CPLT 110

Literary Analysis and Criticism

Final Paper Assignment

Due Date: Sunday, March 22, 2020, by 11:59pm via iLearn

Write a four-to-five-page paper (1000 to 1250 words, double-spaced, in MLA format) on one of the topics listed below. You must include a bibliography of the works cited in your essay. General reminders: present a strong, original thesis based on your reading of the texts (or film) and demonstrate the validity of your claim by providing direct evidence from the works in question (use textual evidence to support your claims instead of citing your own life-experience). Also, provide appropriate page numbers for all quotations or background descriptions of specific passages, and include a works cited page to your paper (refer to the MLA Handbook for guidance on how to do both). If you choose to consult secondary sources from the

Library or Internet, you must cite them appropriately.1) Freud’s “The Uncanny” and Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”: Reread Freud’s “The Uncanny” and Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” taking the following questions into consideration: What is “the uncanny” and how does it function in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman”? What explanation does Freud give for his emphasis on eyes and how do eyes, or vision, function in Hoffmann’s story? What implications does the story’s focus on vision have in terms of the act of reading the story itself? In other words, how do Hoffmann’s words in the story manipulate the reader’s vision?

2) Gender, Race and Ridley Scott’s ​Blade Runner​: rescreen Ridley Scott’s ​Blade Runner and reread Judith Butler’s “The Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire” and Frantz Fanon’s “The Negro and Recognition” taking the following questions into consideration: In what sense and on what grounds does Butler call gender a “performative” and Fanon call “the negro” a “comparison”? How do these issues of gender and race arise in Scott’s ​Blade Runner​, even if only implicitly? What does this film suggest about human subjectivity when it is rendered almost indistinguishable from an automaton (i.e. the replicants)?

Thinking Gende

r

Edited by Linda J. Nicholson

Also published in the series

FeminismlPostmodernism
Linda J. Nicholson

JUDITH BUTLER
FEMINISM AND THE
SUBVERSION
OF IDENTITY

~ ..

ROUTLEDGE New York London

First published in 1990 by

Routledge
an imprint of
Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc.
29 West 35 Street
New York, NY 10001

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE

© 1990 by Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized In any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now
kno,:n or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Butler, Judith P.
Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity I by

Judith Butler.
p. cm.-(Thinking gender)

Includes index.
ISBN 0-415-90042-5; ISBN 0-415-90043-3 (pbk.)
1. Feminism-Philosophy. 2. Sex role. 3. Sex differences

(Psychology) 4. Identity (Psychology) 5. Femininity (Psychology)
I. Title. II. Series.
HQl154.B88 1989
305.3-dc20 89-6438

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data also available.

Contents

Preface
1 Subjects of Sex/GenderlDesire

i “Women” as the Subject of Feminism
11 The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
1Il 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

2 Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the
Heterosexual Matrix
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

3 Subversive Bodily Acts
i The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva
11 Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics

of Sexual Discontinuity
1Il Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex
IV Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions

Conclusion: From Parody to Politics

Notes

Index

VB

1
1
6
7

13
16
25

35
38
43
57
66
72

79
79

93
111
128

142
150
170

xii / Preface

edgement also goes to Linda Singer, whose persistent radicalism has
been invaluable Sandra Bartky for her work and her timely words of
encouragement: Linda Nicholson for her editorial and critical advice,
and Linda Anderson for her acute political intuitions. I also thank
the following individuals, friends, and colleagues who shaped and
supported my thinking: Eloise Moore Agger, Ines Azar, Peter Caws,
Nancy F. Cott, Kathy Natanson, Lois Natanson, Maurice Natanson,
Stacy Pies, Josh Shapiro, Margaret Soltan, Robert V. Stone, Richard
Vann and Eszti Votaw. I thank Sandra Schmidt for her fine work in
helping to prepare this manuscript, and Meg Gilbert for her assistance.
I also thank Maureen MacGrogan for encouraging this project and
others with her humor, patience, and fine editorial guidance.

As before, I thank Wendy Owen for her relentless imagination,
keen criticism, and for the provocation of her work.

1
Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.
-Simone de Beauvoir

Strictly speaking, “women” cannot be said to exist.
-Julia Kristeva

Woman does not have a sex.
-Luce Irigaray

The deployment of sexuality … established this notion of sex.
-Michel Foucault

The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.
-Monique Wittig

i. “Women” as the Subject of Feminism

For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some
existing identity, understood through the category of women, who
not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but
constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued.
But politics and representation are controversial terms. On the one
hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political
process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as
political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative
function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what
is assumed to be true about the category of women. For feminist
theory, the development of a language that fully or adequately repre-
sents women has seemed necessary to foster the political visibility
of women. This has seemed obviously important considering the
pervasive cultural condition in which women’s lives were either mis-
represented or not represented at all.

Recently, this prevailing conception of the relation between feminist
theory and politics has come under challenge from within feminist
discourse. The very subject of women is no longer understood in
stable or abiding terms. There is a great deal of material that not only
questions the viability of “the subject” as the ultimate candidate for
representation or, indeed, liberation, but there is very little agreement
after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the
category of women. The domains of political and linguistic “represen-
tation” set out in advance the criterion by which subjects themselves
are formed, with the result that representation is extended only to
what can be acknowledged as a subject. In other words, the qualifica-

2 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

tions for being a subject must first be met before representation can
be extended.

Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produce the
subjects they subsequently come to represent.! Juridical notions of
power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms-that
is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control and even
“protection” of individuals related to that political structure through
the contingent and retractable operation of choice. But the subjects
regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them,
formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements
of those structures. If this analysis is right, then the juridical formation
of language and politics that represents women as “the subject” of
feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version
of representational politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be
discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed
to facilitate its emancipation. This becomes politically problematic
if that system can be shown to produce gendered subjects along
a differential axis of domination or to produce subjects who are
presumed to be masculine. In such cases, an uncritical appeal to
such a system for the emancipation of “women” will be clearly self-
defeating.

The question of “the subject” is crucial for politics, and for feminist
politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably pro-
duced through certain exclusionary practices that do not “show”
once the juridical structure of politics has been established. In other
words, the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain
legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are
effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes
juridical structures as their foundation. Juridical power inevitably
“produces” what it claims merely to represent; hence, politics must
be concerned with this dual function of power: the juridical and the
productive. In effect, the law produces and then conceals the notion
of “a subject before the law”z in order to invoke that discursive
formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently
legitimates that law’s own regulatory hegemony. It is not enough to
inquire into how women might become more fully represented in
language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how
the category of “women,” the subject of feminism, is produced and
restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipa-
tion is sought.

Indeed, the question of women as the subject of feminism raises the
possibility that there may not be a subject who stands “before” the
law, awaiting representation in or by the law. Perhaps the subject, as

—
Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 3

well as the invocation of a temporal “before,” is constituted by the
law as the fictive foundation of its own claim to legitimacy. The
prevailing assumption of the ontological integrity of the subject before
the law might be understood as the contemporary trace of the state
of nature hypothesis, that foundationalist fable constitutive of the
juridical structures of classical liberalism. The performative invoca-
tion of a nonhistorical “before” becomes the foundational premise
that guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent
to be governed and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social
contract.

Apart from the foundationalist fictions that support the notion of
the subject, however, there is the political problem that feminism
encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common
identity. Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of
those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in
the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause
for anxiety. As Denise Riley’s title suggests, Am I That Name? is a
question produced by the very possibility of the name’s multiple
significations.’ If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the
term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person”
transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender
is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different histori-
cal contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic,
sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.
As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the
political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced
and maintained.

The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for
feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist
cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression
of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or
hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination. The no-
tion of a universal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years
for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the
concrete cultural contexts in which it exists. Where those various
contexts have been consulted within such theories, it has been to find
“examples” or “illustrations” of a universal principle that is assumed
from the start. That form of feminist theorizing has come under
criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cul-
tures to support highly Western notions of oppression, but because
they tend as well to construct a “Third World” or even an “Orient”
in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of
an essential, non-Western barbarism. The urgency of feminism to

4 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to st.rengthen the
appearance of feminism’s own claims to be representattve has occa-
sionally motivated the shortcut to a categorial or fictive universality
of the structure of domination, held to produce women’s common
subjugated experience.

Although the claim of universal patriarchy no longer enjoys the kind
of credibility it once did, the notion of a generally shared conception of
“women,” the corollary to that framework, has been much more
difficult to displace. Certainly, there have been plenty of debates:
Is there some commonality among “women” that preexists their
oppression, or do “women” have a bond by virtue of their oppression
alone? Is there a specificity to women’s cultures that is independent
of their subordination by hegemonic, masculinist cultures? Are the
specificity and integrity of women’s cultural or linguistic practices
always specified 2gainst and, hence, within the terms of some more
dominant cultural formation? If there is a region of the “specifically
feminine,” one that is both differentiated from the masculine as such
and recognizable in its difference by an unmarked and, hence, pre-
sumed universality of “women”? The masculine/feminine binary con-
stitutes not only the exclusive framework in which that specificity can
be recognized, but in every other way the “specificity” of the feminine
is once again fully decontextualized and separated off analytically
and politically from the constitution of class, race, ethnicity, and other
axes of power relations that both constitute “identity” and make the
singular notion of identity a misnomer.”

My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the
~ \ subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of

\ the representational discourse in which it functions. Indeed, the
premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood
as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple
refusals to accept the category. These domains of exclusion reveal
the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction,
even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory
purposes. Indeed, the fragmentation within feminism and the para-
doxical opposition to feminism from “women” whom feminism
claims to represent suggest the necessary limits of identity politics.
The suggestion that feminism can seek wider representation for a
subject that it itself constructs has the ironic consequence that
feminist goals risk failure by refusing to take account of the
constitutive powers of their own representational claims. This
problem is not ameliorated through an appeal to the category of
women for merely “strategic” purposes, for strategies always have
meanings that exceed the purposes for which they are intended. In

–
Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 5

this case, exclusion itself might qualify as such an unintended
yet consequential meaning. By conforming to a requirement of
representational politics that feminism articulate a stable subject,
feminism thus opens itself to charges of gross misrepresentation.

Obviously, the political task is not to refuse representational poli-
tics-as if we could. The juridical structures of language and politics
constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position
outside this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating
practices. As such, the critical point of departure is the historical
present, as Marx put it. And the task is to formulate within this
constituted frame a critique of the categories of identity that contem-
porary juridical structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize.

Perhaps there is an opportunity at this juncture of cultural politics,
a period that some would call “postfeminist,” to reflect from within
a feminist perspective on the injunction to construct a subject of
feminism. Within feminist political practice, a radical rethinking of
the ontological constructions of identity appears to be necessary in
order to formulate a representational politics that might revive femi-
nism on other grounds. On the other hand, it may be time to entertain
a radical critique that seeks to free feminist theory from the necessity
of having to construct a single or abiding ground which is invariably
contested by those identity positions or anti-identity positions that it
invariably excludes. Do the exclusionary practices that ground femi- \
nist theory in a notion of “women” as subject paradoxically undercut I
feminist goals to extend its claims to “represenration”?’

Perhaps the problem is even more serious. Is the construction of
the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting
regulation and reification of gender relations? And is not such a
reification precisely contrary to feminist aims? To what extent does
the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the
context of the heterosexual matrix~If a stable notion of gender no
longer proves to be the foundational premise of feminist politics,
perhaps a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable to contest the
very reifications of gender and identity, one that will take the variable
construction of identity as both a methodological and normative
prerequisite, if not a political goal.

To trace the political operations that produce and conceal what
qualifies as the juridical subject of feminism is precisely the task of a
feminist genealogy of the category of women. In the course of this
effort to question “women” as the subject of feminism, the unprob-
lematic invocation of that category may prove to preclude the possibil-
ity of feminism as a representational politics. What sense does it make
to extend representation to subjects who are constructed through

1
I
I

6 / Subjects of Sex/GenderlDesire

the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative
requirements of the subject? What relations of domination and exclu-
sion are inadvertently sustained when representation becomes the sole
focus of politics? The identity of the feminist subject ought not to be
the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject
takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the
assertion of that foundation. Perhaps, paradoxically, “representa-
tion” will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject
of “women” is nowhere presumed.

ii. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire

Although the unproblematic unity of “women” is often invoked to
construct a solidarity of identity, a split is introduced in the feminist
subject by the distinction between sex and gender. Originally intended
to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction between
sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intracta-
bility sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence,
gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex.
The unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the
distinction that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex.”

