Wittig finds in lesbainism a form of
sex that does away with gender's constitutive categories. Judith
Butler, however, points to the way that it is defined in opposition
to heterosexuality, and hence dependent on it. Judith Butler
transforms Wittig's thought, casting doubt on lesbianism as a
gender-abolishing praxis, pointing to parody as a possible method.
“Gay is to straight not as copy is to
original but as copy is to copy (Butler, p. 41). Judith Butler's
method for de-normalizing heterosexuality is to expose its
copiedness, do strip its of is status as natural, original, exalted,
and to see it as just as invented and anomalous as any other sexual
practice.
“For
Wittig, the task is not to prefer the feminine side of the binary to
the masculine, but to displace the binary as such through a
specifically lesbian disintegration of its constitutive categories
(Butler, p. 160).” Like Wittig I like to imagine that my sexuality
has a special potency to destabilize gendered identity. I like to
imagine that the suppression of intimacy between men is foundational
to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, that when I bring about
intimacy between men I am striking at something that is constitutive
of the gendered order.
But
if we conceive of undoing gender as happening exclusively through
homosexual pairings, we are reifing gendered categories. “Lesbainism
that defines itself in radical exclusion from heterosexuality
deprives itself of the capacity to resignify the very heterosexual
constructs by which it is partially and inevitably constituted
(Butler, p. 163). So how do we re-signify the heterosexual? Just as
Wittig conjures the lesbain that is not a woman, I would like to
conjur the heterosexual that is not straight.
In
order to de-center straightness, we can find what in heterosexuality
is exterior to itself. What is anomalous? What is perverse? What is
outside the realm of normative sex? What disturbs the distinctions of
normative and deviant sexuality? Cuckolding, femdom, pegging, The
Pointer Sisters' “man with a slow hand,” the man who wants to be
smothered or absorbed, the fact that the most apparently heterosexual
couple may be comprised of two gender-dysphoric asexuals, two agender
individuals, two people that just happen to be too lazy to bother
doing things differently than they've been told to, or two people who
love each other and wear the clothes expected of them in the same way
that they go to work everyday or feed the parking meter, but whose
orientation to their own and each others bodies lies partially
outside gendered prescriptions.
Everyone's
copy of straight sex and gender norms is a failed copy judged against
a pure ideal: the man's small penis, the dark hairs above his wife's
upper lip, his pointed chest and the size of is aureola, her lean and
curveless frame, her sqaure jaw and unyielding logic. Human
relationships are inevitably influenced by the sex and gender norms
that have been imposed on us, but no one really meets the
heterosexual ideal. I suggest we go about embracing this failure,
that each of us find what about us illudes the gendered order, and
that we seek to multiply these transgressions.
No comments:
Post a Comment