Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (41 page)

instance, microbes as "invading," egg as "waiting" for sperm) and semantical grids (such binary oppositions as male/female, inner/ outer) that organize and animate our perception and experience. We thus have no direct, innocent, or unconstructed knowledge of our bodies; rather, we are always reading our bodies according to various interpretive schemes.

These are important insights, which have deepened, enriched, and complicated contemporary feminist understandings of the politics of the body; Judith Butler's
Gender Trouble
is a striking example. Butler's aim is both to provoke "gender trouble" in the mind of the reader—by "denaturalizing" the categories of gender and of the "natural" itself—and to suggest how "gender trouble'' is
culturally
stirred up through "subversive bodily acts" that exhibit the artificiality of gender. The latter aspect, although it was for me the most intriguing part of Butler's book, actually gets the shortest shrift when it comes to detailed elaboration and illustration. The

greater part of Butler's considerable philosophical energy and expertise is devoted to a "genealogical" critique of gender (for Butler this means an exploration of gender categories as the
effect
of discourse rather than the "natural" ground of identity) through examination of the work of Freud, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Wittig. Her strategy is to expose their concealed assumptions naturalizing heterosexuality and/or maternity, while also teasing out the elements of their work that problematize such assumptions.

The genealogical critique is the deconstructive aspect of Butler's work. The "constructive" aspect is her theory of gender, which has two parts: an analysis of gender as "performance" and an argument for parody as the most effective strategy for subverting the fixed "binary frame" of gender. Sociologists may recognize in Butler's "performative theory" a poststructuralist, feminist reincarnation of Serving Goffman's innovative and persuasive performative theory of identity.
19
For Butler, as for Goffman, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic "core" self but are the dramatic
effect
(rather than the cause) of our performances.

These we learn how to "fabricate" in the same way we learn how to manipulate a language: through imitation and gradual command of public, cultural idioms (for instance, the corporeal gestures of gender). Within this framework, the illusion of an "interior and organizing gender core" is itself a "fantasy instituted and inscribed on

the surface of bodies" through our performances.
20
That illusion, moreover (and here Butler provides a significant dimension missing in Goffman) effectively protects the institution of reproductive heterosexuality from scrutiny and critique
as
an institution, continually regulating rather than merely reflecting our sexuality.

Whether or not one is willing to go so postmodern as to deny
all
interior determinations of identity, the performative approach is enormously insightful (and pedagogically useful) as a framework for exploring the ongoing, interactive, imitative processes by means of which the self, gender (I would add race as well), and their illusions of authenticity are constructed. What cultural gestures are involved in the performance of masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, maternity, paternity, whiteness, blackness? How is authenticity "fabricated" and conveyed? How is the "binary frame" (of race as well as gender) enacted and regulated? These questions can be concretely explored by students through examination of the everyday artifacts of culture such as advertisements and commercials

and through critical reflection on their own interactions with each other. By experiencing the "strangeness" of examining themselves and their culture as fabricated out of specific lexicons of publicly available gestures, and by recognizing the degree to which their selves are created in public interaction, they find that the given is thrown into fresh critical relief and that productive ''trouble" has been made for entrenched assumptions about what is "natural" and what is "unnatural."

I also found Butler's intricate and deft exposure of various theorists' hidden commitments to "heterosexual matrices" and maternal essences to be brilliant—particularly her incisive critique of Kristeva's heterosexism. Butler is superb at the detection and deconstruction of naturalist assumptions; even Foucault is shown to have concealed commitments to the notion of a "true body beyond the law." Her own antibiologism is, indeed, far more relentless and programmatic than Foucault's.

Primarily a cultural historian, he was notoriously resistant to identifying with any theoretical position. For Butler, contrastingly, there
is
one correct, unimpeachable position: it is that any conception of the "natural" is a dangerous "illusion" of which we must be "cured."
21
The "cure" is to "recast" all biological claims within the "more encompassing framework" that sees discourse as foundational and the body as thoroughly

"text." Thus, Kristeva's postulation of a "maternal body prior to discourse" is described as "fundamentally inverted" and must be ''reversed"
22
—that is, must be shown to be the product of language: "[Kristeva's] argument makes clear that maternal drives constitute those primary processes that language invariably represses or sublimates. But perhaps her argument could be recast within an
even more encompassing framework:
What cultural configuration of language, indeed, of discourse, generates the trope of a prediscursive libidinal multiplicity, and for what purposes?"
23

Here, in my opinion, Butler shifts from performing edifying genealogical therapy on entrenched assumptions to offering discursive or linguistic foundationalism as the highest critical court, the clarifying, demystifying and liberating Truth. The notion of discursive foundationalism as "cure" suggests that the textualization of the body is itself a privileged theoretical turn immune from cultural suspicion and critique. I would argue, against this, that both naturalist and textualizing notions of the body are culturally situated (the latter in postmodern culture), and that both are thus equally amenable to being historically utilized as coercive instruments of power. Some historical eras clearly have been dominated by biologistic paradigms, paradigms which have serviced and continue to service heterosexist and sexist ideology. But does it follow from this that "biology" is ipso facto and in all contexts merely the discursive "product" of heterosexist and sexist regimes? Or that a textualist view of the body necessarily escapes those regimes?