If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then
a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in anyone way. Taken

I
t? it~ logic~! ~~mit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discon-
tlllUlty—oetween sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. As-
suming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow

I that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies
of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further,
even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their mor-
phology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no
reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two.” The
presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in
a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is
otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is
theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-
floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might
just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and
feminine a male body as easily as a female one.

This radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set
of problems. Can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender
without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through
what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical,
chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the

–
Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 7

scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for US?9
Does sex have a history?” Does each sex have a different history, or
histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established,
a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable con-
struction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced
by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and
social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps \
this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender;
indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence
that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinc-
tion at all.

l l

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural
interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought
not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on
a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate
the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are
established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature;
gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature”
or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,”
prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.
This construction of “sex” as the radically unconstructed will concern
us again in the discussion of Levi-Strauss and structuralism in chapter
2. At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability
and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality
of sex in a prediscursive domain. This production of sex as the predis- \
cursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of,
cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender
need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that pro-
duce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very opera-
tion of discursive production?

iii. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate

Is there “a” gender which persons are said to have, or is it an
essential attribute that a person is said to be, as implied in the question
“What gender are you?”? When feminist theorists claim that gender
is the cultural interpretation of sex or that gender is culturally con-
structed, what is the manner or mechanism of this construction? If
gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently, or does its
constructedness imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing
the possibility of agency and transformation? Does “construction”
suggest that certain laws generate gender differences along universal
axes of sexual difference? How and where does the construction of

8 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

gender take place? What sense can we make of a construction that
cannot assume a human constructor prior to that construction? On
some accounts, the notion that gender is constructed suggests a certain
determinism of gender meanings inscribed on anatomically differenti-
ated bodies, where those bodies are understood as passive recipients
of an inexorable cultural law. When the relevant “culture” that “con-
structs” gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws,
then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under
the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology, but
culture, becomes destiny.

On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex
that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.,,12 For
Beauvoir, gender is “constructed,” but implied in her formulation is
an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender
and could, in principle, take on some other gender. Is gender as
variable and volitional as Beauvoir’s account seems to suggest? Can
“construction” in such a case be reduced to a form of choice? Beauvoir
is clear that one “becomes” a woman, but always under a cultural
compulsion to become one. And clearly, the compulsion does not
come from “sex.” There is nothing in her account that guarantees
that the “one” who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If “the
body is a situation.v ‘:’ as she claims, there is no recourse to a body
that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings;
hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity.
Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all
along.”

The controversy over the meaning of construction appears to
founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between free will
and determinism. As a consequence, one might reasonably suspect
that some common linguistic restriction on thought both forms and
limits the terms of the debate. Within those terms, “the body” appears
as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as
the instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will
determines a cultural meaning for itself. In either case, the body is
figured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural
meanings are only externally related. But “the body” it itself a con-
struction, as are the myriad “bodies” that constitute the domain of
gendered subjects. Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence
prior to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges: To what
extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of
gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive
medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly
immaterial will? 15

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 9

Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse
which, it will be suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or to
safeguard certain tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any
analysis of gender. The locus of intractability, whether in “sex” or
“gender” or in the very meaning of “construction,” provides a clue
to what cultural possibilities can and cannot become mobilized
through any further analysis. The limits of the discursive analysis of
gender presuppose and preempt the possibilities of imaginable and
realizable gender configurations within culture. This is not to say that
any and all gendered possibilities are open, but that the boundaries
of analysis suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned experience.
These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural
discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language
of universal rationality. Constraint is thus built into what that lan-
guage constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender.

Although social scientists refer to gender as a “factor” or a “dimen-
sion” of an analysis, it is also applied to embodied persons as “a
mark” of biological, linguistic, and/or cultural difference. In these
latter cases, gender can be understood as a signification that an (al-
ready) sexually differentiated body assumes, but even then that signi-
fication exists only in relation to another, opposing signification.
Some feminist theorists claim that gender is “a relation,” indeed, a
set of relations, and not an individual attribute. Others, following
Beauvoir, would argue that only the feminine gender is marked, that
the universal person and the masculine gender are conflated, thereby
defining women in terms of their sex and extolling men as the bearers
of a body-transcendent universal personhood. _

In a move that complicates the discussion further, Luce -Irigaray
argues that women constitute a paradox, if not a contradiction, within
the discourse of identity itself. Women are the “sex” which is not
“one.” Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric
language, women constitute the unrepresentable. In other words,
women represent the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence
and opacity. Within a language that rests on univocal signification,
the female sex constitutes the unconstrainable and undesignatable. In
this sense, women are the sex which is not “one,” but multiple.” In
opposition to Beauvoir, for whom women are designated as the Other,
Irigaray argues that both the subject and the Other are masculine
mainstays of a closed phallogocentric signifying economy that
achieves its totalizing goal through the exclusion of the feminine
altogether. For Beauvoir, women are the negative of men, the lack

~—~-~- – —-~

10 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

against which masculine identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray,
that particular dialectic constitutes a system that excludes an entirely
different economy of signification. Women are not only represented
falsely within the Sartrian frame of signifying-subject and signified-
Other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure
of representation as inadequate. The sex which is not one, then,
provides a point of departure for a criticism of hegemonic Western
representation and of the metaphysics of substance that structures the
very notion of the subject.

What is the metaphysics of substance, and how does it inform
thinking about the categories of sex? In the first instance, humanist
conceptions of the subject tend to assume a substantive person who is
the bearer of various essential and nonessential attributes. A humanist
feminist position might understand gender as an attribute of a person
who is characterized essentially as a pregendered substance or “core,”
called the person, denoting a universal capacity for reason, moral
deliberation, or language. The universal conception of the person,
however, is displaced as a point of departure for a social theory of
gender by those historical and anthropological positions that under-
stand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in
specifiable contexts. This relational or contextual point of view sug-
gests that what the person “is,” and, indeed, what gender “is,” is
always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined. I?
As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a
substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among cultur-
ally and historically specific sets of relations.

Irigaray would maintain, however, that the feminine “sex” is a
point of linguistic absence, the impossibility of a grammatically de-
noted substance, and, hence, the point of view that exposes that
substance as an abiding and foundational illusion of a masculinist
discourse. This absence is not marked as such within the masculine
signifying economy-a contention that reverses Beauvoir’s argument
(and Wittig’s) that the female sex is marked, while the male sex is
not. For Irigaray, the female sex is not a “lack” or an “Other” that
immanently and negatively defines the subject in its masculinity. On
the contrary, the female sex eludes the very requirements of represen-
tation, for she is neither “Other” nor the “lack,” those categories
remaining relative to the Sartrian subject, immanent to that phallogo-
centric scheme. Hence, for Irigaray, the feminine could never be the
mark of a subject, as Beauvoir would suggest. Further, the feminine
could not be theorized in terms of a determinate relation between the
masculine and the feminine within any given discourse, for discourse

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 11

is not a relevant notion here. Even in their variety, discourses consti-
tute so many modalities of phallogocentric language. The female sex
is thus also the subject that is not one. The relation between masculine
and feminine cannot be represented in a signifying economy in which
the masculine constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified.
Paradoxically enough, Beauvoir prefigured this impossibility in The
Second Sex when she argued that men could not settle the question
of women because they would then be acting as both judge and party
to the case.”

The distinctions among the above positions are far from discrete;
each of them can be understood to problematize the locality and
meaning of both the “subject” and “gender” within the context of
socially instituted gender asymmetry. The interpretive possibilities of
gender are in no sense exhausted by the alternatives suggested above.
The problematic circularity of a feminist inquiry into gender is under-
scored by the presence of positions which, on the one hand, presume
that gender is a secondary characteristic of persons and those which,
on the other hand, argue that the very notion of the person, positioned
within language as a “subject,” is a masculinist construction and
prerogative which effectively excludes the structural and semantic
possibility of a feminine gender. The consequence of such sharp dis-
agreements about the meaning of gender (indeed, whether gender is
the term to be argued about at all, or whether the discursive construc-
tion of sex is, indeed, more fundamental, or perhaps women or
woman and/or men and man) establishes the need for a radical re-
thinking of the categories of identity within the context of relations
of radical gender asymmetry.

For Beauvoir, the “subject” within the existential analytic of misog-
yny is always already masculine, conflated with the universal, differ-
entiating itself from a feminine “Other” outside the universalizing
norms of personhood, hopelessly “particular,” embodied, condemned
to immanence. Although Beauvoir is often understood to be calling
for the right of women, in effect, to become existential subjects and,
hence, for inclusion within the terms of an abstract universality, her
position also implies a fundamental critique of the very disernbodi-
ment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject.” That subject
is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodi-
ment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodi-
ment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as
female. This association of the body with the female works along
magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes re-
stricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes,

___——————u

12 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical
freedom. Beauvoir’s analysis implicitly poses the question: Through
what act of negation and disavowal does the masculine pose as a
disembodied universality and the feminine get constructed as a
disavowed corporeality? The dialectic of master-slave, here fully re-
formulated within the nonreciprocal terms of gender asymmetry,
prefigures what Irigaray will later describe as the masculine signifying
economy that includes both the existential subject and its Other.

Beauvoir proposes that the female body ought to be the situation
and instrumentality of women’s freedom, not a defining and limiting
essence.” The theory of embodiment informing Beauvoir’s analysis is
clearly limited by the uncritical reproduction of the Cartesian distinc-
tion between freedom and the body. Despite my own previous efforts
to argue the contrary, it appears that Beauvoir maintains the mind/
body dualism, even as she proposes a synthesis of those terms.” The
preservation of that very distinction can be read as symptomatic
of the very phallogocentrism that Beauvoir underestimates. In the
philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues through
Descartes, Husserl, and Sartre, the ontological distinction between
soul (consciousness, mind) and body invariably supports relations of
political and psychic subordination and hierarchy. The mind not only
subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing
its embodiment altogether. The cultural associations of mind with
masculinity and body with femininity are well documented within
the field of philosophy and feminism.” As a result, any uncritical
reproduction of the mind/body distinction ought to be rethought for
the implicit gender hierarchy that the distinction has conventionally
produced, maintained, and rationalized.

The discursive construction of “the body” and its separation from
“freedom” in Beauvoir fails to mark along the axis of gender the very
mind-body distinction that is supposed to illuminate the persistence
of gender asymmetry. Officially, Beauvoir contends that the female
body is marked within masculinist discourse, whereby the masculine
body, in its conflation with the universal, remains unmarked. Irigaray
clearly suggests that both marker and marked are maintained within a
masculinist mode of signification in which the female body is “marked
off,” as it were, from the domain of the signifiable. In post-Hegelian
terms, she is “cancelled,” but not preserved. On Irigaray’s reading,
Beauvoir’s claim that woman “is sex” is reversed to mean that she is
not the sex she is designated to be, but, rather, the masculine sex
encore (and en corps) parading in the mode of otherness. For Irigaray,
that phallogocentric mode of signifying the female sex perpetually

4

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 13

reproduces phantasms of its own self-amplifying desire. Instead of a
self-limiting linguistic gesture that grants alterity or difference to
women, phallogocentrism offers a name to eclipse the feminine and
take its place.

iv. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond

Beauvoir and Irigaray clearly differ over the fundamental structures
by which gender asymmetry is reproduced; Beauvoir turns to the
failed reciprocity of an asymmetrical dialectic, while Irigaray suggests
that the dialectic itself is the monologic elaboration of a masculinist
signifying economy. Although Irigaray clearly broadens the scope of
feminist critique by exposing the epistemological, ontological, and
logical structures of a masculinist signifying economy, the power of
her analysis is undercut precisely by its globalizing reach. Is it possible
to identify a monolithic as well as a mono logic masculinist economy
that traverses the array of cultural and historical contexts in which
sexual difference takes place? Is the failure to acknowledge the specific
cultural operations of gender oppression itself a kind of epistemologi-
cal imperialism, one which is not ameliorated by the simple elabora-
tion of cultural differences as “examples” of the selfsame phallogocen-
trism? The effort to include “Other” cultures as variegated
amplifications of a global phallogocentrism constitutes an appropria-
tive act that risks a repetition of the self-aggrandizing gesture of
phallogocentrism, colonizing under the sign of the same those differ-
ences that might otherwise call that totalizing concept into question.”

Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist
signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the
totalizing gestures of feminism. The effort to identify the enemy as
singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strat-
egy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. That the
tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests
that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist. It
can operate to effect other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist
subordination, to name but a few. And clearly, listing the varieties
of oppression, as I began to do, assumes their discrete, sequential
coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their conver-
gences within the social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient;
oppressions cannot be summarily ranked, causally related, distributed
among planes of “originality” and “derivativeness.”24 Indeed, the field
of power structured in part by the imperializing gesture of dialectical
appropriation exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual difference,

14 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which cann<;>t be sum-
marily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentnsm or any
other candidate for the position of “primary condition of oppression.”
Rather than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying economies,
dialectical appropriation and suppression of the Other is one tactic
among many, deployed centrally but not exclusively in the service of
expanding and rationalizing the masculinist domain.

The contemporary feminist debates over essentialism raise the ques-
tion of the universality of female identity and masculinist oppression
in other ways. Universalistic claims are based on a common or shared
epistemological standpoint, understood as the articulated conscious-
ness Or shared structures of oppression or in the ostensibly transcul-
tural structures of femininity, maternity, sexuality, and/or ecriture
feminine. The opening discussion in this chapter argued that this
globalizing gesture has spawned a number of criticisms from women
who claim that the category of “women” is normative and exclusion-
ary and is invoked with the unmarked dimensions of class and racial
privilege intact. In other words, the insistence upon the coherence and
unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity
of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete
array of “women” are constructed.

Some efforts have been made to formulate coalitional politics which
do not assume in advance what the content of “women” will be.
They propose instead a set of dialogic encounters by which variously
positioned women articulate separate identities within the framework
of an emergent coalition. Clearly, the value of coalitional politics is
not to be underestimated, but the very form of coalition, of an emerg-
ing and unpredictable assemblage of positions, cannot be figured in
advance. Despite the clearly democratizing impulse that motivates
coalition building, the coalitional theorist can inadvertently reinsert
herself as sovereign of the process by trying to assert an ideal form
for coalitional structures in advance, one that will effectively guaran-
tee unity as the outcome. Related efforts to determine what is and is
not the true shape of a dialogue, what constitutes a subject-position,
and, most importantly, when “unity” has been reached, can impede
the shelf-shaping and self-limiting dynamics of coalition.

The insistence in advance on coalitional “unity” as a goal assumes
that solidarity, whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action.
But what sort of politics demands that kind of advance purchase on
unity? Perhaps a coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions
and take action with those contradictions intact. Perhaps also part of
what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence,
breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often tortuous

4

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 15

process of democratization. The very notion of “dialogue” is cultur-
ally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel
secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not.
The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities
need first to be interrogated. Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks
relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents oc-
cupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presupposi-
tions about what constitutes “agreement” and “unity” and, indeed,
that those are the goals to be sought. It would be wrong to assume
in advance that there is a category of “women” that simply needs to
be filled in with various components of race, class, age, ethnicity, and
sexuality in order to become complete. The assumption of its essential
incompleteness permits that category to serve as a permanently avail-
able site of contested meanings. The definitional incompleteness of
the category might then serve as a normative ideal relieved of coercive
force.

Is “unity” necessary for effective political action? Is the premature
insistence on the goal of unity precisely the cause of an ever more bitter
fragmentation among the ranks? Certain forms of acknowledged
fragmentation might faciliate coalitional action precisely because the
“unity” of the category of women is neither presupposed nor desired.
Does “unity” set up an exclusionary norm of solidarity at the level of
identity that rules out the possibility of a set of actions which disrupt
the very borders of identity concepts, Or which seek to accomplish
precisely that disruption as an explicit political aim? Without the
presupposition Or goal of “unity,” which is, in either case, always
instituted at a conceptual level, provisional unities might emerge in
the context of concrete actions that have purposes other than the
articulation of identity. Without the compulsory expectation that
feminist actions must be instituted from some stable, unified, and
agreed upon identity, those actions might well get a quicker start and
seem more congenial to a number of “women” for whom the meaning
of the category is permanently moot.

This antifoundationalist approach to coalitional politics assumes
neither that “identity” is a premise nOr that the shape Or meaning of
a coalitional assemblage can be known prior to its achievement.
Because the articulation of an identity within available cultural terms
instates a definition that forecloses in advance the emergence of new
identity concepts in and through politically engaged actions, the foun-
dationalist tactic cannot take the transformation or expansion of
existing identity concepts as a normative goal. Moreover, when
agreed-upon identities or agreed-upon dialogic structures, through
which already established identities are communicated, no longer

16 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

constitute the theme or subject of politics, then identities can come into
being and dissolve depending on the concrete practices that constitute
them. Certain political practices institute identities on a contingent
basis in order to accomplish whatever aims are in view. Coalitional
politics requires neither an expanded category of “women” nor an
internally multiplicitous self that offers its complexity at once.

Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred,
never fully what it is at any given juncture in time. An open coalition,
then, will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and
relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open
assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences
without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure.

v. Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance

What can be meant by “identity,” then, and what grounds the
presumption that identities are self-identical, persisting through time
as the same, unified and internally coherent? More importantly, how
do these assumptions inform the discourses on “gender identity”? It
would be wrong to think that the discussion of “identity” ought to
proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason
that “persons” only become intelligible through becoming gendered
in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility.
Sociological discussions have conventionally sought to understand
the notion of the person in terms of an agency that claims ontological
priority to the various roles and functions through which it assumes
social visibility and meaning. Within philosophical discourse itself,
the notion of “the person” has received analytic elaboration on the
assumption that whatever social context the person is “in” remains
somehow externally related to the definitional structure of person-
hood, be that consciousness, the capacity for language, or moral
deliberation. Although that literature is not examined here, one prem-
ise of such inquiries is the focus of critical exploration and inversion.
Whereas the question of what constitutes “personal identity” within
philosophical accounts almost always centers on the question of what
internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity
of the person through time, the question here will be: To what extent
do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute
identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical
status of the person? To what extent is “identity” a normative ideal
rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the reg-
ulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligi-

Q

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 17

ble notions of identity? In other words, the “coherence” and “continu-
ity” of “the person” are not logical or analytic features of personhood,
but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility.
Inasmuch as “identity” is assured through the stabilizing concepts of
sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of “the person” is called
into question by the cultural emergence of those “incoherent” or
“discontinuous” gendered beings who appear to be persons but who
fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by
which persons are defined.

“Intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute and
maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender,
sexual practice, and desire. In other words, the spectres of discontinu-
ity and incoherence, themselves thinkable only in relation to existing
norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and
produced by the very laws that seek to establish causal or expressive
lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted gen-
ders, and the “expression” or “effect” of both in the manifestation
of sexual desire through sexual practice.

The notion that there might be a “truth” of sex, as Foucault ironi-
cally terms it, is produced precisely through the regulatory practices
that generate coherent identities through the matrix of coherent gen-
der norms. The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes
the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between
“feminine” and “masculine,” where these are understood as expres-
sive attributes of “male” and “female.” The cultural matrix through
which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain
kinds of “identities” cannot “exist”-that is, those in which gender
does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire
do not “follow” from either sex or gender. “Follow” in this context
is a political relation of entailment instituted by the cultural laws that
establish and regulate the shape and meaning of sexuality. Indeed,
precisely because certain kinds of “gender identities” fail to conform
to those norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as develop-
mental failures or logical impossibilities from within that domain.
Their persistence and proliferation, however, provide critical oppor-
tunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of that domain of
intelligibility and, hence, to open up within the very terms of that
matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender dis-
order.

Before such disordering practices are considered, however, it seems
crucial to understand the “matrix of intelligibility.” Is it singular? Of
what is it composed? What is the peculiar alliance presumed to exist

II

18 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

between a system of compulsory heterosexuality and the discursive
categories that establish the identity concepts of sex? If “identity” is
an effect of discursive practices, to what extent is gender identity,
construed as a relationship among sex, gender, sexual practice, and
desire, the effect of a regulatory practice that can be identified as
compulsory heterosexuality? Would that explanation return us to yet
another totalizing frame in which compulsory heterosexuality merely
takes the place of phallogocentrism as the monolithic cause of gender
oppression?

Within the spectrum of French feminist and poststructuralist the-
ory, very different regimes of power are understood to produce the
identity concepts of sex. Consider the divergence between those posi-
tions, such as Irigaray’s, that claim there is only one sex, the masculine,
that elaborates itself in and through the production of the “Other,”
and those positions, Foucault’s, for instance, that assume that the
category of sex, whether masculine or feminine, is a production of
a diffuse regulatory economy of sexuality. Consider also Wittig’s
argument that the category of sex is, under the conditions of compul-
sory heterosexuality, always feminine (the masculine remaining un-
marked and, hence, synonomous with the “universal”). Wittig con-
curs, however paradoxically, with Foucault in claiming that the
category of sex would itself disappear and, indeed, dissipate through
the disruption and displacement of heterosexual hegemony.

The various explanatory models offered here suggest the very differ-
ent ways in which the category of sex is understood depending on
how the field of power is articulated. Is it possible to maintain the
complexity of these fields of power and think through their productive
capacities together? On the one hand, Irigaray’s theory of sexual
difference suggests that women can never be understood on the model
of a “subject” within the conventional representational systems of
Western culture precisely because they constitute the fetish of repre-
sentation and, hence, the unrepresentable as such. Women can never
“be,” according to this ontology of substances, precisely because they
are the relation of difference, the excluded, by which that domain
marks itself off. Women are also a “difference” that cannot be under-
stood as the simple negation or “Other” of the always-already-mascu-
line subject. As discussed earlier, they are neither the subject nor its
Other, but a difference from the economy of binary opposition, itself
a ruse for a monologic elaboration of the masculine.

Central to each of these views, however, is the notion that sex
appears within hegemonic language as a substance, as, metaphysically
speaking, a self-identical being. This appearance is achieved through

•
Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 19

a performative twist of language and/or discourse that conceals the
fact that “being” a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible. For
Irigaray, grammar can never be a true index of gender relations
precisely because it supports the substantial model of gender as a
binary relation between two positive and representable terms. 25 In
Irigaray’s view, the substantive grammar of gender, which assumes
men and women as well as their attributes of masculine and feminine
is an example of a binary that effectively masks the univocal and
hegemo?i~ discours,e of the mas~uline, phallogocentrism, silencing
the feml~llne as a site of subversive multiplicity. For Foucault, the
substantive grammar of sex imposes an artificial binary relation be-
tween the sexes, as well as an artificial internal coherence within each
term of that binary. The binary regulation of sexuality suppresses
the subversive multiplicity of a sexuality that disrupts heterosexual,
reproductive, and medicojuridical hegemonies.

For Wittig, the binary restriction on sex serves the reproductive
ain: s of a system of compulsory heterosexuality; occasionally, she
claims that the overthrow of compulsory heterosexuality will inaugu-
rate a true humanism of “the person” freed from the shackles of sex.
In other contexts, she suggests that the profusion and diffusion of a
nonphallocentric erotic economy will dispel the illusions of sex, gen-
der, and identity. At yet other textual moments it seems that “the
lesbian” emerges as a third gender that promises to transcend the
binary restriction on sex imposed by the system of compulsory hetero-
sexuality. In her defense of the “cognitive subject,” Wittig appears to
have no metaphysical quarrel with hegemonic modes of signification
or representation; indeed, the subject, with its attribute of self-deter-
mination, appears to be the rehabilitation of the agent of existential
choice under the name of the lesbian: “the advent of individual sub-
jects demands first destroying the categories of sex…. the lesbian is
the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex. ,,26
She does not criticize “the subject” as invariably masculine according
to the rules of an inevitably patriarchal Symbolic, but proposes in its
place the equivalent of a lesbian subject as language-user. 27
, The ide~tificationof women with “sex,” for Beauvoir as for Wittig,
IS a conflation of the category of women with the ostensibly sexualized
features of their bodies and, hence, a refusal to grant freedom and au-
tonomy to women as it is purportedly enjoyed by men. Thus, the de-
struction of the category of sex would be the destruction of an attribute,
sex, that has, through a misogynist gesture of synecdoche, come to take
the place of the person, the self-determining cogito. In other words,
only men are “persons,” and there is no gender but the feminine:

20 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between
the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there
are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the “mascu-
line” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine,
but the general.”

Hence, Wittig calls for the destruction of “sex” so that women can
assume the status of a universal subject. On the way toward that
destruction, “women” must assume both a particular and a universal
point of view.” As a subject who can realize concrete universality
through freedom, Wittig’s lesbian confirms rather than contests the
normative promise of humanist ideals premised on the metaphysics
of substance. In this respect, Wittig is distinguished from Irigaray, not
only in terms of the now familiar oppositions between essentialism
and materialism,” but in terms of the adherence to a metaphysics of
substance that confirms the normative model of humanism as the
framework for feminism. Where it seems that Wittig has subscribed
to a radical project of lesbian emancipation and enforced a distinction
between “lesbian” and “woman,” she does this through the defense
of the pregendered “person,” characterized as freedom. This move not
only confirms the presocial status of human freedom, but subscribes to
that metaphysics of substance that is responsible for the production
and naturalization of the category of sex itself.

