This is week two of an ongoing series of gender theory diaries. Last week we had the lovely MAJeff hosting the kickoff of the series. This week I’m posting about rethinking gender and power, and how that might translate into political change.
I’ll include the same upfront note as MAJeff, which is that parts of these discussions may get heavy into theoretical language (although I am going to make a concentrated effort to keep my diary as accessible as possible) since there are a lot of academics and other brands of theory dorks around these parts. If you don’t understand something, please don’t hesitate to ask for explanations. The mark of a true theory dork is the ability to convert what sounds like dense, over-intellectualized bullshit into conversational language that actually makes sense to people who don’t study this stuff. No matter what your level of familiarity with the subject matter, if you have an interest, please post your thoughts, questions, musings.
Click on in, the water’s soupy.
In the spring of 1986, a few months before I turned 16, I had an identity crisis from which I’ve never entirely ‘recovered’. I consider this a good thing.
I was a sophomore in high school at the time, and I was skipping school with a new friend, a displaced punk who’d just moved to town from Austin because she kept getting into trouble there. We’d smoked a joint, but we weren’t terribly stoned. We were sitting on the floor of the Florida room of my mom’s house, talking about everything and nothing, when the thing hit me.
Out of everywhere and nowhere, I was abruptly overcome with a profound disconnect inside of myself, sort-of like an episode of depersonalization. It was like, all of the sudden I really didn’t know who I was. Girl, sophomore, popular, honor student, soccer player, Czech-Spanish-Irish, thespian, perhaps lesbian; I had a phone number from capitalism and a social security number from the state and a surname from my father; I knew my address and my birth date and that I had lost my first tooth when I was 5, was allergic to holly berries, liked to play the bass, had gotten my first period when I was 12, didn’t like avocados or mustard, was still a virgin.
But ‘I’ was not in any of those things. Where was I? Who was I, really? I did not know, and it was frightening as hell.
It was then that I began to write. One of the other primary effects of the thing was to loosen the ties between my sense of my own identity and all kinds of labels and categories. This would prove extremely complicated for the ensuing decade. I wouldn’t get to college until my mid-20s and until then I had very little language to talk about this experience and the effects it had on me, and not many people seemed to know what I was trying to say when I’d take a shot at it. I often fell in love with the ones who did seem to know what I was trying to say.
All of it–the inability to express myself in any way that felt ‘real’ enough to me, the trapped feeling I got whenever I thought about myself inhabiting a collection of predefined labels and categories, the way the world treated me for being a woman, for being queer, for being unapologetically weird, for being smart but not traditionally ambitious–made me feel very powerless. Defiant and angry and confused and desperate and passionate and powerless.
Liberals and progressives have these kinds of problems. We have difficulty with identity. We have gender trouble. We have chaotic and ineffective power. Individually and collectively. We keep talking past each other about it, and this failure to communicate in a way that feels ‘real’ is compounding the problems. It is fragmenting the political power that we could otherwise coalesce, and that is bad. Lately, our politics have been little more than reactionary. I’m not being harshly critical. It’s hard not to kick when you are so acutely aware of the noose tightening.
We need to rethink gender and power.
Michel Foucault was a French theorist who didn’t do a whole lot with gender, but who did a lot with power that we can use when we re-think gender and strategies to politics.
When states were still sovereignties, says Foucault, there was a different sort of power relation between sovereignty and subject than there is between state and citizen. The old sort of power was centered around threats and death, whereas the new sort of power, which Foucault calls bio-power, focuses on the organization and discipline of life processes, on the regulation of the body. This power needs what Foucault calls ‘docile’ bodies, and it manufactures them through discipline and regulation. (As an example, think: military. Bodies are heavily regulated, wills are broken down, and then both are rebuilt to reflexively respond to commands from ‘higher up’ with strength, skill, and force.)
‘Docile’ bodies are easy to manipulate, to change, and to inscribe with normalizations of whichever categories are useful in any given scheme of power relations–for example, scientific categories like medical/psychiatric definitions of ‘normal sexuality’. In a detailed analysis in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison Foucault describes how the disciplinary power employed by the state produces not only ‘docile’ bodies, but also utilizes constant surveillance to produce a state of mind “that assures the automatic functioning of power.” (p. 201) We are not constantly observed directly by regulating authorities of the state, but we constantly watch ourselves and each other for signs of deviance; we police ourselves and each other into ‘normality’.
