Thursday, March 13, 2008

Butler part II

In the second chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler takes up a commonplace of feminist theory, the patriarchy. She notes that many feminists have tried to produce and analyze the pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which they can base a new, non-oppressive society. She cautions, however, this feminist recourse to pre-patriarchy to not “promote a politically problemative reification of women’s experience in the course of debunking the self-reifying claims of masculinist power” (p. 48). In other words, she doesn’t want new “stories of origins” to be created while we try to debunk the old. Essentially, Butler is describing the way in which feminist discourse has and needs to continue to, “locate moments or structures within history or culture that establish gender hierarchy” in order to, “repudiate those reactionary theories which would naturalize or universalize the subordination of women” (49). It is using this type of analysis Butler hopes we can understand the formation of gender and its origins.

I. Structuralism’s Critical Exchange

Structuralism is one of the French schools of thought Butler uses in her gender analysis. Butler describes Levi-Strauss’s, a famous structuralist, view of the “critical exchange”. The critical exchange is the exchange of females from different clans for marriage (otherwise known as exogamy). A structualist analysis of this exchange is what reveals the “incest taboo.” It starts with the ideas that women were exchanged, in reality, to bond the men together (homosocial). That bonding is what precedes the “incest taboo” or, in other words, the incest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women. Butler also claims that incest is a “pervasive cultural fantasy” that is perpetuated because it is taboo.

Butler ends this section with an interesting quote, “language is the residue and alternative accomplishment of dissatisfied desire, the variegated cultural reduction of a sublimination that never really satisfies” (58)- I think then what she is saying is that the “taboos” that have come about through a variety of historical contexts have also created a limited language to talk about alternative sex practices….Feel free to help me out with this.

II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade

Butler addresses Lacan and Riviere’s theories on masquerade. She begins with an analysis of Lacan’s language (Symbolic) of to have (the phallus) and to be (the phallus). Men have the phallus and thus women strive “to be” the phallus. “To be” the phallus embodies and affirms the phallus. Lacan concludes that, this “‘appearing as being’ the Phallus that women are compelled to do is inevitably masquerade” (63). This claim brings up the idea that there is a “being” or “ontological specification of femininity prior to the masquerade…that might promise an eventual disruption and displacement of the phallogocentric signifying economy” (64).


Riviere’s psychoanalytic description of “womanliness as a masquerade” supposedly hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for female homosexuality. A mask is used to defend their feelings and protect individuals from societal disapproval (gay men mask in masculine heterosexuality and “masculine” women in femininity).


Is “masking” or “masquerading,” then, performing gender? If yes, then what is truly being masked?

III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender

Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia states that “loss” prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one itself. In other words “the ego is said to incorporate the other into the very structure of the ego” sustaining this “lost” one with “magical acts of imitation” (78). Furthering this theory, gender too can be internalized with the “imitation” of internalized taboos. “This process of internalizing lost loves becomes pertinent to gender formation…” (79).

Butler questions assumptions that are present in Freud’s arguments that seem to negate the view that gender is performed. She states that many of his theories and claims “disguise its own genealogy. In others words “dispositions” are traces of a history of enforced sexual prohibitions which is untold and prohibitions seek to render untellable” (87).

IV. Gender Complexity and the limits of identification and V. Reformulating prohibition as power

Butler, at the end states that, “an even more precise understanding is needed of how the juridical law of psychoanalysis, repression, produces and proliferates the genders it seeks to control” (97). She points again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates and also regulates approved heterosexuality and homosexuality as subversive and “before” or prior to the “law.”

3 comments:

Kira Price said...

What a daunting task to "locate moments or structures within history or culture that establish gender hierarchy"...ah. Although Butler does a great job of seeking out and incorporating historical moments to support her claims, I have trouble seeing if this approach will ever work in the way that we see the true origins of the gender hierarchy as it is today. By saying this, I am not suggesting there is no point in trying to figure it out-- I think the search in and of itself is important (and not just for feminists). I myself, just feel completely overwhelmed with trying to figure out a universal "truth" about the history of anything. There are tons of reasonings and interpretations that lead people to create social history the way we have. How can we ever find a moment that is beyond personal reaction and opinion? I commend Butler for trying to do this.

hannah said...

Laura,
Thanks for your summary. I'm also wondering about the "masquerading" concept and whether that is gender performance. I think Butler sets up this question here on p. 64 when she states that Lacan's masquerade could be either "an appearing that makes itself convincing as a 'being'" or "a denial of a feminine desire that presupposes some prior ontological femininity regularly unrepresented by the phallic economy." But then Butler goes on to suggest that these options don't have to be mutually exclusive. She is skeptical about the existence of an "ontological femininity," but certainly some aspects of gender and sexuality can be oppressed by society and therefore hidden. I'm not exactly sure what her final answer to the question is, but I think it's important to discuss since there are so many claims in our culture today that women in power are "trying to be men" (just think about Hillary Clinton...).

agroggel said...

I'm not fully aware of Butler's theory of female exogamy but last semester I read several interesting literary interpretations dealing with this issue. It showed that in many Shakespearean plays male friendships and kinship networks are valued more than the institution of marriage. Representing female characters as mere catalysts for such homosocial bonds to form. Great discussion lola!