Ever since I began my journey into feminist/queer theory my freshman year, I have viewed the category of gender as an enemy. I saw the ways this construct has a negative impact on everyone - constraining the actions of men and women into rigid categories, convincing us that our gender must match our biology, telling us that there are only two gendered ways to be in the world. I hated everything about gender, seeing only its oppressive forces against us all. One of the theorists who first began to break apart the idea of gender for me was Judith Butler. Her gender performativity theory displayed the ways that gender is constructed, worn, and acted out in life. It made me realize the ways that gender was liberating - that we control our own actions and thus can decide do whatever we want with gender - but then reminded me of how society constrains our opportunities and punishes our performative failures. Queer theory's proposed solution to this is to deconstruct the category of gender. If gender is oppressive and socially constructed, then it is possible to stop the oppression by taking apart this category. I went around believing this for quite some time, until I started thinking more closely about the topic last semester.
As most of you know, last semester there was a panel discussion about race and whether it has any usefulness as a category. A lot of the discussion at this panel was about the undeniable effect of race on our lives despite its social constructedness. The panel and the room came almost unanimously to the same idea - that race cannot be deconstructed as a category unless it stops having a real effect on our lives, as this deconstruction would only be erasure.
While race and gender work in very different ways that I am still figuring out, this started my thoughts about whether I really thought gender should be deconstructed. I came across a critique of Butler's performativity theory by a trans person named Cos who did not feel that Butler's theory validated trans identity. Butler famously says in Gender Trouble, "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... Identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results." However, most trans people distinguish between their gender identity and gender expression, where their expression "expresses" a deeply held gender feeling. In order for a trans person to desire so much to transition, there has to be something more to their identity than performance. I wrote my paper about this, and the conclusion I came to is that Butler can ignore the identity piece because she is cisgender. Because her gender identity and expression align, Butler can imagine that gender is not a central part of others' identity. (This is similar to the ways that white people can think they don't have a race and thus advocate for colorblindness.) Peformativity requires that people perceive one's gender in a particular way for one to be that gender, and thus it removes people's agency to self-define. It is especially violent when cisgender people are almost always these perceivers, since we operate in the cisgender hegemonic gender binary, and thus non-binary gender will almost never be perceived correctly. If we try to deconstruct gender, this will only remove more agency from people to self-identify and further erase their identities under a structure of cisgender domination.
Because transgender and genderqueer people's identities are invalidated by the idea of deconstructing gender, I propose that we should instead advocate for gender flexibility. Everyone should be able to self-define their gender and express it in any way that they want. This will require tearing down this system of cisgender hegemony. Fuck the cis-tem!
I think that gender deconstruction is a necessary prerequisite for gender flexibility, since the idea of gender flexibility can be seen as a reconstruction. The ideas of gender abolition, the result of deconstruction, and gender flexibility, the result of this reconstruction, are very closely related and both would mediate free agency in a sense. However, I do agree with you in that flexibility would be a better end-goal. Flexibility would be a step further than abolition because it would provide a means determining identity.
ReplyDeleteAs you said, trans individuals distinguish between their gender identity and gender expression, and their issue comes with a misalignment between the two. The way our society wants things to work is that biological sex will socially constitute one's gender identity, and that identity will naturally lead to a certain form of expression. Note that the source of everything here is the biological sex. I think a society with true agency needs to treat gender expression as the source of everything in this context. Gender expression should mediate gender identity, and identity should have no relationship with biological sex. In my paper, I argued that the linguistic tradition marrying sex and gender descriptions essentializes their relationship. I think that in order to posit that no such relationship exists between biological sex and gender identity (and thus gender expression), a preliminary step would be that gender descriptions should take on a new vocabulary that divorces itself with the sexes that historically constituted them.
By maintaining our current terminology with gender descriptions (and thus our ideas of gender in general), gender remains fixed and one dimensional, ranging between femaleness or maleness. I think a deconstruction of gender is important to actually understand what features are grouped together in sets at these extremes. Once this process is understood, I think we can view gender not one-dimensionally in terms of the relationship between these two sets (extremes), but multi-dimensionally in terms of the relationships between the extremes of the elements belonging to both these sets. I think this multi-dimensionality of gender is what you might have been referring to when you said gender flexibility. And furthermore, I think this multi-dimensional defining of gender could divorce gender from its historically constituted, sex essentialized, and one-dimensional past.