While criticized by some feminists because they see his overall theory as precluding the identity-based politics they view as most effective for feminist concerns, Foucault is a departure point for a good deal of postmodern feminist/queer theory, perhaps most notably Judith Butler.
In her second and probably most popular book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler (an anti-essentialist, like Foucault) crafts an elaborate argument that there is no ‘natural’ sexual or gender identity; in a similar vein as Anne Fausto-Sterling, whom MAJeff wrote about last week, Butler uses biological evidence to demonstrate that the binarily opposed sex categories we use–male/female as opposites–are empirically unstable. This is a sloppy way to say it but to keep it conversational: she has the idea that heteronormativity did not arise from some ‘natural order’ of neatly categorical male and female bodies, but rather, that repetitive gender performances within regulated cultural frames gave rise to a belief in that ‘natural order’. The performances construct us as we construct them. (As an example, think: language. Language is something we create at the same time as it creates us, at least in the sense that language is alive and ever-changing, and we learn about our world and our selves in a way that’s mediated through language.)
For Butler, personal identities–particularly gender and sexual identities–are kinds of fictions. Useful fictions, political fictions, but fictions nonetheless. We aren’t these static-natural-essentialized-categorized things, rather, we are always performing pieces of our selves; our selves are always spilling out over the edges of the walls of categories, slipping around in between the cracks and the lines; we are fluid.
So, what’s the point, right? Get to the action, already. What about politics? What about ethics? What about ethical politics? I’d argue, using portions of Foucault and Butler, that we can’t have true liberal/progressive politics as long as we continue to behave as though the power that is used to ‘control’ us does not flow through our own bodies; we cannot have true liberal/progressive politics unless we resist the structure that seeks to simultaneously erase our differences and construct new differences and then use both those erasures and constructions to manipulate and divide us. We need to learn how to communicate across difference and then build effective coalitions. We need to address the gender trouble. We need more powerful alliances. Butler and Foucault don’t give us any easy answers but they do give us tools, strategies and ideas.
Foucault offers us an interpretation of things where power is omnipresent, and not necessarily always an oppressive force (although he sees desire for power as a bad thing); where power has the body as its target–indeed, where power courses through bodies–and where power is never without resistance. The better we understand the precise nature of the power relations between society and our selves, between the state and our bodies, and how those relations function, the more strategies we can produce to resist, to influence power in various directions, and to transform ourselves. We can also learn from Foucault why it’s so important to listen to the voices of the marginalized when it comes to strategizing political change: because if we don’t, then no matter how good our intentions, we will necessarily produce new configurations of the same old domination.
Although Butler is a constructivist, nothing that she does necessarily erases sexual difference. Contrary to erasure, her work opens up a place to talk about sexual difference in a way that does not restrict bodies to one of only two sets of innate behavioral characteristics assigned by physical resemblance to some kind of genital archetype. (That would be an awesome name for a band: Genital Archetype.) Arguing that we should move beyond identity politics (which, according to Butler, constrict, fragment, and neglect to consider differences in power and resources), Butler describes a strategy of ‘subversive repetition’. It’s a complex strategy and this is probably an over-simplistic reduction of it, but it’ll have to do: even though she posits gender as a social construct that perpetuates through repetition, she doesn’t think we can just make up ‘new gender’ willy-nilly; she thinks we’re limited to the array of performance pieces within our social frame that mark us as intelligible social subjects, but she also thinks we can put those pieces together in novel ways that resist heteronormativity and disrupt gender norms, and thereby destabilize and transform identity–a condition in which Butler locates power and the possibility of political change.
I read a lot of pleas in the liberal/progressive blogosphere to reorganize and rebuild from the grassroots. Here’s the thing: there’s a ‘disease’ in the roots, and that’s how we got the problems we have in the first place. And I think, I think, that the only revolution worth having anymore starts with a politics of personal transformation.
