Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary
Sex, gender and sexuality
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The-Radical-Democratic-Imaginary-oleh-Laclau-and-Mouffe
Sex, gender and sexuality
The political implications of this post-structuralist approach to the formation of identity through struggle are often widely misinterpreted. The common mis- reading of Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990a) is a case in point. Like Laclau and Mouffe, Butler takes as one of her primary targets the dualistic metaphors that prevail in some types of feminist theory. Where economistic Marxists hold that the economy determines the political, reductionist feminists argue that biological sex is given pre-discursively, and that only gender is socially constructed. Butler appropriates Foucauldian ontological principles to argue that sex is a strategically- constructed fiction whose deployment allows for the extension and intensification of misogynist and homophobic discipline. Wherever it is assumed that it is perfectly natural to divide humans into two simple biological camps, male and female, as if P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y 152 that division had no historical and political dimension, we should look for the operation of underlying authoritarian forces such as sexism and heterosexism (1990a). The claim that sex and gender are the fictional products of political strategies has often been misread as an endorsement of a voluntarist, “anything goes” or “I-can-be-anything-I-want-to-be” approach to identity. If this claim were correct, then any attempt by a constructivist theorist to deal with power would be incoherent. Butler’s constructivist position on sex and gender is well supported by recent feminist research. Many feminists have long argued that theorists such as Chodorow (1978), Hartsock (1983) and MacKinnon (1989) are overly reductionist in their categorization of socio-political subjects in terms of the two biological sexes model. 1 Individuals are of course positioned within social structures—as women, men, feminine, masculine, heterosexual, homosexual and so on—but again, every social structure is overdetermined, and the identity of a subject never flows directly from her complex structural positioning. We never encounter “women” as such in actual history; concrete subjects are produced through the discursive formation of identities. Further, the gendering subject positions that operate as the interpretative frameworks through which complex structural positionings are lived are always overdetermined by other subject positions. A gendered identity is always a hybrid racialized, sexualized and class-oriented construct. Finally, no subject ever develops an identity that allows her to be “at home” in her structural positions. We can never arrive at a final interpretative framework that would correspond perfectly to a given ensemble of structural positionings such that it would provide an adequate explanation for those structures’ effects. Every subject is to some extent alienated from her assigned structural positionings; this condition is shared by the structurally empowered and the structurally disempowered alike. The structurally empowered may enjoy access to material resources that allow them to conceal their alienation or to compensate for it in a more effective manner, but alienation nevertheless remains a universal condition. It is precisely this gap between the interpretative framework that is offered by identity and the effects of structural positionings that drives the individual to engage in an endless search for new identifications. At the present moment, the hegemonic character of the binary biological sexes model in the developed West is such that virtually every individual is structurally positioned—through medical, legal, economic, linguistic, socio-cultural and other discourses—as either male or female. Scott asserts that this fact derives not from pre-discursive nature, but from the institutionalization of power relations. Gender is the social organization of sexual difference. But this does not mean that gender reflects or implements fixed and natural physical differences between women and men; rather gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences. (Scott 1988:2) P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y 153 Scott calls for a critical form of women’s history that would investigate “fixed gender categories as normative statements that organize cultural understandings of sexual difference” (1988:175). Adams similarly contends that feminist theory ought to challenge the two biological sexes model. Instead of assuming from the start that the world is naturally divided into males and females, we should study the political processes by which otherwise banal material bodily differences are invested with strategic meanings such that they appear to correspond to the two biological sexes model (1979). Nicholson notes that this departure from biologism frees feminist theory to think in radical pluralist terms. We cannot look to the body to ground cross-cultural claims about the male/female distinction…. In this alternative view the body does not disappear from feminist theory. Rather, it becomes a variable rather than a constant, no longer able to ground claims about the male/female distinction across large sweeps of human history, but still there is always a potentially important element in how the male/female distinction gets played out in any specific society. (Nicholson 1994:83) The very categorization of human bodies in the supposedly given biological categories, “male” and “female,” depends upon the normalizing work of a historically specific political apparatus. As Butler contends, the claim that a given body is one biological sex or the other only appears to be an innocent descriptive claim. Citing Foucault, she states that this supposedly neutral act of biological sex categorization “is itself a legislation and a production of bodies, a discursive demand, as it were, that bodies become produced according to principles of heterosexualizing coherence and integrity, unproblematically as either female or male” (Butler 1992:351). Constructivist feminist theory is not sufficiently anti-essentialist if it merely notes the historical specificity of the social construction of gender as it is articulated with other identities. It must further recognize that the myth of a binary biological sex difference is central to sexism and heterosexism. Butler comments