The Gender Problems: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990: second edition 1999) is a book by philosopher Judith Butler, in which the author argues that gender is a kind of performance improvisation. This work is influential in feminism, women's studies, and lesbian and gay studies, and also enjoys widespread popularity beyond traditional academic circles. Butler's ideas on gender were then seen as the basis of queer theory and advancing different sexual practices during the 1990s.
Video Gender Trouble
Summary
Butler criticized one of the main assumptions of feminist theory: that there are identities and subjects that require representation in politics and language. For Butler, "women" and "women" are complicated categories by factors such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Moreover, the universality considered by these terms parallels the universality of assumed patriarchy, and removes the peculiarity of oppression at different times and places. Butler thus distanced himself from identity politics for the sake of a new coalition feminism that criticized the basis of identity and gender. He challenges assumptions about the often-made distinction between sex and gender, by which sex is biologically while gender is culturally built. Butler argues that this false distinction introduces disunity into the subject of feminism that supposedly united. The sex body can not signify without gender, and the real existence of sex before discourse and cultural coercion is only the effect of gender function. Gender and sex are both built.
Examining the work of philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Butler explores the relationship between power and sex and gender categories. For Beauvoir, women are a disadvantage to who builds their identity; For Irigaray, this dialectic includes a "determinative economy" that does not include a female representation at all because it uses the phallocentric language. Both assume that there is an "identical self" of women who need representation, and their arguments hide the impossibility of "being" sex at all. Butler argues otherwise that gender is performative: there is no identity behind actions that are considered "expressing" gender, and these actions are, instead of expressing, the illusion of a stable gender identity. If the appearance of "being" is thus the result of culturally influenced actions, there is no solid and universal gender: established through performance practices, gender "women" (such as "men" gender) remain dependent and open to interpretation and "resignation." In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. He called for people to complicate the gender category through performance.
Discussing patriarchy, Butler notes that feminists have often sought help on pre-patriarchal cultural circumstances as the underlying model of a non-oppressive new society. For this reason, the stories of genuine sexual transformation into gender through incest taboos have proved very useful to feminists. Butler visited three of the most popular: anthropological structuralism of anthropologist Claude LÃÆ' Â © vi-Strauss, where incest taboo requires that family structure be governed by women's exchanges; Joan Riviere's psychoanalytic description of "femininity as a mask" conceals a masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic explanations of mourning and melancholia, in which the loss encourages the ego to incorporate the attributes of a lost loved one, in which cathexis becomes identification.
Butler expands these gender identification accounts to emphasize productive or gender-performative aspects. With LÃÆ' Â © vi-Strauss, he states that incest is "a pervasive cultural fantasy" and that the presence of taboos arouses these desires; along with Riviere, he states that mimicry and mask form the "essence" of gender; with Freud, he asserted that "gender identification is a kind of melancholy in which the sex of a prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition" (63) and therefore "identification of the same sex" depends on the unfinished (but at once forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with father, not mother, Oedipus myth). For Butler, "heterosexual melancholy is culturally institutionalized as the price of a stable gender identity" (70) and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the idea of ​​homosexuality, which remains prohibited but must be within cultural boundaries. Finally, he points again to the productivity of the incest taboo, the law that produces and regulates approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, which is not before the law.
In response to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's work which presupposes the symbolic order of the father and the suppression of the "feminine" necessary for language and culture, Julia Kristeva adds women back to the narrative by claiming that the poetic language - "semiotic" - is the surface of the mother's body in writing, uncontrollable by the father's logo. For Kristeva, poetic writing and maternity are the only culturally permissible ways for women to return to the body of the mother who gave birth to them, and female homosexuality is impossible, near psychosis. Butler criticizes Kristeva, claiming that his insistence on "motherhood" that precedes culture and poetry as a return to the mother's body is essential: "Kristeva conceptualizes this maternal instinct as having an ontological status before paternal law but fails to consider the way in which the law might be the cause of that desire is said to suppress "(90). Butler argues that the idea of ​​"birth" as a long-lost paradise for women is social construction, and invites Foucault's argument in The History of Sexuality (1976) to put the idea that maternity precedes or defines women as themselves products of discourse.