Note that Butler does not so much
argue
against Kristeva's notion of the biological maternal as
consume
it within the "more encompassing framework" of discourse. Butler's world is one in which language swallows everything up, voraciously, a theoretical pasta machine through which the categories of competing frameworks are pressed and reprocessed as "tropes." In this linguistic foundationalism, Butler is very much more the Derridean than the Foucauldian, even though Foucauldian language and ideas dominate in the book. Within Foucault's understanding of the ways in which the body is "produced" through specific historical practices, "discourse" is not foundational but is, rather, one of the many interrelated modes by which power is made manifest. Equally, if not more, important for him are the institutional and everyday
practices
by means of which our experience of the body is organized: insti

tutionalized monitoring, "normalizing" examinations, the spatial and temporal organization of schools and prisons, the "confessional" mode between physicians and patients, teachers and students, and so forth. Correlatively, determining whether a particular act or stance is resistant or subversive requires examination of its practical, historical, institutional reverberations. For Foucault, such determinations can never simply be read from the textual surface of the body. Contrastingly, Butler's analyses of how gender is constituted and subverted take the body as just such a text whose meanings can be analyzed in abstraction from experience, history, material

practice, and context.

Butler's theory of parody as subversion is a striking example. This theory is an extremely interesting suggestion of the consequences, for a theory of resistance, of the thoroughly linguistic and performative nature of the gendered body as she has described it. As was discussed earlier, there are for Butler no "natural" resources (for instance, no polymorphous sexuality or androgyny that exists prior to our genderization) to inform struggle against the system of gender. What
can
occur (and what
does
continually occur, Butler suggests) is that the "natural" or ''essential" nature of gender is challenged (and thus the system destabilized) from within the resources of the system itself, through parody of it—for example, drag: "In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency."
24
Butler thus offers a theory of subversion that equally honors the role of marginalized sexualities
and
what for many thinkers are hallmarks of postmodern art: the use of obvious artifice, quotation marks, irony, and parody to subvert established conventions.

This is ingenious and exciting, and it sounds right—in theory. And so long as we regard the body in drag as an abstract, unsituated linguistic structure, as pure text, we may be convinced by Butler's claim that the gender system is continually being playfully destabilized and subverted from within. But subversion of cultural assumptions (despite the claims of some deconstructionists) is not something that happens
in
a text or
to
a text. It is an event that takes place (or doesn't) in the reading of the text, and Butler does not explore this. She does not locate the text in question (the body in drag) in cultural context (are we watching the individual in a gay club or on the "Donahue" show?), does not consider the possibly different responses of various readers (male or female, young or

old, gay or straight?) or the various anxieties that might complicate their readings, does not differentiate between women in male attire and men in female drag (two very different cultural forms, I would argue), and does not consult (or at least does not report on) a single human being's
actual
reaction either to seeing or to enacting drag. On what basis, then, does she conclude that drag "effectively mocks . . . the notion of a true gender identity" and "displaces the entire enactment of gender significations from the discourse of truth and falsity"?
25

Attempting to give this abstract text some "body" through my own (admittedly limited) intuitions, drag performances (and cross dressing and "the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities,"
26
also mentioned by Butler) seem far less destabilizing of the "binary frame'' of gender than those identities that present themselves not as parodying either masculinity or femininity but as thoroughly ambiguous with regard to gender. (Only rarely do we interpret bodies as sexually ambiguous, for—as Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna have argued, and as Holly Devor's interviews with female "genderblenders" indicate—our readings are overdetermined for
maleness,
that is, it only takes a few male cues for bodies to be interpreted as male.)
27
Ambiguity is unsettling and challenging. Somehow I managed to see
M. Butterfly
without foreknowledge that the role of Butterfly was played by a man. When the actor slowly removed his clothes and gradually slipped out of his female "presentation of self," I was quite shaken. Butand this is crucial with respect to Butler's argument—my disequilibrium was the result,
not
of my having been made parodically aware of the gap between illusion and "reality," but because precisely in the absence of that awareness, I watched "femininity" segue into "masculinity" without a clear and distinct boundary to mark the transformation. In that transitional space, gender reality was shaken for me, not because I realized that gender is an artifice (I knew that before I went to the play) but because the familiar dualities (the "binary frame") had been forced to yield to an unclear and uncharted continuum.

Turning now to the "author" side of the text, what does Butler make of the fact that highly dualist gender ontologies frequently prevail in the worldviews of drag performers? Drag star Chili Pepper, speaking on the "Donahue" show, said without irony that he felt drag queens could help teach women how to be "real women." According to Esther Newman, such attitudes are far from unusual;

many female impersonators "see masculinity and femininity as
the
polar modes of existence."
28
So, too, do many transsexuals. Jan Morris, who eventually had a sex change operation, has written of "that inner factor" which he identified in himself (when still physically male) as "femaleness,'' of gender as the "essentialness of oneself"; she approvingly quotes C. S. Lewis's description of gender as "reality, a more fundamental reality than sex."
29
Lesbian butch and femme identities, too, are frequently read by heterosexuals as proof of how irresistible masculine and feminine roles are—an irresistibility they then go on to attribute to the "naturalness" of heterosexuality. How culturally subversive can these forms be if they are so readily interpreted as proof of the foundational nature of gender, the essential reality of the "binary frame"?

I want to make clear that my criticism of the abstract nature of Butler's argument does not entail a denial of the fact that subversive elements are continually at work (or at play) in our culture. My point is that subversion is contextual, historical, and, above all, social. No matter how exciting the destabilizing potential of texts, bodily or otherwise, whether those texts are subversive or recuperative or both or neither cannot be determined in abstraction from actual social practice. In "'Material Girl,"' I criticized Susan McClary's reading of Madonna's music video "Open Your Heart to Me" for romanticizing what McClary sees as the playful, parodic, subversive aspects of that text at the expense of effacement of the grimmer
social
reality of how young men and women are actually responding to the images of music videos.