Totally agree with you, Leah. Furthermore, I'm thinking that all categories of identity require that they be constituted by acts, or performed. To be a man requires that one constitute this identity with male actions, or that to be homosexual requires that one affirm homosexual desires, or that to be a "funny guy," one has to actually do funny things. However, that these identifiers must be performed does not somehow mean they are "not real." Rather, they are the real expression of that individual, the real constitutive acts, and are thus as real as identity will ever get. "The doing is everything," as Nietzsche reminds us. We will never access the noumena, the "really real," if it exists at all. Thus, one's gender desires are one's real gender desires, and for no reason should be deemed not worthy of affirmation.
ReplyDeleteLeah,
ReplyDeleteIn Butler’s view, separation of a gender identity and a gender performance is non-existent. The view you claim some trans people to have—that there is some gender identity beyond performance—is what Butler argues against. I merely want to point out that these are two radically different views.
I think you should hesitate to claim that there is some notion of identity beyond performance. The idea that gender is “an identity tenuously constituted in time” and “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” allows for gender to develop and change. Butler’s claim is that gender is not grounded in some kind of essence/nature. She calls gender a historical situation and distinguishes it from a natural fact. If gender identity exists beyond performativity, then where do you propose it exists? Are you proposing that gender has an essence? That it is innate in the sense described above? From what I can tell, our options regarding the location of gender is either in the historical situation of a person, or in an essence. You could argue for a combination of the two, but then you would still include some form of essentialism. I do not think you want to do this.
In Butler’s claims, she is not denying the facticity of body, but she is distinguishing the cultural meaning of the body from its facticity. She also notes that we are compelled to conform to this culture by regulative and punitive means. In this respect, one might say that a person who felt the need to transition was experiencing the compulsion of society to conform, to align one’s cultural and physical genitals (an idea brought up in the FTM/Butch border wars). This person would be desiring a physicality that he/she/whoever felt matched his/her/whoever’s gender. Butler is trying to distinguish between the physical and the cultural. Trans people who transition appear to be associating the physical and the cultural. It seems reasonably to say, then, that Butler would think of the trans’ desire to transition as a reflection of a belief in an essentialist connection between the facticity of the body and its cultural meaning.
Pierce,
ReplyDeleteYour analysis in your final paragraph, as well as Butler's analysis, shows a complete misunderstanding of trans identity - proving that the gender performativity model does not work in sync with most trans identities. Trans people do not physically transition in order to "align one's cultural and physical genitals," but rather because they deeply feel that they are another gender than the one they have been assigned/perceived as. I'm not sure where this gender feeling comes from. You might say it is an essence, but I would rather use the word "identity." If you believe that trans people transition because they feel forced to align "cultural and physical genitals," this fails to consider (1) trans people who are not yet outwardly presenting as their gender identity and (2) trans people who do not desire to physically transition. [I want to first clarify that when I use "transition," I mean socially. This can be broken down into performative and physical/surgical transitions, but both are not required in order for one to have transitioned.]
In the first scenario, if a trans woman is not yet outwardly expressing her identity as a woman (as in, dressing and acting in a certain way that she deems female - the performative piece), why then would she desire to transition surgically? At this point, her cultural and physical genitals match (she is performing as male and has a penis). It's her identity which does not match, which she wants people to acknowledge and respect.
In the second scenario, a trans woman transitions to be recognized as the gender she identifies with. This does not always require that she undergo a physical (that is, surgical) transition. While some trans people do feel dysphoric and desire to surgically transition, some do not. Using Butler's point of view, how then would you explain a trans woman's desire to transition presentation-wise but then not transition physically? This would be working against the supposed initiative to align her cultural and physical genitals.
I just want to make the point that, no matter what Butler says about trans identity, she will never understand it well enough for me to respect her analysis of the meanings behind it. It is offensive to me and to trans people to have our lived experiences (the experience of having a gender identity which exists separately from gender performance) denied by a theory which does not take our existence into account.
Leah,
ReplyDeleteThanks for clarifying. I did take your meaning of transition in the physical/surgical sense.