that not only is sex positioned as the key to human intelligibility, but that “to qualify as legitimately human, one must be coherently sexed. The incoherence of sex is precisely what marks off the abject and the dehumanized from the recognizably human” (Butler 1992:352–3). There is, perhaps, no clearer case of the materiality of the two biological sexes model than that of the treatment of intersexed infants. Fausto-Sterling argues that we should have at least five biological sex categories: male, female, hermaphrodites (who possess one testis and one ovary), male pseudo- hermaphrodites (who possess testes and some female genitalia but lack ovaries), and female pseudo-hermaphrodites (who possess ovaries and some male genitalia but lack testes). She admits that even these five categories are too roughly drawn to reflect the tremendous biological variations that exist between different human P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y 154 bodies. It is estimated that as many as four percent of all newborn babies are born with hermaphrodite and pseudo-hermaphrodite bodies (Fausto-Sterling 1993:21). Legal and medical institutions respond to this situation not by changing our conception of biological sex to accommodate these bodies, but by changing these bodies so that they fit the myth of binary biological sex categorization. Beginning at a very early age, the intersexed babies are subjected to extensive hormonal and surgical procedures (Fausto-Sterling 1993:22; Angier 1997). The ethical questions that are raised by this sort of intervention are enormous, and the rights of these infants should be recognized as a feminist priority. The treatment of intersexed bodies also demonstrates the political character of taken-for-granted thinking about sex and gender: as is always the case, “nature” is actually the product of a highly political intervention. Homophobic anxiety is clearly one of the chief motivating forces behind this violent and non-consensual medical assault on the individuals who are born with intersexed bodies. The surgical, pharmacological and psychological construction of the subject’s “natural” gender is deemed successful if he or she exhibits heterosexual desire at adolescence (Debonis 1995). Once an individual is structurally positioned as a “biological” male or female through these medical, psychological, familial and political apparatuses, she is further positioned within gender structures. Again, we find the constitutive effects of contingent political interventions, rather than the mere reflection of an objective “nature.” With respect to the law, Adams writes, It is not that the law…does things to women; rather it is a question of women as they are made by the law. The law works by constructing a reality that cannot be said to pre-exist the law. What is important are the means of representation, for they produce their own effects; it is not a matter of representing a pre-existent reality. (Adams 1990:44) 2 Many different examples from the experiences of working-class women, women of color, women sex trade workers and lesbians who are recognized by official discourse as biological females and yet find themselves structurally positioned outside the normal “woman” category could be offered to support Adams’ claim. Because the hegemonic gender structures are overdetermined by racism, heterosexism and bourgeoisification, many “females” have found that they are not always legally and socially included as “women.” We could consider, for example, the courts’ denial of lesbian mothers’ rights to retain legal custody of their children, or the normalization in welfare policy of the idea that poor women do not have the right to conceive a child in the first place. Or we could examine the experiences of working-class women, women of color or prostitutes who have been sexually harassed or raped and yet find that the courts do not take the violation of their rights as seriously as they would for white middle-class victims (Higginbotham 1992:258; Morrison 1992; Davis 1981:172–210). Similarly, we could study the ways in which the payment of a lower wage for third world women P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y 155 in light semi-skilled manufacturing jobs in South-East Asia, the maquiladora region of Mexico, and California’s Silicon Valley is justified in terms of their “special nature”: they are seen as peculiarly suited to repetitive work, and as naturally content with a standard of living that is much lower than that of their white European and American counterparts (Flanders 1997:42; Mohanty 1997). Butler’s argument for a constructivist approach to gender also finds support in contemporary literary criticism and psychological research. In some cases, the promotion of gender conformity is profoundly marked by race and class. The incitement of femininity for white middle-class girls is often thoroughly intertwined with racial and class-oriented superiority discourse. Becoming properly feminine— or rebelling against “ladylike” rules—can involve complex encounters with race- and class-differentiated symbols and taboos (Pratt 1984; Martin 1993). Conversely, racist disciplining can take the form of a brutal de-gendering. During slavery, for example, African women were reduced to mere commodities and subjected to torturous conditions that destroyed their kinship relations and personhood (Spillers 1987). In other cases, sexuality operates as the nodal point in gender disciplining. Bem contends that the abjection of same-sex desire is often at work wherever distinctions between “gender conformists” and “gender non-conformists” are made (1993). She notes that by virtue of our dissident sexuality, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transvestites and transsexuals are subjected to extreme forms of pathologization as “gender non-conformists” (Bem 1993:167). Where some feminists assume that individuals are simply “socialized” in a functionalist manner into gender roles that are supposed to correspond to the two biological sexes model, Freudian and Lacanian feminists insist on the precarious and incomplete character of the effects that are generated through identification (Mitchell and Rose 1983:5–6; Salecl 1994:116). Founded on lack, the subject always remains troubled by the sense that something at the very core of her being is missing. She is compelled by this fundamental sense of inadequacy to engage in a perpetual search for stability and completion that will always remain beyond her grasp. She is driven to