The metaphysics of substance is a phrase that is associated with
Nietzsche within the contemporary criticism of philosophical dis-
course. In a commentary on Nietzsche, Michel Haar argues that a
number of philosophical ontologies have been trapped within certain
illusions of “Being” and “Substance” that are fostered by the belief
that the grammatical formulation of subject and predicate reflects the
prior ontological reality of substance and attribute. These constructs,
argues Haar, constitute the artificial philosophical means by which
simplicity, order, and identity are effectively instituted. In no sense,
however, do they reveal or represent some true order of things. For
our purposes, this Nietzschean criticism becomes instructive when it
is applied to the psychological categories that govern much popular
and theoretical thinking about gender identity. According to Haar,
the critique of the metaphysics of substance implies a critique of the
very notion of the psychological person as a substantive thing:

The destruction of logic by means of its genealogy brings with it
as well the ruin of the psychological categories founded upon this
logic. All psychological categories (the ego, the individual, the
person) derive from the illusion of substantial identity. But this

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 21

illusion goes back basically to a superstition that deceives not
only common sense but also philosophers-namely, the belief in
l~nguage and, more precisely, in the truth of grammatical catego-
nes. It was grammar (the structure of subject and predicate) that
inspired Descartes’ certainty that “I” is the subject of “think”
whereas it is rather the thoughts that come to “me”: at bottom
faith in grammar simply conveys the will to be the “cause” of one’s
thoughts. The subject, the self, the individual, are just so many false
concepts, since they transform into substances fictitious unities
having at the start only a linguistic reality.31

Wittig provides an alternative critique by showing that persons
cann?t be signi~~d within l~nguage without the mark of gender. She
provides a political analysis of the grammar of gender in French.
According to Wittig, gender not only designates persons, “qualifies”
them, as it were, but constitutes a conceptual episteme by which
binary gender is universalized. Although French gives gender to all
sorts of nouns other than persons, Wittig argues that her analysis has
consequences for English as well. At the outset of “The Mark of
Gender” (1984), she writes:

The mark of gender, according to grammarians, concerns substan-
tives. They talk about it in terms of function. If they question its
meaning, they may joke about it, calling gender a “fictive sex.” …
as far as the categories of the person are concerned, both [English
and French] are bearers of gender to the same extent. Both indeed
give way to a primitive ontological concept that enforces in lan-
guage a divis.ion of beings into sexes…. As an ontological concept
that deals With the nature of Being, along with a whole nebula of
other primitive concepts belonging to the same line of thought,
gender seems to belong primarily to philosophy;”

For gender to “belong to philosophy” is, for Wittig, to belong to
‘:that body of self-evident concepts without which philosophers be-
li~ve they c~nnot develop a line of reasoning and which for them go
without saymg, for they exist prior to any thought, any social order,
m nature. ,,33 Wittig’s view is corroborated by that popular discourse
~n gender identity that uncritically employs the inflectional attribu-
tIO? of “being” to genders and to “sexualities.” The unproblematic
claim to “be” a woman and “be” heterosexual would be symptomatic
of that metaphysics of gender substances. In the case of both “men”
and “women,” this claim tends to subordinate the notion of gender
under that of identity and to lead to the conclusion that a person is a

. gender and is one in virtue of his or her sex, psychic sense of self, and

22 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

various expressions of that psychic self, the most salient being that of
sexual desire. In such a prefeminist context, gender, naively (rather
than critically) confused with sex, serves as a unifying principle of the
embodied self and maintains that unity over and against an “opposite
sex” whose structure is presumed to maintain a parallel but opposi-
tional internal coherence among sex, gender, and desire. The articula-
tion “I feel like a woman” by a female or “I feel like a man” by
a male presupposes that in neither case is the claim meaninglessly
redundant. Although it might appear unproblematic to be a given
anatomy (although we shall later consider the way in which that
project is also fraught with difficulty), the experience of a gendered
psychic disposition or cultural identity is considered an achievem~nt.
Thus “I feel like a woman” is true to the extent that Aretha Franklm’s
invocation of the defining Other is assumed: “You make me feel like
a natural woman. ,,34 This achievement requires a differentiation from
the opposite gender. Hence, one is one’s gender to the extent that one
is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces
the restriction of gender within that binary pair.

I Gender can denote a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire,
.only when sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate gender-
where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self-and
desire-where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself
through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires. The
internal coherence or unity of either gender, man or woman, thereby
requires both a stable and oppositional heterosexuality. That institu-
tional heterosexuality both requires and produces the univocity of
each of the gendered terms that constitute the limit of gendered
possibilities within an oppositional, binary gender system. This con-
ception of gender presupposes not only a causal relation among sex,
gender, and desire, but suggests as well that desire reflects or expresses
gender and that gender reflects or expresses desire. The metaphys,ical
unity of the three is assumed to be truly known and expressed in a
differentiating desire for an oppositional gender-that is, in a form
of oppositional heterosexuality. Whether as a naturalistic paradigm
which establishes a causal continuity among sex, gender, and desire,
or as an authentic-expressive paradigm in which some true self is said
to be revealed simultaneously or successively in sex, gender, and
desire, here “the old dream of symmetry,” as Irigaray has called it, is
presupposed, reified, and rationalized.

This rough sketch of gender gives us a clue to understanding the
political reasons for the substantializing view of gender. The institu-
tion of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and
regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term

;4

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 23

is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is
accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire. The act of
differentiating the two oppositional moments of the binary results in
a consolidation of each term, the respective internal coherence of sex,
gender, and desire.

The strategic displacement of that binary relation and the meta-
physics of substance on which it relies presuppose that the categories
of female and male, woman and man, are similarly produced within
the binary frame. Foucault implicitly subscribes to such an explana-
tion. In the closing chapter of the first volume of The History of
Sexuality and in his brief but significant introduction to Herculine
Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Journals of a Nineteenth-
Century Hermaphrodite.” Foucault suggests that the category of sex,
prior to any categorization of sexual difference, is itself constructed
through a historically specific mode of sexuality. The tactical produc-
tion of the discrete and binary categorization of sex conceals the
strategic aims of that very apparatus of production by postulating
“sex” as “a cause” of sexual experience, behavior, and desire. Fou-
cault’s genealogical inquiry exposes this ostensible “cause” as “an
effect,” the production of a given regime of sexuality that seeks to
regulate sexual experience by instating the discrete categories of sex
as foundational and causal functions within any discursive account
of sexuality.

Foucault’s introduction to the journals of the hermaphrodite, Her-
culine Barbin, suggests that the genealogical critique of these reified
categories of sex is the inadvertent consequence of sexual practices
that cannot be accounted for within the medicolegal discourse of a
naturalized heterosexuality. Herculine is not an “identity,” but the
sexual impossibility of an identity. Although male and female anatom-
ical elements are jointly distributed in and on this body, that is not
the true source of scandal. The linguistic conventions that produce
intelligible gendered selves find their limit in Herculine precisely be-
cause she/he occasions a convergence and disorganization of the rules
that govern sex/gender/desire. Herculine deploys and redistributes the
terms of a binary system, but that very redistribution disrupts and
proliferates those terms outside the binary itself. According to Fou-
cault, Herculine is not categorizable within the gender binary as it
stands; the disconcerting convergence of heterosexuality and homo-
s~xuality in her/his person are only occasioned, but never caused, by
his/her anatomical discontinuity. Foucault’s appropriation of Hercu-
line is suspect;” but his analysis implies the interesting belief that
sexual heterogeneity (paradoxically foreclosed by a naturalized “her-
ero” -sexuality) implies a critique of the metaphysics of substance

24 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

as it informs the identitarian categories of sex. Foucault imagines
Herculine’s experience as “a world of pleasures in which grins hang
about without the cat. ,,37 Smiles, happinesses, pleasures, and desires
are figured here as qualities without an abiding substance to which
they are said to adhere. As free-floating attributes, they suggest the
possibility of a gendered experience that cannot be grasped through
the substantializing and hierarchizing grammar of nouns (res extensa)
and adjectives (attributes, essential and accidental). Through his cur-
sory reading of Herculine, Foucault proposes an ontology of acciden-

.tal attributes that exposes the postulation of identity as a culturally
restricted principle of order and hierarchy, a regulatory fiction.

If it is possible to speak of a “man” with a masculine attribute and
to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that
man, then it is also possible to speak of a “man” with a feminine
attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the
gender. But once we dispense with the priority of “man” and
“woman” as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to
subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and
accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally
intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction
produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent
gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability
of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant
play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models
of intelligibility.

The appearance of an abiding substance or gendered self, what the
psychiatrist Robert Stoller refers to as a “gender core,,,38 is thus
produced by the regulation of attributes along culturally established
lines of coherence. As a result, the exposure of this fictive production
is conditioned by the deregulated play of attributes that resist assimila-
tion into the ready made framework of primary nouns and subordi-
nate adjectives. It is of course always possible to argue that dissonant
adjectives work retroactively to redefine the substantive identities they
are said to modify and, hence, to expand the substantive categories
of gender to include possibilities that they previously excluded. But if
these substances are nothing other than the coherences contingently
created through the regulation of attributes, it would seem that the
ontology of substances itself is not only an artificial effect, but essen-
tially superfluous.

In this sense, gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-
floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of
gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory
practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse

’14

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 25

of th.e metap.hys~cs of s~bsta.nc~, ~ender proves to be performative-
tha~ IS, constItutI~g the identity It IS purported to be. In this sense, gen-
der IS al~ays a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said
to p~eexIst the deed. T~e challenge for rethinking gender categories
outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the rele-
vance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there
is no. ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, ?ecoming~ ‘the doer’ is merely
a. fiction ad?ed to th~ deed-the deed IS everything.t”” In an applica-
non t?at NIetzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned,
we mIg?t state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind thel
expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted byl t
the very “expressions” that are said to be its results. ‘

vi. Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement

A great deal of feminist theory and literature has nevertheless as-
sumed that there is a “doer” behind the deed. Without an agent, it is
argued, the~e can be no agency and hence no potential to initiate a
tra~sforma~IO.n of relations of domination within society. Wittig’s
radI~al feminist theory occupies an ambiguous position within the
conttnuu.m. of theories on the question of the subject. On the one
hand, WIttIg appears to dispute the metaphysics of substance but on
the other hand, she retains the human subject, the individual, as
the metaphysical locus of agency. While Wittig’s humanism clearly
presupposes that there is a doer behind the deed, her theory neverthe-
less d~ltneate~ the performative construction of gender within the
ma~ertal practices of culture, disputing the temporality of those expla-
nations that ~ould confuse “cause” with “result.” In a phrase that
suggests the tntertextual space that links Wittig with Foucault (and
reveals the traces of the Marxist notion of reification in both of their
theories), she writes:

A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the
cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by
the oppressor; the “myth of woman,” plus its material effects and
manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of
~omen. Thus, this mark does not preexist oppression … sex
IS taken ,~s an “i~mediate given,” a “sensible given,” “physical
features, belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be
a physica~ and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic
construction, an “imaginary formation. ,,40

B~cause this production of “nature” operates in accord with the
dIctates of compulsory heterosexuality, the emergence of homosexual

26 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

desire, in her view, transcends the categories of sex: “If desire could
liberate itself, it would have nothing to do with the preliminary
marking by sexes.,,41

Wittig refers to “sex” as a mark that is somehow applied by an
institutionalized heterosexuality, a mark that can be erased or obfus-
cated through practices that effectively contest that institution. Her
view, of course, differs radically from Irigaray’s. The latter would
understand the “mark” of gender to be part of the hegemonic signify-
ing economy of the masculine that operates through the self-elaborat-
ing mechanisms of specularization that have virtually determined the
field of ontology within the Western philosophical tradition. For
Wittig, language is an instrument or tool that is in no way misogynist
in its structures, but only in its applications.t’ For Irigaray, the possi-
bility of another language or signifying economy is the only chance
at escaping the “mark” of gender which, for the feminine, is nothing
but the phallogocentric erasure of the female sex. Whereas Irigaray
seeks to expose the ostensible “binary” relation between the sexes as
a masculinist ruse that excludes the feminine altogether, Wittig argues
that positions like Irigaray’s reconsolidate the binary between mascu-
line and feminine and recirculate a mythic notion of the feminine.
Clearly drawing on Beauvoir’s critique of the myth of the feminine in
The Second Sex, Wittig asserts, “there is no ‘feminine writing.’ ,,43

