In my first term as a graduate student in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, I was introduced to the writing of Judith Butler. Having an undergraduate degree in a different discipline altogether, and having gained my primary education in feminist theory and practice not in academia but through Tumblr activists, Butler was simply not in my repertoire — in fact, I do not believe I had ever heard her name prior to graduate school. For this reason, I first approached Butler from a rather unique standpoint. Many of my graduate peers, who had first encountered Butler as undergraduates, were disenfranchised with Butler’s philosophical articulations and abstractions. I therefore came to Butler with a certain level of scepticism — unlike my peers who had likely been introduced to the author as a brilliant foundational feminist writer by their second-wave professors. I understood Judith Butler’s work as potentially fundamental, yet at the same time I was wary of her claims, given my exposure to the many lamentations of my peers.
Gender, according to Butler, is a social artiface — each one of us is gendered, and reifies this gender through an unexamined performance of it. Not only is gender constructed, but because it is so intertwined with notions of sex, sex too is revealed to be a construction — “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture” (Butler 11). To support the aforementioned claims, the author offers up a “genealogical critique” as a way of exposing “the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formation of power” (Butler xxix). Butler tells the reader that this approach
refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity… rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. (xxix)
Although I think Butler certainly presents many intriguing theories within this overarching genealogical critique, her argument concerning the woman as “subject” troubles me.
The first chapter of Gender Trouble begins by stating that “feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity… [that] not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued” (Butler 3). Butler then insists that this assumed subject must be interrogated, that “feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism” (Butler 18–19). Although I agree with this statement, I cannot help but feel something is missing. What Butler describes here is so intrinsically linked to white feminist approaches in which a (white) universal woman subject is created as a strategic method, thereby excluding not simply queer individuals and communities, but also people of color — and yet she somehow fails to recognize this connection.
This is perhaps one of the key points at which Butler and Driskill diverge — while both support the “[u]ndoing and redoing of gender,” Driskill explicitly recognizes the ways gender and race intersect, while Butler does not (Driskill 106). Of course, Butler certainly does recognize the harm brought to gender minorities through “doing gender” by the prescribed rules of dominant society, but she fails to address the fact that “current dominant notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ have been used as tools of genocide and invasion” (Butler 88, Driskill 103). Additionally, Driskill makes a distinction between language and context of various notions of gender, making the point that one cannot “use the same terms for all of these different genders and contexts” (Driskill 100). According to Driskill, there are gender expectations of dominant culture, subversive forms of gender crafted by Queer and Trans folks, as well as uniquely Indigenous conceptualizations of gender (100). Whereas Butler articulates “the need for a radical rethinking of the categories of identity within the context of relations of radical gender asymmetry,” an Indigenous lens might instead argue for a return to “[g]ender cooperation and balance” (Butler 16, Driskill 103).
Judith Butler’s writing, regardless of its flaws, can certainly be identified as foundational to queer theories, as well as an important intervention in feminism. However, while the author calls for a coalition “based on the irreducible complexity of sexuality,” her lack of intersectional analysis limits the scope of her work (Butler xxvi). I repeat Butler’s own question in asking, “What relations of domination and exclusion are inadvertently sustained when representation becomes the sole focus of politics?” and further, how does a deconstruction of such representations perpetuate the problem when it fails to fully interrogate race (Butler 9)? Driskill emphasizes that an intentionality is necessary if one is to play with or subvert gender as Butler suggests, but can such a performance be truly intentional — and therefore not replicate “gender dynamics that are… dangerous” if it ignores or downplays the dynamics of race?
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