Undoing Gender

Feminism attempts to transform gender relations, rethinking what it means to live in and around gender norms. Norms create unity through exclusion. Butler’s work Gender Trouble came out when feminism shifted to understanding sexual difference as a foundation of language and culture. Butler cites the movement through Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Saussure, Kristeva, and Cixous. Gender Trouble asserts, through identities such as butch and femme, that gender is performative, emulating a copy, not an origin. Butler notes the tension between opposition to their point either on the grounds that the Oedipal conflict is necessary for language and culture or based on the necessity of sexual difference in opposing patriarchal structures.

Considering the final chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler notes how drag exposed them to gender performativity, but they add that institutions threaten severe consequences for deviating from gender norms. Drag is a moment during which “the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged” (216), allowing a questioning of the ontology of gender. The tension between violence and fantasy in the film Paris is Burning (1990) illustrates how the body is a site of paradoxically affirming and resisting norms. The genders Butler discusses are not new, but Butler emphasizes the need to treat them as new to allow the possibility of intelligibility.

Butler compares Jurgen Habermas’s and Ewald’s conceptions of norms, concluding that norms are presupposed to maintain social order, yet norms both maintain nonviolence and justify violence. The question of what is human is constantly evolving, and it must continue to be investigated through nonviolent, anti-imperialist methods to serve an international community. Resignification plays a significant role in innovating existing political structures, and Butler compares the violence of Nazi innovation against the inclusivity of post-apartheid South African elections. Butler advocates for a “radical democratic” approach that extends norms of “viable life,” clarifying that they are pro-choice and noting the dissonant nature of the democratic process. Butler details Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of the multiple subject, which defies modern binaries, noting how Anzaldua advocates for inclusivity across differences. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak conceptualizes a fractured subject, which Butler exemplifies by explaining how disenfranchised subjects should not be colonized by supposed representatives. Spivak’s translations of Mahasweta Devi’s writings exposed the connectedness of “tribal” and “international” life. The voice of the subaltern exposes the need for a rethinking of collective norms and practices, and Butler proposes a continuous politics toward inclusivity and nonviolence.

Butler notes how philosophy has developed a “spectral double” outside the academy, but they add that philosophy has progressed considerably through other fields in the humanities and cultural studies. At 12 years old, Butler read Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), which provided them with an affirmation of life. Later, Butler struggled with Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) as a double text which rhetorically hides its meaning. Both books belonged to Butler’s mother, and they found Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818), belonging to their father. Butler’s Jewish education provided a second founding to their interest in philosophy, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. In college, Butler rejected Nietzsche and Paul de Man, preferring traditional, continental philosophy. Citing Max Scheler, Butler notes their progression into post-idealism, and, in graduate studies, Butler shifted to focus on gender, sexuality, and feminism, finding themself in the position of the Other.

Butler’s dissertation work on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) highlighted the self-loss inherent in recognition via reflection through and in the Other. This paradigm afflicts philosophy, and Butler notes how feminist philosophy is often questioned as “real” philosophy. Shifting into literary theory, Butler adds how theory supplanted philosophy in some ways. Butler acknowledges how Walter Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, and Cornel West both are and are not considered philosophers, adding that most feminist philosophers no longer work in philosophy departments. Though philosophy is now most active outside its institutional confines, Butler notes the vitality of philosophy under the name of theory. Butler summarizes how Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) reverses Hegel’s “lord and bondsman” (247). Gilroy uses and advocates for the use of selective components from Eurocentric modernity to involve radically disenfranchised peoples in anti-capitalist and anti-colonial aims. Butler relishes the advances that have come seemingly at the expense of institutionalized philosophy, comparing the humanities to Hegel’s “bondsman” and philosophy to the “lord.”