Undoing Gender

Published in 2004 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Butler, Judith.
Undoing gender/by Judith Butler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-96922-0 (alk. paper) – ISBN 0-415-96923-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Sex role. 2. Gender identity, I. Title.
HQ1075.B89 2004
305.3–dc22
2003066872
ISBN 0-415-96922-0 (hb)
ISBN 0-415-96923-9 (pb)

For Wendy,
again and again

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to Amy Jamgochian and Stuart Murray who helped at various stages to edit and compile these essays. I also thank Denise Riley whose conversation over these last years has moved my thinking in ways too many and too intricately to recount.

I thank Gayle Salamon as well whose dissertation on embodiment and materiality has prompted my own re-thinking on such topics.

The essay “Beside Oneself” was given as part of the Amnesty Lecture Series on “Sexual Rights” at Oxford in the spring of 2002 and will appear in an Oxford publication of those lectures edited by Nicholas Bamforth. It contains material published in “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” which first appeared in
Studies in Gender and Sexuality
4:1

(2003). “Doing Justice to Someone” appeared in a different form in
GLQ
(7, no. 4, 2001). In revising the essay, I have incorporated suggestions made by Vernon Rosario and Cheryl Chase and am grateful to them both for the important perspectives they provided. “Gender Regulations” was commissioned by Gil Herdt and Catharine Stimpson for a forthcoming volume on “Gender” with the University of Chicago Press. “Undiagnosing Gender” is also in
Transgender Rights: Culture,
Politics, and Law
, edited by Paisley Currah and Shannon Minter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual” appeared first in
differences
(vol. 13, no. 1, spring 2002). “Longing for Recognition” appeared first in
Studies in Gender and Sexuality
(vol. 1, no. 3, 2000) and some parts of that essay appeared as well as “Capacity” in
Regarding Sedgwick
, edited by Stephen Barber (New York: Routledge, 2001). “Quandaries of the Incest Taboo” appeared in
Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis
in Contemporary Culture
, edited by Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). “Bodily Confessions” was given as a paper at the American Psychological Division Meetings (Division 39) in San Francisco in the spring of 1999. “The End of Sexual Difference?” appeared in different form in
Feminist Consequences:
Theory for a New Century
, edited by Misha Kavka and Elizabeth Bronfen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). “The Question of Social Transformation” appeared in a longer version in Spanish in
Mujeres y transformaciones sociales
, with Lidia Puigvert and Elizabeth Beck Gernsheim (Barcelona: El Roure Editorial, 2002). “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?” was published in
Schools of Thought:
Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science
, edited by Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) and appeared in a separate version in
Women and Social Transformation
(New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003).

Introduction: Acting in Concert

The essays included here represent some of my most recent work on gender and sexuality focusing on the question of what it might mean to undo restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life. Equally, however, the essays are about the experience of
becoming undone
in both good and bad ways. Sometimes a normative conception of gender can undo one’s personhood, undermining the capacity to persevere in a livable life. Other times, the experience of a normative restriction becoming undone can undo a prior conception of who one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has greater livability as its aim.

If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own.

But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself).

Although being a certain gender does not imply that one will desire a certain way, there is nevertheless a desire that is constitutive of gender itself and, as a result, no quick or easy way to separate the life of gender from the life of desire. What does gender want? To speak in this way may seem strange, but it becomes less so when we realize that the social norms that constitute our existence carry desires that do not originate with our individual personhood. This matter is made more complex by the fact that the viability of our individual personhood is fundamentally dependent on these social norms.

The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially viable beings. That view has its allure and its truth, but it also misses a couple of important points. The terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human.

These norms have far-reaching consequences for how we understand the model of the human entitled to rights or included in the participatory sphere of political deliberation. The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that ethnicity. Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life. If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition, then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well. But if the schemes of recognition that are available to us are those that “undo” the person by conferring recognition, or “undo” the person by withholding recognition, then recognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced.

This means that to the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human and who does not.

If I am a certain gender, will I still be regarded as part of the human?

Will the “human” expand to include me in its reach? If I desire in certain ways, will I be able to live? Will there be a place for my life, and will it be recognizable to the others upon whom I depend for social existence?

There are advantages to remaining less than intelligible, if intelligibility is understood as that which is produced as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms. Indeed, if my options are loathsome, if I have no desire to be recognized within a certain set of norms, then it follows that my sense of survival depends upon escaping the clutch of those norms by which recognition is conferred. It may well be that my sense of social belonging is impaired by the distance I take, but surely that estrangement is preferable to gaining a sense of intelligibility by virtue of norms that will only do me in from another direction. Indeed, the capacity to develop a critical relation to these norms presupposes a distance from them, an ability to suspend or defer the need for them, even as there is a desire for norms that might let one live. The critical relation depends as well on a capacity, invariably collective, to articulate an alternative, minority version of sustaining norms or ideals that enable me to act. If I am someone who cannot
be
without
doing
, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do something with what is done with me. This does not mean that I can remake the world so that I become its maker. That fantasy of godlike power only refuses the ways we are constituted, invariably and from the start, by what is before us and outside of us. My agency does not consist in denying this condition of my constitution. If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.

As a result, the “I” that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them. This is not easy, because the “I” becomes, to a certain extent unknowable, threatened with unviability, with becoming undone altogether, when it no longer incorporates the norm in such a way that makes this “I” fully recognizable. There is a certain departure from the human that takes place in order to start the process of remaking the human. I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation.

The essays in this text are efforts to relate the problematics of gender and sexuality to the tasks of persistence and survival. My own thinking has been influenced by the “New Gender Politics” that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.
¹
I believe, however, that it would be a mistake to subscribe to a progressive notion of history in which various frameworks are understood to succeed and supplant one another.

There is no story to be told about how one moves from feminist to queer to trans. The reason there is no story to be told is that none of these stories are the past; these stories are continuing to happen in simultaneous and overlapping ways as we tell them. They happen, in part, through the complex ways they are taken up by each of these movements and theoretical practices.

Consider the intersex opposition to the widespread practice of performing coercive surgery on infants and children with sexually indeterminate or hermaphroditic anatomy in the name of normalizing these bodies. This movement offers a critical perspective on the version of the “human” that requires ideal morphologies and the constraining of bodily norms. The intersex community’s resistance to coercive surgery moreover calls for an understanding that infants with intersexed conditions are part of the continuum of human morphology and ought to be treated with the presumption that their lives are and will be not only livable, but also occasions for flourishing. The norms that govern idealized human anatomy thus work to produce a differential sense of who is human and who is not, which lives are livable, and which are not. This differential works for a wide range of disabilities as well (although another norm is at work for invisible disabilities).

A concurrent operation of gender norms can be seen in the
DSM IV
’s Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis. This diagnosis that has, for the most part, taken over the role of monitoring signs of incipient homosexuality in children assumes that “gender dysphoria” is a psychological disorder simply because someone of a given gender manifests attributes of another gender or a desire to live as another gender. This imposes a model of coherent gendered life that demeans the complex ways in which gendered lives are crafted and lived. The diagnosis, however, is crucial for many individuals who seek insurance support for sex reassignment surgery or treatment, or who seek a legal change in status. As a result, the diagnostic means by which transsexuality is attributed implies a pathologization, but undergoing that pathologizing process constitutes one of the important ways in which the desire to change one’s sex might be satisfied. The critical question thus becomes, how might the world be reorganized so that this conflict can be ameliorated?