict can be ameliorated?