Wittig is clearly attuned to the power of language to subordinate
and exclude women. As a “materialist,” however, she considers lan-
guage to be “another order of materialiry.Y’ an institution that can
be radically transformed. Language ranks among the concrete and
contingent practices and institutions maintained by the choices of
individuals and, hence, weakened by the collective actions of choosing
individuals. The linguistic fiction of “sex,” she argues, is a category
produced and circulated by the system of compulsory heterosexuality
in an effort to restrict the production of identities along the axis of
heterosexual desire. In some of her work, both male and female
homosexuality, as well as other positions independent of the het-
erosexual contract, provide the occasion either for the overthrow
or the proliferation of the category of sex. In The Lesbian Body and
elsewhere, however, Wittig appears to take issue with genitally or-
ganized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of
pleasures which would both contest the construction of female sub-
jectivity marked by women’s supposedly distinctive reproductive
function.” Here the proliferation of pleasures outside the reproductive
economy suggests both a specifically feminine form of erotic dif-
fusion, understood as a counterstrategy to the reproductive construc-
tion of genitality. In a sense, The Lesbian Body can be understood,

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 27

for Wittig, as an “inverted” reading of Freud’s Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality, in which he argues for the developmental
superiority of genital sexuality over and against the less restricted
and more diffuse infantile sexuality. Only the “invert,” the medical
classification invoked by Freud for “the homosexual,” fails to
“achieve” the genital norm. In waging a political critique against
genitality, Wittig appears to deploy “inversion” as a critical reading
practice, valorising precisely those features of an undeveloped sexual-
ity designated by Freud and effectively inaugurating a “post-genital
politics. ,,46 Indeed, the notion of development can be read only as
normalization within the heterosexual matrix. And yet, is this the
only reading of Freud possible? And to what extent is Wittig’s practice
of “inversion” committed to the very model of normalization that she
seeks to dismantle? In other words, if the model of a more diffuse and
antigenital sexuality serves as the singular, oppositional alternative
to the hegemonic structure of sexuality, to what extent is that binary
relation fated to reproduce itself endlessly? What possibility exists for
the disruption of the oppositional binary itself?

Wittig’s oppositional relationship to psychoanalysis produces the
unexpected consequence that her theory presumes precisely that psy-
choanalytic theory of development, now fully “inverted,” that she
seeks to overcome. Polymorphous perversity, assumed to exist prior
to the marking by sex, is valorised as the telos of human sexuality.”
One possible feminist psychoanalytic response to Wittig might argue
that she both undertheorizes and underestimates the meaning and
function of the language in which “the mark of gender” occurs. She
understands that marking practice as contingent, radically variable,
and even dispensable. The status of a primary prohibition in Lacanian
theory operates more forcefully and less contingently than the notion
of a regulatory practice in Foucault or a materialist account of a
system of heterosexist oppression in Wittig.

In Lacan, as in Irigaray’s post-Lacanian reformulation of Freud,
sexual difference is not a simple binary that retains the metaphysics
of substance as its foundation. The masculine “subject” is a fictive
construction produced by the law that prohibits incest and forces
an infinite displacement of a heterosexualizing desire. The feminine
is never a mark of the subject; the feminine could not be an “attri-
bute” of a gender. Rather, the feminine is the signification of lack,
signified by the Symbolic, a set of differentiating linguistic rules
that effectively create sexual difference. The masculine linguistic
position undergoes individuation and heterosexualization required
by the founding prohibitions of the Symbolic law, the law of the
Father. The incest taboo that bars the son from the mother and

28 / Subjects of Sex/GenderlDesire

thereby instates the kinship relation between them is a law ena~ted
“in the name of the Father.” Similarly, the law that refuses the girl’S
desire for both her mother and father requires that she take up the
emblem of maternity and perpetuate the rules of kinship. Both n:’-a.s~u­
line and feminine positions are thus instituted through prohibitive
laws that produce culturally intelligible genders, but on~y through t~e
production of an unconscious sexuality that reemerges m the domam
of the imaginary. 48 . .

The feminist appropriation of sexual difference, whether wntt~t.J- m
opposition to the phallogocentrism of Lac~n (Irigaray) ~r as a critical
reelaboration of Lacan, attempts to theonze the femmme, not as an
expression of the metaphysics of substance, but as the unrepr~se~ta?le
absence effected by (masculine) denial that grounds the signifying
economy through exclusion. The feminine as the repudiated!exc~uded
within that system constitutes the possibility of a critique and disn~p­
tion of that hegemonic conceptual scheme. The works of Jacquelme
Rose 49 and Jane Gallop” underscore in different ways the constructed
status of sexual difference, the inherent instability of that construc-
tion, and the dual consequentiality of a prohibition that at once
institutes a sexual identity and provides for the exposure of .th.at
construction’s tenuous ground. Although Wittig and other matenahst
feminists within the French context would argue that sexual difference
is an unthinking replication of a reified set of sexed p~larities: these
criticisms neglect the critical dimension of the unconscious which, as
a site of repressed sexuality, reemerges within the discours~ of the
subject as the very impossibility of its coherence. As R?se p.omts out
very clearly the construction of a coherent sexual identity along
the disjunctive axis of the feminine/masculine is bound to fail;” the
disruptions of this coherence through the inadvertent reemergence of
the repressed reveal not only that “identity” is constructed, but that
the prohibition that constructs identity is inefficacious (the paternal
law ought to be understood not as a deterministi~ divine will, but ~s a
perpetual bumbler, preparing the ground for the msurrecnons agamst
him).

The differences between the materialist and Lacanian (and post-
Lacanian) positions emerge in a normative quarrel over whether there
is a retrievable sexuality either “before” or “outside” the law in the
mode of the unconscious or “after” the law as a postgenital sexuality.
Paradoxically, the normative trope of polymorphous pe~versity is
understood to characterize both views of alternative sexuahty. There
is no agreement, however, on the manner of delimiti~g th.a~ “law” or
set of “laws.” The psychoanalytic critique succeeds m giving an ac-
count of the construction of “the subject”-and perhaps also the

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 29

illusion of substance-within the matrix of normative gender rela-
tions. In her existential-materialist mode, Wittig presumes the subject,
the person, to have a presocial and pregendered integrity. On the
other hand, “the paternal Law” in Lacan, as well as the monologic
mastery of phallogocentrism in Irigaray, bear the mark of a monothe-
istic singularity that is perhaps less unitary and culturally universal
than the guiding structuralist assumptions of the account presume.Y

But the quarrel seems also to turn on the articulation of a temporal
trope of a subversive sexuality that flourishes prior to the imposition
of a law, after its overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge
to its authority. Here it seems wise to reinvoke Foucault who, in
claiming that sexuality and power are coextensive, implicitly refutes
the postulation of a subversive or emancipatory sexuality which could
be free of the law. We can press the argument further by pointing out
that “the before” of the law and “the after” are discursively and
performatively instituted modes of temporality that are invoked
within the terms of a normative framework which asserts that subver-
sion, destabilization, or displacement requires a sexuality that some-
how escapes the hegemonic prohibitions on sex. For Foucault, those
prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently productive in the sense
that “the subject” who is supposed to be founded and produced in
and through those prohibitions does not have access to a sexuality
that is in some sense “outside,” “before,” or “after” power itself.
Power, rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibi-
tive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently generative)
functions of differential relations. Hence, the sexuality that emerges
within the matrix of power relations is not a simple replication or
copy of the law itself, a uniform repetition of a masculinist economy
of identity. The productions swerve from their original purposes and
inadvertently mobilize possibilities of “subjects” that do not merely
exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand
the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible.

The feminist norm of a postgenital sexuality became the object of
significant criticism from feminist theorists of sexuality, some of
whom have sought a specifically feminist and/or lesbian appropriation
of Foucault. This utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosex-
ual constructs, a sexuality beyond “sex,” failed to acknowledge the
ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for
women even within the terms of a “liberated” heterosexuality or
lesbianism.” The same criticism is waged against the notion of a
specifically feminine sexual pleasure that is radically differentiated
from phallic sexuality. Irigaray’s occasional efforts to derive a specific
feminine sexuality from a specific female anatomy have been the focus

r

30 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

of anti-essentialist arguments for some time.” The return to biology
as the ground of a specific feminine sexuality or meaning seems to
defeat the feminist premise that biology is not de,stiny. But w~ether
feminine sexuality is articulated here through a discourse of biology
for purely strategic reasons,” or whether it is, in fact, a feminist r~turn
to biological essentialism, the characterization of female ~exualIty, as
radically distinct from a phallic organization ~f sexuality re~ams
problematic. Women who fail either to recognize that sexualI~ ~s
their own or understand their sexuality as partially constructed within
the terms of the phallic economy are potentially written off within
the terms of that theory as “male-identified” or “unenlightened.”
Indeed, it is often unclear within Irigaray’s text whether sexuality IS
culturally constructed, or whether it is only culturally constr~c~ed
within the terms of the phallus. In other words, is specifically feminine
pleasure “outside” of culture as.its prehistory, o~ as its utopian future?
If so of what use is such a notion for negonatmg the contemporary
struggles of sexuality within the terms of its construction? .

The pro-sexuality movement within feminist theory a~d I?ractIce has
effectively argued that sexuality is always constructed within the terms
of discourse and power, where power is partially understood in terms
of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions. The emergence of a
sexuality constructed (not determined) in these terms within lesbian,
bisexual and heterosexual contexts is, therefore, not a sign of a mascu-
line identification in some reductive sense. It is not the failed project of
criticizing phallogocentrism or heterosexual hegemo?y, as if a poli~i~al
critique could effectively undo the cultural construction o,ft~e fer~ll~Ist
critic’s sexuality. If sexuality is culturally constru~ted wIthI~ eXIstm.g
power relations, then the postulation of ~ normatIv~ sexua~Ity ,that IS
“before,” “outside,” or “beyond” power IS a cultural impossibility and
a politically impracticable dre~m, one tha~ postp~n~~ t,he concrete a~d
contemporary task of rethinking subvers~vePOSSI~IlItI~s.for sexuality
and identity within the terms of power Itself. ThIS critical task pre-
sumes, of course, that to operate within the matrix of power is not the.
same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the i
possibility of a repetition of the law whi~h is n,ot it~, consol~da~ion, ~ut
its displacement. In the place of a “male-identified sexuality m wh,rch
“male” serves as the cause and irreducible meanmg of that sexuality,
we might develop a notion of sexuali~ co,nstructed in t~r~,s ,of phallic
relations of power that replay and redIstr~butethe ~ossIbII~:~es o~ that
phallicism precisely through the subversive ~per,atIO~ of Id~?tIfic~­
tions” that are, within the power field of sexuality, inevitable. If Iden~I­
fications,” following Jacqueline Rose, can be exposed a,s phant,asmatlc,
then it must be possible to enact an identification that displays ItS phan-

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 31

tasmatic structure. If there is no radical repudiation of a culturally con-
structed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to acknowledge
and “do” the construction one is invariably in. Are there forms of repe-
tition that do not constitute a simple imitation, reproduction, and,
hence, consolidation of the law (the anachronistic notion of” male iden-
tification” that ought to be discarded from a feminist vocabulary)?
What possibilities of gender configurations exist among the various
emergent and occasionally convergent matrices of cultural intelligibil-
ity that govern gendered life?

Within the terms of feminist sexual theory, it is clear that the presence
of power dynamics within sexuality is in no sense the same as the simple
consolidation or augmentation of a heterosexist or phallogocentric
power regime. The “presence” of so-called heterosexual conventions
within homosexual contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically
gay discourses of sexual difference, as in the case of “butch” and
“femme” as historical identities of sexual style, cannot be explained as
chimerical representations of originally heterosexual identities. And
neither can they be understood as the pernicious insistence of hetero-
sexist constructs within gay sexuality and identity. The repetition of’
heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight
may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization
of gender categories. The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-
heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of
the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy
is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of
“the original,” discussed in the final sections of chapter 3 of this text,
reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the
natural and the original. 56 Even if heterosexist constructs circulate as
the available sites of power/discourse from which to do gender at all,
the question remains: What possibilities of recirculation exist? Which
possibilities of doing gender repeat and displace through hyperbole,
dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation the very constructs
by which they are mobilized?

