Flexner Book Club Blog

Just yesterday, I was discussing the value and danger in identity categories in one of the Bryn Mawr courses being offered in connection with Judith Butler’s Flexner Lectureship, “Queens, Nuns, and Other Deviants in the Early Modern Iberian World.”  Some students felt very strongly about the necessity of gender identity categories for the purpose of social movement organization and coherence, but the divisive potential of these categories is quite strong.  Because one can never be sure of how a category may come to be stigmatized or politicized in the future, Butler considers their merit as “sites of necessary trouble” in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.”

Butler reminds us that categories are often born out of fear of “erasure,” but the desire to counter the threat of erasure should be examined for its potential to “reinstall another [violence of erasure] in its place” (125).  Although Butler is mainly considering the implications of the identification of the “I,” I found this essay helpful in better understanding a period of the pro-choice movement’s identity politics.

In 1986, during the Supreme Court case Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Roe v. Wade came within a single vote of being overturned.  From a fear of the “erasure” of the pro-choice movement’s strength and policies, pro-choice advocates redefined their categorization to include a conservative message strategy, with the hope of broadening pro-choice support.  With the hope of appealing to conservatives wary of big government and fond of privacy rights, the pro-choice movement adopted the slogan, “Who Decides—You or Them?”  This “reframing” of the pro-choice identity to include hints of conservative rhetoric was successful in protecting pro-choice legislature from “erasure,” but ultimately weakened the pro-choice movement by giving credence to arguments that would be used against it.  The conservative message strategy strengthened the legislative possibility for parental consent laws and the reduction of public funding for abortions.  As Butler states, “there is no way to predict or control the political uses to which that sign [identity], will be put in the future” (126).

The homosexual identities that Butler writes about expose the panicked desire to counter the myth of an “original” and “correct” heterosexuality and she suggests that homosexual identities may merely reinscribe their status as an imperfect “copy” of heterosexuality.  In other words, the danger in identity categories is their potential to fall into the service of what they intend to counter or delineate from, which was seen in the case of the pro-choice movement adjusting their identity.

I am thinking about becoming a princess. It’s going to be harder than you might think. Raised Pennsylvania Dutch and Lutheran in the shadow of the women’s movement, I have always been self-reliant above all else. Since childhood, I scoffed at gender roles, willfully subverting them: I reached for the check when it came; I took out the trash; and I installed the new downspout. No man, not even the husband I love and with whom I have shared nearly 30 years of life, was going to get in the way. Of my taking out the trash. (Hmmmm?)

Reading Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” I realized I had a little reflecting to do. Had I, like Butler’s “‘providing”” butch on page 131, become “caught in a logic of inversion whereby that ‘providingness’ turns to a self-sacrifice”—implicating me in “the most ancient trap of feminine self-abnegation”? Hmmmm. . . .

On the topic of self-abnegation, there’s the song “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman” (133). As a teenager, listening to Carole King’s rendition on a hand-me-down record, I was struck by its urgency and sexuality. Just to hear a woman singing—claiming—the word “wuh-mahn” was a powerful experience. As a likely straight, gender-conforming adolescent female, I did not think much about what a “natural woman” was, or how it was problematic (133).

As powerful as I found the song to be, what perturbed me was the “You make me feel” part. Even King and co-writer Gerry Goffin must have felt a little shaky about it—why else put that part in parentheses in the title? Why, whether in 1967 when Aretha Franklin first recorded it, or in 1977 when I was listening to the song, were we relying on, celebrating, that someone else made us feel anything, let alone a certain kind of woman?

Then it got even worse: “And if I make you happy I don’t need to do more.” What kind of self-abnegation is that—commonplace, or so-pathetic-that-self-will-need-a-spatula-to-pick-itself-up-from-the-floor?

