Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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