Consider not only that the ambiguities and incoherences within
and among heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual practices are
suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the dis-
junctive and asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine, but that
these cultural configurations of gender confusion operate as sites for’
intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications. In other
words, the “unity” of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice
that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory
heterosexuality. The force of this practice is, through an exclusionary
apparatus of production, to restrict the relative meanings of “hetero-

F

32 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

sexuality,” “homosexuality,” and “bisexuality” as well as the subver-
sive sites of their convergence and resignification. That the power
regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment them-
selves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic,
and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself
ought to be stopped-as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist
as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the
crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might
call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?

If h 0 “”” ” ” lit “th tt ere lS no recourse to a person, a sex, or a sexua 1 y a
escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively
produce and regulate the intelligibility of those concepts for us, what
constitutes the possibility of effective inversion, subversion, or dis-
placement within the terms of a constructed identity? What possibili-
ties exist by virtue of the constructed character of sex and gender?
Whereas Foucault is ambiguous about the precise character of the
“regulatory practices” that produce the category of sex, and Wittig
appears to invest the full responsibility of the construction to sexual
reproduction and its instrument, compulsory heterosexuality, yet
other discourses converge to produce this categorial fiction for reasons
not always clear or consistent with one another. The power relations
that infuse the biological sciences are not easily reduced, and the
medicolegal alliance emerging in nineteenth-century Europe has
spawned categorial fictions that could not be anticipated in advance.
The very complexity of the discursive map that constructs gender
appears to hold out the promise of an inadvertent and generative
convergence of these discursive and regulatory structures. If the regu-
latory fictions of sex and gender are themselves multiply contested
sites of meaning, then the very multiplicity of their construction holds
out the possibility of a disruption of their univocal posturing.

f Clearly this project does not propose to layout within traditional
I philosophical terms an ontology of gender whereby the meaning of
being a woman or a man is elucidated within the terms of phenome-
nology. The presumption here is that the “being” of gender is an
effect, an object of a genealogical investigation that maps out the
political parameters of its construction in the mode of ontology. To
claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or
artificiality, where those terms are understood to reside within a
binary that counterposes the “real” and the “authentic” as opposi-
tional. As a genealogy of gender ontology, this inquiry seeks to under-
stand the discursive production of the plausibility of that binary
relation and to suggest that certain cultural configurations of gender

Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire / 33

I take the place of “the real” and consolidate and augment their hegern-
\ ony through that felicitous self-naturalization.

If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born
but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term
in pr?~ess, ~ecomjgg, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said
to ongmate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to
~ntervention an~ resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal
mto the most reified forms, the “congealing” is itself an insistent and
insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means.
It is, for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if
there were a telos that governs the process of acculturation and
construction. Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of II
repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over
time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of
being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, “t-
will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitu-
tive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory’
frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of \
gender. To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of
a naturalistic necessity, a move which has been a part of cultural
critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added
burden of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible
only through its appearance as gendered, admits of possibilities that
have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender
that have constituted its contingent ontologies.

The following chapter investigates some aspects of the psychoana-
lytic structuralist account of sexual difference and the construction
of s~xuality with respect to its power to contest the regulatory regimes
outlined here as well as its role in uncritically reproducing those
regi~es. The univocity of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and
the binary framework for both sex and gender are considered through-
out as regulatory fictions that consolidate and naturalize the conver-
gent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist oppression. The
final chapter considers the very notion of “the body,” not as a ready
surface awaiting signification, but as a set of boundaries, individual
and social, politically signified and maintained. No longer believable
as an interior “truth” of dispositions and identity, sex will be shown
to be a performatively enacted signification (and hence not “to be”),
one that, released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can
occasion the parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered
meanings. This text continues, then, as an effort to think through the
possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified

34 / Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist
power, to make gender trouble, not throu.g? t~e strategies ~hat figure
a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization, .subverslve. confu-
sion, and proliferation of precisely those co~stltutlve categories. that
seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundatlonal
illusions of identity.

2
Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the
Production of the Heterosexual Matrix

The straight mind continues to affirm that incest, and not homosexuality represents its
major interdiction. Thus, when thought by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but

heterosexuality .
-Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind”

On occasion feminist theory has been drawn to the thought of an
origin, a time before what some would call “patriarchy” that would
provide an imaginary perspective from which to establish the contin-
gency of the history of women’s oppression. Debates have emerged
over whether prepatriarchal cultures have existed, whether they were
matriarchal or matrilineal in structure, whether patriarchy could be
shown to have a beginning and, hence, be subject to an end. The
critical impetus behind these kinds of inquiry sought understandably
to show that the antifeminist argument in favor of the inevitability of
patriarchy constituted a reification and naturalization of a historical
and contingent phenomenon.

Although the turn to a prepatriarchal state of culture was intended
to expose the self-reification of patriarchy, that prepatriarchal scheme
has proven to be a different sort of reification. More recently, some
feminists have offered a reflexive critique of some reified constructs
within feminism itself. The very notion of “patriarchy” has threatened
to become a universalizing concept that overrides or reduces distinct
articulations of gender asymmetry in different cultural contexts. As
feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against
racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly import-
ant to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subor-
dinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a
transcultural notion of patriarchy. The articulation of the law of
patriarchy as a repressive and regulatory structure also requires recon-
sideration from this critical perspective. The feminist recourse to an
imaginary past needs to be cautious not to promote a politically
problematic reification of women’s experience in the course of de-
bunking the self-reifying claims of masculinist power.

Notes

1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

1. See Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The His-
tory ofSexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, 1980), originally published as Histoire de la sexualite
1: La uolonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). In that final chapter,
Foucault discusses the relation between the juridical and productive law.
His notion of the productivity of the law is clearly derived from Nie-
tzsche, although not identical with Nietzsche’s will-to-power. The use
of Foucault’s notion of productive power is not meant as a simple-
minded “application” of Foucault to gender issues. As I show in chapter
3, section ii, “Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Disconti-
nuity,” the consideration of sexual difference within the terms of Fou-
cault’s own work reveals central contradictions in his theory. His view
of the body also comes under criticism in the final chapter.

2. References throughout this work to a subject before the law are extra-
polations of Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,”
in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary
Readings, ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987).

3. See Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of
‘Women’ in History (New York: Macmillan, 1988).

4. See Sandra Harding, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of
Feminist Theory,” in Sex and Scientific Inquiry, eds. Sandra Harding
and Jean F. O’Barr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp.
283-302.

5. I am reminded of the ambiguity inherent in Nancy Cott’s title, The
Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987). She argues that the early twentieth-century U.S. feminist

T
I

6.

7.

8.

9.

Notes I 151

~ovement ,~ought to “ground” it~elf i~ a program that eventually
gro~nded that moveme~t. Her historical thesis implicitly raises the

~uestlOn of whether unc~ltlcally accepted f<.>undations operate like the
re~~rn ~f the r.epressed ; based on exclusionary practices, the stable

political Identities that found. politic~l movements may invariably be-
come threatened by the very instability that the foundationalist move
creates.

I use t~e term heterosexu.a! r:z~trix throughout the text to designate 1
tha~ gnd of cultur~l intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and
desires are naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion
o~ th,e “h~terose:ual contract” and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne
Rich. s n?tlOn .of c<:>mpu!sory heterosexuality” to characterize a hege-
mOnIC discursive/episternic model of gender intelligibility that assumes
that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex
expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male feminine
expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined
through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality. -‘

For a discuss.io.n of the sex!gender distinction in structuralist anthropol-
ogy and feminist appropriations and criticisms of that formulation see
chapter 2, section i, “Structuralism’s Critical Exchange.” ‘

For an.intere~tingstu~y of the berdache and multiple-gender arrange-
ments m Native Amenca.n cul.tur~s, see Walter L. Williams, The Spirit
and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity tn American Indian Culture (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1988). See also, Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead
eds., Sexual N!eanings.: Th~ Cultural Construction of Sexuality, (Ne~
York: Camb~ldge University Press, 1981). For a politically sensitive
and provocative analysis of the berdache, transsexuals, and the contin-
gency of gender dichotomies, see Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy Me-
~enna, G~nder: An Ethnomethodological Approach (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1978).
A great deal of feminist research has been conducted within the fields
?f biologr and the history of science that assess the political interests
mherent m the various discriminatory procedures that establish the
scientific basis for sex. See Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe, eds.,
Genes and Gender, vols. 1 and 2, (New York: Gordian Press 1978
1979); the two issues on feminism and science of Hypatia: A Journal
of ~eminist Philosophy, vol. 2, No.3, Fall 1987, and vol. 3, No.1,
~pnng 1988, and especi.al.ly T~e. Biology and Gender Study Group,
. Th~ Impo~tance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology”
m this last Issue (Spnng 1988); Sandra Harding, The Science Question
m Feminism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Evelyn Fox-
~eller, Reflections on Gender and Science, (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, .1984); Donna Haraway, “In the Beginning was the Word:
The Genesis of Biological Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, Vol. 6, No.3, 1981; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
(New York: Routledge, 1989); Sandra Harding and Jean F. O’Barr,

152 / Notes
Notes / 153

10.

11.

12.

13.
14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Sex and Scientific Inquiry, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories
About Women and Men (New York: Norton, 1979).

Clearly Foucault’s History of Sexuality offers one way to rethink the
history of “sex” within a given modern Eurocentric context. For a more
detailed consideration, see Thomas Lacquer and Catherine Gallagher,
eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in
the 19th Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198.7),
originally published as an issue of Representations, No. 14, Spnng
1986.

See my “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, ~ittig, Foucault,:’
in Feminism as Critique eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Basil
Blackwell, dist. by University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. E. M. Parshley, (New
York: Vintage, 1973), p. 301.

Ibid., p. 38.

See my “Sex and Gender in Beauvoir’s Second Sex,” Yale F~ench
Studies, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, No. 72, WlOter,
1986.

Note the extent to which phenomenological theories such as Sartre’s,
Merleau Ponty’s, and Beauvoir’s tend to use the term embodiment.
Drawn as it is from theological contexts, the term tends to figure “the”
body as a mode of incarnation and, hence, to preserve the external
and dualistic relationship between a signifying immateriality and the
materiality of the body itself.

See Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter
with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), originally
published as Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1977).

See Joan Scott, “Gender as a Useful Category of Historic~l An~lysi~,”
in Gender and the Politics ofHistory, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988), pp. 28-52, repr. from American Historical Review, Vol.
91, No.5, 1986.

Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. xxvi.
See my “Sex and Gender in Beauvoir’s Second Sex.”
The normative ideal of the body as both a “situation” and an “instru-
mentality” is embraced by both Beauvoir with respect t? gender. and
Frantz Fanon with respect to race. Fanon concludes his analysis of
colonization through recourse to the body as an instrument of freedom,
where freedom is, in Cartesian fashion, equated with a consciousness
capable of doubt: “0 my body, make of me always a man who ques-
tions!” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [New York: Grove
Press, 1967},-p. 323, originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs
[Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952]).

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

The radical ontological disjunction in Sartre between consciousness
a?d .the body, is part of the Cartesian inheritance of his philosophy.
Significantly, It IS Descartes’ distinction that Hegel implicitly interro-
gates at the outset of the “Master-Slave” section of The Phenomenol-
ogy. of Spirit. ~eauvoir’s. analysis of the masculine Subject and the
feminine Other IS clearly situated in Hegel’s dialectic and in the Sartrian
reformulation of that dialectic in the section on sadism and masochism
i~ ~eing and Nothingness. Critical of the very possibility of a “synthe-
SIS of consciousness and the body, Sartre effectively returns to the
Cartesian problematic that Hegel sought to overcome. Beauvoir insists
that the body can be the instrument and situation of freedom and that
sex can be the occasion for a gender that is not a reification but a
moda~ity of freedom. At first this appears to be a synthesis of body and
consciousness, where consciousness is understood as the condition of
freedom. The question that remains, however, is whether this synthesis
requires and maintains the ontological distinction between body and
m!nd of which it is composed and, by association, the hierarchy of
mind over body and of masculine over feminine.

See Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contempo-
rary Views,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 8, No.1, Spring, 1982.

Gayatri Spivak most pointedly elaborates this particular kind of binary
explanation as a colonizing act of marginalization. In a critique of the
“self-presence of the cognizing supra-historical self,” which is charac-
teristic of the epistemic imperialism of the philosophical cogito, she
locates politics in the production of knowledge that creates and censors
the margins that constitute, through exclusion, the contingent intelligi-
bility of that subject’s given knowledge-regime: “I call ‘politics as such’
the prohibition of marginality that is implicit in the production of any
explanation. Frot.TI that point of view, the choice of particular binary
opposmons … IS no mere intellectual strategy. It is, in each case,
the co~dition of the possibility for centralization (with appropriate
apologies) and, correspondingly, marginalization” (Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak, “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia,” in In Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics [New York: Routledge, 1987] p.
113). ‘

~ee the..arg~~,ent against. “ranking oppressions” in Cherrfe Moraga,
La Guera, 10 ThIS Brzdge Called My Back: Writings of Radical

Women of Color, eds. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherne Moraga (New
York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1982).

