Judith Butler Part III Chapters III, IV & Conclusion

Butler beings Part III with a discussion of Simone De Beauvoir’s thoughts: “gender is the variable cultural construction of sex, the myriad and open possibilities of cultural meaning occasioned by a sexed body”. She considers gender to be to something that one becomes, an activity in itself, rather than an activity, or a substantial thing. She runs across the classic problem—the avoidance of “fate of an impossible utopian project”—but suggests that with a new language we can resist the limitations of the binary world we live in today.

She goes on to explore Monique Wittig’s thoughts on how “one is not born a woman”. She claims there is no reason to divide up human bodies into male and female sexes. This process is merely a habit of heteronormative society which is revitalized through our economic, political and social institutions. And therefore there should be no distinction between sex and gender. She delves into the concept of being “naturalized but not natural” (153). Stating that a woman “only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation to a man; that relation is heterosexuality”. She says that sex is oppression to women, gays and lesbians, and in order to fix this, women need to assume the ‘authoritative’ position and overthrow the category of sex. “The repeated practice of naming sexual difference has created this appearance of natural division. The naming of sex is an act of domination and compulsion, an institutionalized performative that both creates and legislates social reality by requiring that discursive / perceptual construction of bodies in accord with principles of sexual difference”. (157)

She concludes “we are compelled in our bodies and our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us…’men’ and ‘women’ are political categories, and not natural facts” (157).

Wittig argues that concepts are formed and maintained in the realm of the materiality of language. And this language works in a material way to construct the social world. (162). She discusses the “universalization” of language. It is in language that we are lessoning the availability of gender / sex identity and promoting universal points of view. She states this clearly when she says “To universalize that point of view of women is simultaneously to destroy the category of women and to establish the possibility of a new humanism”. (162) Butler suggests that literary works give Wittig an opportunity to experiment with the pronouns within this universal language. For example in her book Les Guerilleres, she changes “he” to “il” and states that this switch is “not to feminize the world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language” (163). Wittig argues that the only way to effectively fight this heterosexual world is to take over this universal point of view and make it ‘lesbianized’. Butler brings up a good point when she quotes Wittig: “Language has a dual possibility: It can be used to assert a true and inclusive hierarchy in inclusive universality of persons, or it can institute a hierarchy in which only some persons are eligible to speak and others, by virtue of their exclusion from the universal point of view, cannot “speak” without simultaneously deauthorizing that speech”. (164). The main point Wittig offers is that the only way to leave the current heterosexual language context is to become lesbian or gay, because participation in heterosexuality can only be a repetition of this heteronormative oppression. Butler disagrees with this statement, pointing out that there are many other sources that generate power discourses that construct and structure homosexuality and heterosexuality. Butler also acknowledges that Wittig’s idea of everyone becoming gay or lesbian (and therefore no longer knowing your ‘sex’) “makes sex an impossible category of identity”. (166).

Butler goes on to discuss Wittig’s interpretation of lesbianism and what it means to be butch / femme. She sees lesbianism as a refusal of heterosexuality, but Butler argues “If sexuality and power are co-extensive, and if lesbian sexuality is no more and no less constructed than other modes of sexuality, then there is no promise of limitless pleasure after the shackles of the category of sex have been thrown off” (169), arguing that lesbianism depends on the terms that Wittig suggests it is attempting to transcend. One of Wittig’s main goals is to end the divide between materiality and representation that has for so long that portrayed “straight” thinking. She wants to find a way to offer a “deconstructive and reconstructive set of strategies for configuring bodies to contest the power of heterosexuality” (171). Again, Wittig stresses the importance of breaking down the binary system of categories through lesbianism.

In part IV (Bodily inscriptions, performative subversions) raises many questions about the significance of the “body”. Is the body shaped by gender / sex discourses or political forces? What denotes “the body” as subject to signification? Why are gender significations inscribed as the “body”? Wittig’s opinion is that __ Foucault suggests that the body is “figured as a surface and the scene of a cultural inscription”. He also claims the body as “always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history…and history is the creation of values and meanings by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body” (177). If the body is a reflection of cultural values then this medium must be destroyed in order to rid the body of this subjection, and enable culture to move beyond it. In a similar way, Mary Douglas believes that the body is recognized through cultural codes, and “any discourse that establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of exchange that define what it is that constitutes bodies” (178). Her point suggests, in Butler’s opinion, the body is always limited by these taboos and is trapped by the hegemonic discourse of our social world. Douglas notes that all social systems are in fact susceptible or at risk in their limits and boundaries. We can see this in looking at the way society relates AIDS to gays and not to lesbians. Butler goes on to discuss how “inner” and “outer” inevitably exist and re-establish each other through maintained and damaged boundaries. She asks “what language is “inner space” figured? What kind of figuration is it, and through what figure of the body is it signified?” (183). Eventually, Butler comes back to the notion that gender is nothing but a fabrication of social institutions through which we are all produced and effected by. She suggests drag as a way of undermining and almost mocking this true notion about our gendered society. She asks if gender is a performance, then what kind of performance will show gender itself in a way that destabilizes the “naturalized categories of identity”. And what language is there to describe and embody this performance? She ends the chapter in contemplation of how gender is an act, and how “this repetition is at once a reenactment and re-experience of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimization” (191).

In the conclusion Butler revisits the idea of universality, and discusses the draw backs in using “we” because it leaves no room for “internal complexity” and “indeterminacy” of individuals. I wonder if there is no normative or unitary concept of "woman," can we have feminism as movement/theory? If there's no single "woman," then there can be no single feminism. So in this way how can we, as individuals, progress and live out one common goal of feminism ?