perform an endless series of identifications, but identifications cannot give rise to the formation of complete identities (Lacan 1977; Laclau and Zac 1994). Identifications with subject positions can only produce fragile, unfinished and permanently vulnerable identity effects. These identity effects nevertheless constitute the only bases for stability, coherence and ethical decision- making that the subject can obtain. For psychoanalytic theory, identities always remain incomplete, and compensations for that incompletion always remain somewhat inadequate, because of the paradoxical operation of the unconscious. The unconscious both compels identification and consistently interrupts the identity effects that result from identification. As Rose puts it, “the unconscious undermines the subject from any position of certainty” (1982:29). The implications of the psychoanalytic distinction between identification and identity is especially significant in the case of gender. Sex differentiation is constructed through the oedipal complex, but this process does not transform individuals into fully and simply gendered beings who are at peace with their sex P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y 156 assignments and easily take up roles that neatly match the functional needs of broader socio-cultural systems (Brennan 1990:306–7). After the initial positioning in the phallic phase is forbidden, “the girl will desire to have the phallus and the boy will struggle to represent it. For this reason, for both sexes, this is the insoluble desire of their lives” (Mitchell 1982:7). The strategic implications of the Freudian/Lacanian theory of the unconscious are profoundly ambiguous. Men in a sexist society, or whites in a racist formation, or middle-class professionals who expect upward mobility but are faced with downsizing, are constantly confronted with the sense that their actual capacities fall far short of the omnipotence that was phantasmatically promised to them. Some individuals may react to this gap between the promise of omnipotence and their actual experiences of impotence with a self-reflexive critical discourse that could pave the way towards progressive solidaritistic identifications. Individuals who are aware of the structured contingency of their identities may be more likely to react to marginalizing demonizations with suspicion (Connolly 1991:180). Others, however, may respond with a violent rage towards figures of otherness- such as “castrating feminists,” “invading immigrants,” “crack-addicted single mothers” or “perverse homosexuals,” and so on—and their discourses of demonization might remain almost totally immune to democratic dialogue. Psychoanalytic theory diagnoses the impossibility of full, complete and stable identities as the key to the human condition. It suggests that subjects are necessarily engaged in an infinite search for compensation for their permanent inadequacy, but it cannot predict exactly which phantasmatic or imaginary elements will be temporarily accepted by actual subjects in a concrete context as effective substitutes. To say that gender and biological sex are both discursively constructed is not to say that they have no material impact on our lives. Sex and gender may be strategic fictions, but these fictions are key elements in the operation of many tremendously powerful institutions and apparatuses. Here an analogy could be offered between post-structuralist feminist thought and critical race theory. Critical race theorists contend that race is wholly discursively constructed. For Gates, race is a “biological misnomer,” a “metaphor” and a “trope” (Gates 1985b: 4, 5). Gates’ view is supported by recent scientific inquiries that question the “natural” character of racial categories (Holmes 1994; Holt 1994). Appiah concludes that the “biologization of culture and ideology” in racial discourse is purely contingent: “there are no races, there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask ‘race’ to do for us” (Appiah 1985:36, 35). 3 Gates’ and Appiah’s insistence on the arbitrariness of race can be used as a powerful antidote against the revival of biological racism 4 and against the new racism’s “naturalization” of rigid and exclusionary cultural differences (Barker 1981; Balibar 1991b; Smith 1994b; Salecl 1994:12–14). It should be emphasized, however, that although Gates and Appiah contend that there is no such thing as “race,” they are certainly not saying that “there is no such thing as racism.” The claim that race is arbitrarily constructed within specific configurations of power relations does not contradict the assertion that racism has become so hegemonic P OW E R A N D H E G E M O N Y 157 that no one escapes racial structural positioning. Like all authoritarian forces, racism wants to make the contingent processes of racial structural positioning disappear, such that highly political conceptions of racial otherness and whiteness are accepted as “nature”—hence the backlash of conservatives against multicultural and anti-racist curricula. When the conservatives charge that progressive educators are “politicizing the classroom,” they are only half correct, for “the classroom” never was a neutral site in the first place. Progressive educators are actually re- politicizing racial, ethnic and national identities precisely by revealing the power relations that operate behind the appearance of unity, necessity and nature. Higginbotham argues that race, like gender and class, is a social construction: “[Race is a] highly contested representation of relations of power between social categories by which individuals are identified and identify themselves” (1992:253). For Higginbotham, it is only by grasping the constructed character of race that we can observe the operation of power: the ways in which disciplining strategies advance through racialization, the struggles that take place over racial categorization and racial representation, and the naturalizing concealment of racialization. The rejection of the view that racial differences are pre-discursively constituted allows us to sharpen our analysis of both the ways in which these differences have been constructed in racist traditions and the possibilities for anti- racist resistance. Where we do find discourses in which race appears to operate as if it were a trans-historical and immutable nature, such as Herrnstein and Murray’s Download 0.72 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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