For a,tull.er elaboration of the unrepresentability of women in phallogo-
centnc discourse, see Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has
Always Been Appropriated by the Masculine,” in Speculum of the
Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985). Irigaray appears to revise this argument in her discussion of
“the feminine gender” in Sexes et parentis.

154 / Notes

26. Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman,” Feminist Issues, Vol.
1, No.2, Winter 1981, p.

53.

27. The notion of the “Symbolic” is discussed at some length in Section
Two of this text. It is to be understood as an ideal and universal set of
cultural laws that govern kinship and signification and, within the
terms of psychoanalytic structuralism, govern the production of sexual
difference. Based on the notion of an idealized “paternal law,” the
Symbolic is reformulated by Irigaray as a dominant and hegemonic
discourse of phallogocentrism. Some French feminists propose an alter-
native language to one governed by the Phallus or the paternal law,
and so wage a critique against the Symbolic. Kristeva proposes the
“semiotic” as a specifically maternal dimension of language, and both
Irigaray and Helene Cixous have been associated with ecriture femi-
nine. Wittig, however, has always resisted that movement, claiming
that language in its structure is neither misogynist nor feminist, but an
instrument to be deployed for developed political purposes. Clearly
her belief in a “cognitive subject” that exists prior to language facili-
tates her understanding of language as an instrument, rather than as a
field of significations that preexist and structure subject-formation
itself.

28. Monique Wittig, “The Point of View: Universal or Particular?” Femi-
nist Issues, Vol. 3, No.2, Fall 1983, p. 64.

29. “One must assume both a particular and a universal point of view, at
least to be part of literature,” Monique Wittig, “The Trojan Horse,”
Feminist Issues, Vol. 4, No.2, Fall 1984, p. 68.

30. The journal, Questions Feministes, available in English translation as
Feminist Issues, generally defended a “materialist” point of view which
took practices, institution, and the constructed status of language to
be the “material grounds” of the oppression of women. Wittig was
part of the original editorial staff. Along with Monique Plaza, Wittig
argued that sexual difference was essentialist in that it derived the
meaning of women’s social function from their biological facticity, but
also because it subscribed to the primary signification of women’s
bodies as maternal and, hence, gave ideological strength to the hege-
mony of reproductive sexuality.

31. Michel Haar, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” The New Nie-
tzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David Allison (New
York: Delta, 1977), pp. 17-18.

32. Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,”. Feminist Issues, Vol. 5, No.
2, Fall 1985, p. 4.

33. Ibid., p. 3.

34. Aretha’s song, originally written by Carole King, also contests the
naturalization of gender. “Like a natural woman” is a phrase that
suggests that “naturalness” is only accomplished through analogy or

1.!
.~ Notes / 155

metaph~,r. In ot~er wor~s, “~ou make me feel like a metaphor of the
natural, and WIthout you,. some denaturalized ground would be
revealed. For a further dISCUSSIOn of Aretha’s claim in light of Simone
de Beauvoir’s contention that “one is not born, but rather becomes a
woman,” see my “Beauvoir’s Philosophical Contribution” in eds. Ann
Garry and Marjorie Pearsall, Women, Knowledge, and Reality (Row-
man and Allenheld, forthcoming).

35. Michel. Foucault.’ ed., Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered
MemOirs of a Nmeteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard Me-
Dougall (New. York: Colophon, 1980), originally published as Hercu-
line Barbin, dite Alexma B. presente par Michel Foucault (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1978). The French version lacks the introduction supplied by
Foucault with the English translation.

36. See chapter 2, section ii.

37. Foucault, ed., Herculine Barbin, p. x.

38. Robert Stoller, Presentations of Gender, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1985), pp. 11-14.

39. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kauf-
mann (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 45.

40. Wit.tig, “One is Not Born a Woman,” p. 48. Wittig credits both the
notion of the “mark” of gender and the “imaginary formation” of
natural groups to Colette Guillaumin whose work on the mark of race
provides an analogy for Wittig’s analysis of gender in “Race et nature:
Systeme des marques, idee de group naturel et rapport sociaux,” Plur-
lei, Vol. 11, 1977. The “Myth of Woman” is a chapter of Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex.

41. Monique Wittig, “Paradigm,” in Homosexualities and French Litera-
ture: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, eds. Elaine Marks and George
Starnbolian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 114.

42. C:learly, Wittig does not understand syntax to be the linguistic elabora-
non or reproduction of a kinship system paternally organized. Her
refusal of structuralism at this level allows her to understand language
as gender-neutral. Irigaray’s Parler n’est jamais neutre (Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 198~) criticiz~s precisely the kind of humanist position,
here characteristic of WIttIg, that claims the political and gender neu-
trality of language.

43. Monique Wittig, “The Point of View: Universal or Particular?” p. 63.

44. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” Feminist Issues, Vol. 1, No.1,
Summer 1980, p. 108.

45. Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. Peter Owen (New York:
Avon, 1976), originally published as Le corps lesbien (Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 1973).

46. I am grateful to Wendy Owen for this phrase.

156 I Notes
1 Notes I 157

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

Of course, Freud himself distinguished between “the sexual” and “the
genital,” providing the very distinction that Wittig use~ a~~~nst him.
See, for instance, “The Development of the Sexual Function In Freud,
Outline of a Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1979).

A more comprehensive analysis of the Lacanian position is provided
in various parts of chapter 2 of this text.

Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso,
1987).

Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985);
The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1982).

“What distinguishes psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gen-
der (hence for me the fundamental impasse of Nancy Chodorow’s
work) is that whereas for the latter, the internalisation of norms IS
assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting point
of psychoanalysis is that it does not. The unconscious co~stantly~eveals
the ‘failure’ of identity” (Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality In the FIeld of
Vision, p. 90).

It is, perhaps, no wonder that the singular structuralist notion of “the
Law” clearly resonates with the prohibitive law of the Old Testament.
The “paternal law” thus comes under a post-structuralist critique
through the understandable route of a French reappropriation of Nie-
tzsche. Nietzsche faults the Judea-Christian “slave-morality” for con-
ceiving the law in both singular and prohibitive terr~s. The will~to”
power on the other hand, designates both the productive and multiple
possibilities of the law, effectively exposing the notion of “the Law”
in its singularity as a fictive and repressive notion.

See Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the
Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole S. Van~e
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 267-319. Also In
Pleasure and Danger, see Carole S. Vance, “Pleasure and Danger:
Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” pp. 1-28; Alice Echols, “The Taming
of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968-83,” pp. 50-72; Amber
Hollibaugh, “Desire for the Future: Radical Hope in Pleasure and
Passion” pp. 401-410. See Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga,
“What We’re Rollin Around in Bed with: Sexual Silences in Feminism”
and Alice Echols, “The New Feminism of Yin and Yang,” in Powers
of Desire: The Politics ofSexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell,
and Sharon Thompson (London: Virago, 1984); Heresies, Vo!. No.
12, 1981, the “sex issue”; Samois ed., Coming to Power, (Berkeley:
Samois, 1981); Dierdre English, Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin,
“Talking Sex: A Conversation on Sexuality and Feminism,” Socialist
Review, No. 58, July-August, 1981; Barbara T. Kerr and Mirtha N.

Quinranales, “the Complexity of Desire: Conversations on Sexuality
and Difference,” Conditions, #8; Vo!. 3, No.2, 1982, pp. 52-71.

54. Irigaray’s perhaps most controversial claim has been that the structure
of the v~lva as “two lips touc~ing” constitutes the nonunitary and
autoerotic pleasure of women pnor to the “separation” of this double-
ness through the pleasure-depriving act of penetration by the penis.
See Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Along with Monique Plaza
and Christine Delphy, Wittig has argued that Irigaray’s valorization
of that anatomical specificity is itself an uncritical replication of a
reproductive discourse that marks and carves up the female body into
artificial “parts” like “vagina,” “clitoris,” and “vulva.” At a lecture at
Vassar College, Wittig was asked whether she had a vagina, and she
replied that she did not.

55. See a compelling argument for precisely this interpretation by Diana J.
Fuss, Essentially Speaking, (New York: Routledge, 1989).

56. If we were to apply Fredric Jameson’s distinction between parody
and pastiche, gay identities would be better understood as pastiche.
Whereas parody, Jameson argues, sustains some sympathy with the
original of which it is a copy, pastiche disputes the possibility of an
“original” or, in the case of gender, reveals the “original” as a failed
effort to “copy” a phantasmatic ideal that cannot be copied without
failure. See Fredric Jameson, “Postrnodernism and Consumer Society,”
in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster
(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983).

2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production
of the Heterosexual Matrix

1. During the semester in which I write this chapter, I am teaching Kafka’s
“In the Penal Colony,” which describes an instrument of torture that
provides an interesting analogy for the contemporary field of power
and masculinist power in particular. The narrative repeatedly falters
in its attempt to recount the history which would enshrine that instru-
ment as a vital part of a tradition. The origins cannot be recovered,
and the map that might lead to the origins has become unreadable
through time. Those to whom it might be explained do not speak the
same language and have no recourse to translation. Indeed, the machine
itself cannot be fully imagined; its parts don’t fit together in a conceiv-
able whole, so the reader is forced to imagine its state of fragmentation
without recourse to an ideal notion of its integrity. This appears to be
a literary enactment of Foucault’s notion that “power” has become
so diffuse that it no longer exists as a systematic totality. Derrida
interrogates the problematic authority of such a law in the context of
Kafka’s “Before the Law” (in Derrida’s “Before the Law,” in Kafka
and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, ed.

– –

Frmtz Fanon / 211

to the Antilleans.
The Ne o is c ,om~”son . There is the first truth. He

w o ~ f i k a t is, he is constantly preoccupied with

THE NEGRO self-evaluation and with the ego-ideal. Whenever he
comes into contact with someone else, the question of

AND RECOGNITION value, of merit, arises. The Antillem have no inherent
values of their own, they are always contingent on the
presence of The Other. The question is always whether

A. The Negro and Adh’ he is less intelligent than I, blacker than I, less respect-
From whatever direction one approaches the analysis able than I. Every position of one’s own, every effort at

p+ogenic conditions, one very soon hds One- security, is based on relations of dependence, with the
self in the presence of the following phenomenon: The – diminution of the other. It is the wreckage of what sur-
whole picture of the neurosis, as well as its s ~ ~ P ~ ~ ~ ~ 7 rounds me that provides the foundation for my virility.
emerges as under the iduenoe of some goal, indeed as I should like to suggest an experiment to any Marti-
projehons of &is goal. Therefore one can ascribe the charae nican who reads this book: Find the most “comparative”
ter of a formative cause to this final goal, the quality of a street in Fort-de-France. Rue Schoelcher, rue victor-
principle of orientation, of arrangement, of ~ ~ ~ r d h a ~ ~ ~ . Hugo–certainly not rue Franqois-Arago. The Martinican
T~,, to undersmd the “meaning” and the direction of who agrees to make this experiment will share my opinion
healthy manifestations, and YOU will immediately come face precisely insofar as he can objectively endue seeing him-
to face with a chaotic throng of tendencis, of impulses, of

and of anomalies, bound to discourage some self stripped naked. An Antillean who meets an acquaint-

and to arouse * others the rash resolve to penetrate the ance for the fist time after five or six years’ absence greets
shadows at all costs, even at the risk of finding * the end him with aggression. This is because in the past each had
that nothing h a been gained, or that what has been gained a fixed position. NOW the inferior thinks that he has ac-
is illusory. ~ f , on the other hand, one accepts the hypothesir worth . . . and the superior is determined to con-
of a ha] goal or of a causal finality, one sees the shadows serve the old hierarchy. “You haven’t changed a bit . . ,
dissolve at once and we can read the soul of the patient like still as stupid as ever.”
the pages of a book.’ I have known some, physicians and dentists, who have

~t is on the basis of similar theoretical positions that7 gone on filling their heads with mistakes in judgment
made fifteen years before. It is not so much concephal
errors as “Creolisms” with which the dangerous man is
belabored. He was put in his place once and for all:
nothing to be done about it. The Antillean is character-