Butler exposed part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published about Herculine Barbin, an intersex who lived in France during the nineteenth century and eventually committed suicide when he was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In the introduction to the journals Foucault writes about the early days of Herculine, when he was able to live out his gender or "sex" as he saw fit as "happy non-identity limbo" (94). Butler accuses Foucault of romanticism, claiming that his statement of a "before" identity for a cultural inscription contradicts his work on The History of Sexuality, in which he argues that the original "real" or "sexual identity" The "original" is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not a solution to a repressive power system, but part of the system itself.Butler instead of placing Barbin's early days not in "happy limbo" but along the larger trajectory, from a larger network of social controls, he suggested ultimately that Foucault's disturbing distortion of his ideas about repression in the introduction might be a kind of "moment of confession," or the justification of Foucault's own homosexuality which he seldom uttered and where he only allowed himself once to be interviewed.
Butler traced the thoughts of feminists, Monique Wittig about lesbianism as the only way for the idea of ​​sex being built. The idea of ​​"sex" is always encoded as women, according to Wittig, a way to designate non-men through absence. Women, thus reduced to "sex", can not escape because carrying sex as a burden. Wittig argues that even naming parts of the body creates fiction and builds the feature itself, dividing what was once "intact." Language, repeated over time, "produces a reality effect that is eventually misunderstood as 'facts' (115).
Butler questions the idea that the "body" itself is a natural entity that "does not recognize genealogy," is usually given without explanation: "How the contours of the body are clearly marked as the soil or surface that is assumed to be normal for marking is written, only factor without value, before significance ? "(129). Based on the anthropologist thought of Mary Douglas, described in Purity and Hazard (1966), Butler claims that body boundaries have been drawn to inculcate certain taboos about the limits and possibilities of exchange. So the hegemonic and homophobic press has read the body's pollution that AIDS carries as appropriate to the pollution of homosexual sexual activity, especially those that cross the perineal border of the forbidden. In other words, Butler's claim is that "the body itself is a consequence of the taboo that makes the body distinct on the basis of its stable boundaries" (133). Butler proposes the practice of drag as a way to destabilize binary exteriority/interiority, ultimately to mock the idea that there is "genuine" gender, and to show play to the audience, through exaggeration, that all gender is in written, trained,.
Butler seeks to build feminism (through the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the gender pronoun has been removed or not considered a reasonable category. He claims that even binary subjects/objects, which form the basic assumptions for feminist practice - "we, 'women,' must be subjects and not objects" - are hegemonic and artificial divisions. The subject's idea is for him to be formed through repetition, through "marking practice" (144). Butler offers a parody (for example, drag practice) as a way of destabilizing and making clear the unseen assumptions about gender identity and "local ontological" population level (146) as gender. By reapplying identity practices and exposing as always a failed attempt to "be" a person's gender, he believes that positive and transformative politics can emerge.
All page numbers are from the first edition: Judith Butler, Gender Issues: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990).
Maps Gender Trouble
Reception
Gender Issues reviewed by Shane Phelan at Women & amp; Politics . This work has enjoyed widespread popularity beyond the traditional academic circle, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy! Butler, in the introduction to the second edition of this book, writes that he was shocked by the size of the book audience and his final status as the founder's text of strange theories. Anthony Elliott writes that with the publication of Gender Trouble, Butler established himself at the forefront of feminism, women's studies, lesbian and gay studies, and odd theories. According to Elliott, the core idea described in Gender Trouble, that "gender is a kind of improvisational performance, a theatrical form that is a sense of identity", is then seen as "the foundation of a strange theory project and advancing sexual practices different during the 1990s. "
See also
- Feminist philosophy
- Pascastrukturalisme
- Third wave feminism
- Cancel Gender
References
Further reading
- Judith Butler: The Life Theory by Vicki Kirby
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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