As for certain aspects of “natural” woman, in the early sixties King herself was performing the ideal heterosexual woman (with idealized non-ethnic hair). By the early seventies, King and others flaunted their naturally moppy hair. A frequent remark I heard at that time was that one couldn’t even tell men from women, their appearances were so similar. I used to think this should bug me—the people saying it seemed so confused and powerless—but it never did. I exulted in this confusion. Was I just a crazy kid—or were the early seeds of gender insubordination taking root in me?

While we are revisiting my youth, why not have a look at the Love Is. . . cartoons? These nude little people had no visible sexual features, except that the “woman” had long hair and nipples, and the “man” had short hair and no nipples (??). They gamboled from frame to frame, seemingly undaunted by their unarticulated genitalia. Nature or nurture? If I was bound to challenge gender norms, was it because of some innate quality, or because I saw the Love Is. . . cartoons in the daily paper?

Recently, in reflecting back on those cartoons, I found this. It’s part of an ad campaign through the Advertising Media Program of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). And I felt hope—that we are claiming certain archetypes and reimagining them to reveal our selves, and our hopes for ourselves.

This summer, my husband and I were walking on the High Line in Manhattan, when we saw this sign. Yes! we cheered. We have the abundant privilege of heterosexual marriage, and yet we remain perplexed by other heterosexuals who feel, as Butler puts it, “perpetually at risk” (129). How uplifting to see on a billboard that we should just GET OVER IT.

My lens is a heterosexual, gender-conforming one. I know that I have enormous privilege. Yet I take away some empowering thoughts from “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” And lately I’ve been feeling a little tired. Maybe it’s not too late to try out the princess identity. I think I’d like to feel the “incontrovertible power” of “orchestrat[ing]” a certain dependency (131).

“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” is superb. I want to turn this into a pamphlet and hand it out to people who are skeptical of the utility of critical theory and philosophy in daily life. By “coming out” (a phrase that she deftly interrogates and skewers as iterative, even while affirming its importance and utility) in an essay that resists the entire stated theme and raison d’être—lesbian theory—of the collection in which it appeared, Butler performs her own theory.

The argument of the essay hinges on the limited and limiting categories of identity described by terms like “man,” “woman,” “lesbian,” “queer,” “homosexual,” and “heterosexual,” and on the attendant instability of those categories and any perceived hierarchies among them. These terms are rigid or narrow enough to require ways of “playing” those categories, as when Butler talks about going to a conference to “be” a lesbian, even though she already “is” a lesbian. One is or is not many categories: lesbian, left-handed, woman, queer, mother, Ashkenazi Jew, African-American, and then one also has to “be” those categories at times, in the same way that one might “be” a dutiful daughter or supportive friend, even if one already *is* those things.

Throughout this essay, Butler constantly reflects on the terms of the essay itself. What is a lesbian? What is theory? Yet she questions these terms even as she performs them, effectively stating, “I am a lesbian academic now writing about gender theory for an edited collection on lesbian theory,” and—through her almost parodic self-reflection—”I am now performing the role of self-identified lesbian academic and philosopher in an environment in which it is useful or expected of me to do so.” Butler uses the essay form to perform an identity that she simultaneously claims and critiques, tacitly demonstrating the constraints of identity categories and also their inherent instability.

In Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, he describes political philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory of gesture—that is, action and that which constitutes performance—as “means without ends” (91). In other words, gesture is something that occurs, but it is not in the service of any achievable end goal (despite an impulse to think otherwise). Rather, gesture is characterized by a nothing-ness that “interrupts the normative flow of time and movement” (91) because it does not contribute to the forward movement of time; instead, Muñoz urges us to see gesture as something that suspends time, not propelling it to unfold but expanding possibilities within time. Gesture, then, holds potential because of its ability to “interrupt” and defy normative time—an important potentiality because normative time has a distinct “heteronormative bent” (91). (Time has this “heteronormative bent” because it is coopted by institutions with a heteronormative agenda—we organize time around heterosexual acts, sync it with the heterosexual body, and time seemingly moves forward with heterosexual reproduction which helps reproduce the reigning social order.)