212 1 ~ I a c k Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon / 213

ized by his desire to dominate the other. His line of Not because The Other is the ultimate objective of his
orientation runs through the other. I t is always a question action in the sense of COmmunication between people that
of the subject; one never even thinks of the object. I Adler describes? but, more primitively, because i t is
q to read admiration in the eyes of the other, and if, The Other who corroborates him in his search for
unluckily, those eyes show me an u.npleasant reflection?
I find that mirror flawed: Unquestionably that other one Now that we have marked out the Adlerian line of
is a fool. I do not try to be naked in the sight of the object- orientation of the Antillean, ow task is to look for its
The object is denied in terms of individuality and liberty.
The object is an instrument. It should enable me to realize Here the difficulties begin. In effect, Adler has created
my subjective security. I consider myself fuElled (the a ~ s ~ c h o l o g ~ of the individual. We have jut seen that
wish for plenitude) and I recognize no division. The the feeling of inferiority is an h t iuean characteristic. ~t
Other comes on to the stage only in order to furnish it- is not just this or that htillean who embodies the neu-
I am the Hero. Applaud or condemn, it makes no differ- rOtic formation? but htilleans. Antiflean society is a
ence to me, 1 am the center of attention. If the other seeks neurotic society, a society of ” c ~ m ~ a r i s ~ ~ . ” Hence we are
to make me uneasy with his wish to have value (his driven from h e individual back to the social structure.
fiction), I simply banish him without a trial. He ceases If there is a taint, it lies not in the iou lW of the individual
to exist. I don’t want to hear .about that fellow. I do not but rather in that of the environment.
wish to experience the impact of the object. Contact with The Martinican is and is not a neurotic. 1f we were
the object means conflict. 1 am Narcissus, and what I in applying the conc~usions of the Adlerian school,
want to see in the eyes of others is a reflection that pleases we should say that the Negro is seeking to protest against
me. Therefore, in any given group (environment) in the inferiority that he feels historically. Since in all periods.
Martinique, one finds the man on top, the c o u . that sur- the Negro bas been an inferior, he attempts to react
rounds him, the in-betweem (who are waiting for some- with a superiority complex. And this is indeed what comes
thing better), and the losers. These last are slaughtered out of Brachfeld’s book. Discussing the feeling of racial .
without mercy. One can imagine the temperame that inferiority, Brachfeld quotes a Spanish play by Andr& de
prevails in that jungle. There is no Way out of it. Claamunte, El ualknte negro de Fhdres. This play

Me, nothing but me. makes clear that the inferiority of the Negro does not
The Martinicans are greedy for security- They want to date from this century, since De Claramunte was a con-

the acceptance of their fiction. They want to be temporary of Lope de Vega:
recognized in their quest for manhood. They want to make Only the color of his skin there lacked
an appearance. Each one of them is an isolated, sterile, mat he should be a man of gentle blood.
salient atom .with sharply defined rights of passage, each
one of them h. Each one of them wants to be? to ’emerge. And the Negro, Juan de MCrida, says this:

Everything that an Antillean does is done for The Other. 2. In Understanding ~ u m a n Nature.

216 / Black Skin, White Masks

The Martinican is a man crucified. The environment
that has shaped him (but that he has not shaped) has
horribly drawn and quartered him; and he feeds this cul-
tural environment with his blood and his essences. Now,
the blood of Negroes is a manure prized by experts.

If I were an Adlerian, then, having established the
fact that my friend had fulfilled in a dream his wish to
become white-that is, to be a man-I would show him
that his neurosis, his psychic instability, the rupture of
his ego arose out of this governing fiction, and I would
say to him: “M. Mannoni has very ably described this
phenomenon in the Malagasy. Look here: I tbink you
simply have to resign yourself to remaining in the place
that has been assigned to you.”

Certainly not1 I will not say that at dl I will tell him,
“The environment, society are responsible for your de-
lusion.” Once that has been said, the rest will foUow of
itself, and what that is we know. The end of the world.

I wonder sometimes whether school inspectors and
government functionaries are aware of the role they play
in the colonies. For twenty years they poured every effort
into programs that would make the Negro a white man.
In the end, they dropped him and told him, “You have
an indisputable complex of dependence on the white
man.”

B. The Negro and Hegel
Self-cunsciousness ertsts in itself and for itself, in that and

by the fact that it exists for another self-conrciozcsness; that
b to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized.

-Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to
impose his existence on another man in order to be
recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively

Frantz Fanon / 217

recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme
of his actions. I t is on that other being, on recognition
by that other being, that his own human worth and
reality depend. It is that other being in whom the mean-
ing of his life is condensed.

There is not an open conflict between white and black.
One day the White Master, without conflict, recognized
the Negro slave.

But the former slave wants to make himself recognized.
At the foundation of Hegelian dialectic there is an

absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized. It is in
the degree to which I go beyond my own immediate being
that I apprehend the existence of the other as a natural
and more than natural reality. If I close the circuit, if
I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two direc-
tions, I keep the other within himself. Ultimately, I
deprive him even of this being-for-itself.

I The only means of breaking this vicious circle that
throws me back on myself is to restore to the other,
through mediation and recognition, his human reality,
which is different from natural reality. The other has to
perform the same operation. “Action from one side only
would be useless, because what is to happen can only be
brought about by means of both.. . . .”; “they recognize
themselves as mutually recognizing each other.’

In its immediacy, mnsciousness of self is simple being-
for-itself. In order to win the certainty of oneself, the in-
corporation of the concept of recognition is essential.
Similarly, the other is waiting for recognition by US, in
order to burgeon into the universal consciousness of self.
Each consciousness of self is in quest of absoluteness. It
wants to be recognized as a primal value without reference

4. 6. W. F. Hegel, The ~ h e k n n e n o l o ~ ~ of Mind, trans. by J. B.
Baillie, 2nd rev. d. (London, AUen h Unwin, 1Q49), pp. 230,231.

218 1 B k k Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon / 219

to life, as a transformation of subjective certainty ( G d – The other, however, can recognize me without shggle:
heit) into objective truth ( WahrGt). ‘The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no
men it encounters resistance from the other, self- doubt, be recognized as a person, but he has not attained

consciousness undergoes the experience of desire-the the truth of &is recognition as an independent selfmcon-
first milestone on the road that leads to the dignity of the

Self-consciousness accepts the risk of its Me, and Historically, the Negro steeped in &e inessentiality of
consequently it threatens the other in his physical being. servitude was set free by his master. He did not fight for
” ~ t is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only
&us is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self- Out of slavery the Negro burst into the lists where
consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely im- his masters stood. Like those servants who are allowed
mediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is once every Year to dance in the drawing room, the Negro
not its mere absorption in the expanse of life.”‘ is looking for a prop. The Negro has not become a master.

When there are no longer slaves, there are no longer

The N e ~ o is a slave who has been allowed to assume
the attitude of a master.

The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves
to eat at his table.

soon as I &sire I am asking to be considered. 1 am
not merely here-and-now, sealed into wgness . I am for
somewhere else and for something else. I dm-~and that
notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I Pursue
something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the
creation of a human world-that is, of a world of reci- Since then, M. Deshaies has taken the question of suicide as the

subject of his thesis. He demonstrates that the studies by Jaensch,
procal recognitions. who contrasted the disintegrated-personality “type” (blue eyes,

He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes n ~ e – 1×1 white skin) to the integrated-personality “typen (brown eyes and
a savage I am willing to accept convulsions of sk i . ) , are predominantly specious.
death, invincible dissolution, but also the possibility of According to Durkheim, Jews never committed suicide. N~~ it

is the Negroes. Very well: ‘”The Detroit municipal hospital found
that 16-68 of its suicide cases were Negroes, although the proportion
of Negroes in the total population is only 7.6%. In Cincinnati, the
number of Negro suicides is more than double that of whites; this
may result In part from the amazing sexual disparity among Negro
suicides: 358 women against 76 men.” (Gabriel Deshaies, p s y c b ~ –
ogie du suicide, note 23.)

7. Hegel, op. cit., p. 233.

2 ~ ) I Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon 1 221

one day a good white master who had influence said But the Negro ~ O W S nothing of the cost of freedom,

to his friends, “Let’s be nice to the niggers. . . .” for he has not fought for it. From ti*e to time he has
The masters argued, for after all it was not an white

fought for Liberty and Justice, but these were & r a y s
easy thing, but then they decided to promote the mtchine- liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted

animal-men to the supreme rank of men. by masters. The former slave, who can find in

Shoey shall no longer exist on French soil- memory no trace of the struggle for liberty or of that

The upheaval reached the Negroes from without. The anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard s p e h , sits

black man was acted upon. Values that had not been moved before the young white man singing a d dancing

created by his actions, values that had not been born of on the tightrope of existence.

the systolic tide of his blood, danced in a hued whirl When it does happen that the Negro looks fiercely at

round him. The upheaval did not make a difference in the the white man, the white man tells him: “Brother, there

Negro. He went from one way of life to another, but not is no difference between us.” And yet the &go bkmut
from one life to another. Just as when one tells a n~uch that there is a difference. He wants it. He wants the white

man to turn on him and shout: “Damn nigger.” Then he improved patient that in a few days he will be discharged –
from the hospital, he thereupon suffers a relapse, so the would have that unique chance-to “show them, . , :
-0uncement of the liberation of the black slaves pr* But most often there is but
duced psychoses and sudden deaths. ence, or a paternahtic curiosity.

~t is not an announcement that one hears twice in a The former slave needs a chdenge to his humanity,
l i febe. The black man contented himself with thanking he Wmt.3 a CO&C~, a riot. But it i s too late: The French

the white man, and the most forceful proof of the fact is Negro is doomed to bite himself and jw to bite, I say

the impressive number of statues erected all over France French Negro,* for the American Negro b c a t in
and the colonies to show white France stroking the lclnky a different play. In the United States, the Negro bads
hair of this nice Negro whose chains had just been and is battled. There are laws that, little by little, are

invalidated under the Constitution. There me other lam

“say thank you to the nice man,” the mother tells her that forbid certain forms of di~crid111~ti~~. h d we can
little boy . . . but we know that often the little boy is be s u e that nothing is going to be given free.

There is war, there are defeats, trucer, victories.

In fie same way, the slave hen is in no way identifiable with
The white man, in the capacity of master: said to the the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in hir: work the

Negro, “From now on you are free.” source of his liberation.

8. I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from
the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here
the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants
from the slave is not recognition but work.

222 / Black Skin, Whi te Masks

“The twelve ÿ ill ion black voicesy* howled against the
curtain of the sky. Torn from end to end, marked with the
gashes of teeth biting into the belly of interdiction, the
curtain fell like a burst balloon.

On the field of battle, its four comers marked by the
scores of Negroes hanged by their testicles, a monument
is Gowly being built that promises to be majestic. – .’+I+ at the top of this monument, I can aheady see a
white man and a black man hand in hand. The social reuolution . . . mn1u)t

F Q ~ the French Negro the situation is unbearable. Un- draw its poetry from the past, but
able ever to be sure whether the white man considers him from the future. It cannot begin
cons~iousness in-itself-for-itself, he must forever absorb with itself before it has stripped it-
himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge. self of all its superstitions c0fu:ming

This is what emerges from some of the passages of the – the past. Earlier reuolutions relied on
book that Mounier has devoted to Africa.l” The young rm.?mories out of world history in order
Negroes whom he knew there sought to maintain their to dmg themselues against thefr own
alterity. Alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle.

content. In order to find their own
content, the reuolutwns o f the nine-

The self takes its place by opposing itself, Fichte said. teenth century haue to let the dead
bury the dead. Before, the expression

I said in my introduction that man is a yes. 1 will n ~ e r
‘

exceeded the content; now, the con-
stop reiterating that. tent exceeds the expression.

Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. -lG.~l Mum, The Eighteenth Brumaire,
But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to deg-

radation of man. N o to exploitation of man. No to the
butchery of what is most human in man: freedom. I can already see the faces of all those who will ask

Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is me to be precise on this or that point, to denounce this
always resentment in a reaction. Nietzsche had already or that mode of conduct.
pointed that out in The Will to Power. I t is obvious-and I will never weary of repeating this

To educate man to be crctional, preserving in all his -that the quest for disalienation by a doctor of medicine
relations his respect for the basic values that constitute l ~ ~ m in Guadeloupe can be understood only by recognizing
a human world, is the prime task of him who, having motivations badcally different from those of the Negro
taken thought, prepares to act. laborer building the port facilities in Abidjan. rn first

9. In English in the original. (Translator’s note. )
case, the alienation is of an almost intellectual character,

10. Emmanuel Mounier, L’dueil de Z’Afrique noire (Paris, ~ d i –
tions du Seuil, 1948).