Not being in the service of an end goal, gesture can perhaps pave the way for other ends, thus holding the potential for futures not akin to the futures required and sustained by (hetero)normative time.

This idea of gesture being a “means without ends” was reiterated for me when reading Judith Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Subordination.” She describes gender as a series of repetitive acts (or gestures) that the subject performs even though “repetition never fully accomplishes identity” (131). In other words, gender—and the subject supposedly doing gender—is never “fully” complete. Rather, these acts are always in the service of an impossible end goal, and thus can be considered “means without ends.” But while gendered performances are in the service of an inapproachable gendered end, gender is still a “compulsory performance” (130). In other words, even though there is no end or possibility for completion to gender, we do it anyway because we have to, perhaps even because we perceive the means will and do lead to some gendered end: our performative acts might allow us to say and even believe “I am [insert gender category here].”

But because gender is always happening, it follows that Butler has concerns with organizing these acts to be indicative of static identity categories. She opens the piece with her concerns over theorizing under the label of lesbian, and she worries that present use of the sign “lesbian” in this case impedes “future use of the sign. There is a political necessity to use some sign now, and we do, but how to use it in such a way that its futural significations are not foreclosed?” (126).

In a way, Butler is worried that we are too caught in the “ends” of the “means”—by necessitating gestures to lead to some neat and tidy category (thus implying some finished end), Butler worries that other not-yet-realized ends become “foreclosed.” What futures might become available to us if we abandon the present use of categories and labels to describe gender and sexuality? Is there really any viable way to eschew the “political necessity” to use categories in the present, or would doing so be a step backwards for activists who utilize the categories to promote social change? If gesture is, according to Munoz, “laden with potentiality” (91), can the gestures and acts that produce gender be laden with the same potentiality? How can we access that potentiality in the label-loving and, in some ways, label-necessary 21^st century?

Almost a year ago, I launched a campaign on twitter called #ihadanabortion.  I asked women who were comfortable doing so to “come out” about their abortion experience using the hashtag to aggregate all the responses.  I hoped that this would lessen the stigma associated with abortion in some way and give women who’d had abortions a sense of community, a new way to explore their experiences.

What happened was overwhelming—there were hundreds of women talking about their abortions on twitter, giving voice to their experiences and proving statistics correct (1 in 3 US women will have an abortion in her lifetime). The media picked up on this, and soon the pro-choice world did too.  I understood the mainstream media’s hesitation to embrace the idea that twitter is a legitimate place to talk about abortion; they almost always cover abortion from a political perspective, not a personal one. It was more difficult for me to grapple with the critiques from the pro-choice world—not only that abortion is “too private” a  decision to tweet about, but that “coming out” is not a useful frame to use in trying to reduce abortion stigma.

This week’s Butler reading helped me understand this much more in depth. In talking about lesbians coming out, she asks, “So we are out of the closet, and into what?” (p. 122). When asking women to come out about their experiences on twitter, I didn’t anticipate the hostile environment that would ensue. Within a few hours, cruel comments from anti-abortion folks were dominating the conversation. Since twitter is completely public and unregulated, I had no way of protecting or informing the women who’d entered that space to tell their stories.

When I started the hashtag, I had no idea that it would balloon into a media phenomenon. But I also didn’t ask some critical questions: what would be the consequences of “coming out” to the women who participated? What environment would follow their “coming out”? And then, there’s Butler’s observation that some people “coming out” can be at the expense of others: “Being ‘out’ always depends to some extent on being ‘in’; it gains its meaning only within that polarity. Hence being ‘out’ must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as ‘out'” (p. 123).

Does one woman “coming out” about her abortion on twitter disable others from doing so? Are we constantly pushing each other into the closet instead of helping each other speak truth to power? Is there a way to empower people to tell their own stories, on their own terms, reduce stigma, and not create the theoretical closet over and over again?