Undoing Gender (3 page)

In each of these struggles, we see that technology is a site of power in which the human is produced and reproduced—not just the humanness of the child but also the humanness of those who bear and those who raise children, parents and nonparents alike. Gender likewise figures as a precondition for the production and maintenance of legible humanity. If there is important coalitional thinking to be done across these various movements, all of which comprise the New Gender Politics, it will doubtless have to do with presumptions about bodily dimorphism, the uses and abuses of technology, and the contested status of the human, and of life itself. If sexual difference is that which ought to be protected from effacement from a technology understood as phallocentric in its aims, then how do we distinguish between sexual difference and normative forms of dimorphism against which intersex and transgendered activists struggle on a daily basis? If technology is a resource to which some people want access, it is also an imposition from which others seek to be freed. Whether technology is imposed or elected is salient for intersex activists. If some trans people argue that their very sense of personhood depends upon having access to technology to secure certain bodily changes, some feminists argue that technology threatens to take over the business of making persons, running the risk that the human will become nothing other than a technological effect.

Similarly, the call for a greater recognition of bodily difference made by both disability movements and intersex activism invariably calls for a renewal of the value of life. Of course, “life” has been taken up by right-wing movements to limit reproductive freedoms for women, so the demand to establish more inclusive conditions for valuing life and producing the conditions for viable life can resonate with unwanted conservative demands to limit the autonomy of women to exercise the right to an abortion. But here it seems important not to cede the term “life” to a right-wing agenda, since it will turn out that there are within these debates questions about when human life begins and what constitutes “life” in its viability. The point is emphatically not to extend the “right to life” to any and all people who want to make this claim on behalf of mute embryos, but rather to understand how the “viability” of a woman’s life depends upon an exercise of bodily autonomy and on social conditions that enable that autonomy.

Moreover, as in the case with those seeking to overcome the pathologizing effects of a gender identity disorder diagnosis, we are referring to forms of autonomy that require social (and legal) support and protection, and that exercise a transformation on the norms that govern how agency itself is differentially allocated among genders; thus, a women’s right to choose remains, in some contexts, a misnomer.

Critiques of anthropocentrism have made clear that when we speak about human life we are indexing a being who is at once human and living, and that the range of living beings exceeds the human. In a way, the term “human life” designates an unwieldy combination, since “human” does not simply qualify “life,” but “life” relates human to what is nonhuman and living, establishing the human in the midst of this relationality. For the human to be human, it must relate to what is nonhuman, to what is outside itself but continuous with itself by virtue of an interimplication in life. This relation to what is not itself constitutes the human being in its livingness, so that the human exceeds its boundary in the very effort to establish them. To make the claim, “I am an animal,” avows in a distinctively human language that the human is not distinct. This paradox makes it imperative to separate the question of a livable life from the status of a human life, since livability pertains to living beings that exceed the human. In addition, we would be foolish to think that life is fully possible without a dependence on technology, which suggests that the human, in its animality, is dependent on technology, to live. In this sense, we are thinking within the frame of the cyborg as we call into question the status of the human and that of the livable life.

The rethinking of the human in these terms does not entail a return to humanism. When Frantz Fanon claimed that “the black is not a man,” he conducted a critique of humanism that showed that the human in its contemporary articulation is so fully racialized that no black man could qualify as human.
⁴
In his usage, the formulation was also a critique of masculinity, implying that the black man is effeminized. And the implication of that formulation would be that no one who is not a “man” in the masculine sense is a human, suggesting that both masculinity and racial privilege shore up the notion of the human.

His formulation has been extended by contemporary scholars, including the literary critic Sylvia Wynter, to pertain to women of color as well and to call into question the racist frameworks within which the category of the human has been articulated.
⁵
These formulations show the power differentials embedded in the construction of the category of the “human” and, at the same time, insist upon the historicity of the term, the fact that the “human” has been crafted and consolidated over time.

The category of the “human” retains within itself the workings of the power differential of race as part of its own historicity. But the history of the category is not over, and the “human” is not captured once and for all. That the category is crafted in time, and that it works through excluding a wide range of minorities means that its rearticulation will begin precisely at the point where the excluded speak to and from such a category. If Fanon writes that “a black is not a man,” who writes when Fanon writes? That we can ask the “who” means that the human has exceeded its categorical definition, and that he is in and through the utterance opening up the category to a different future.

If there are norms of recognition by which the “human” is constituted, and these norms encode operations of power, then it follows that the contest over the future of the “human” will be a contest over the power that works in and through such norms. That power emerges in language in a restrictive way or, indeed, in other modes of articulation as that which tries to stop the articulation as it nevertheless moves forward.

That double movement is found in the utterance, the image, the action that articulates the struggle with the norm. Those deemed illegible, unrecognizable, or impossible nevertheless speak in the terms of the “human,” opening the term to a history not fully constrained by the existing differentials of power.

These questions form in part an agenda for the future that one hopes will bring a host of scholars and activists together to craft wide-ranging frameworks within which to broach these urgent and complex issues. These issues are clearly related to changes in kinship structure, debates on gay marriage, conditions for adoption, and access to reproductive technology. Part of rethinking where and how the human comes into being will involve a rethinking of both the social and psychic landscapes of an infant’s emergence. Changes at the level of kinship similarly demand a reconsideration of the social conditions under which humans are born and reared, opening up new territory for social and psychological analysis as well as the sites of their convergence.

Psychoanalysis has sometimes been used to shore up the notion of a primary sexual difference that forms the core of an individual’s psychic life. But there it would seem that sexual difference gains its salience only through assuming that sperm and egg imply heterosexual parental coitus, and then a number of other psychic realities, such as the primal scene and oedipal scenario. But if the egg or sperm comes from elsewhere, and is not attached to a person called “parent,” or if the parents who are making love are not heterosexual or not reproductive, then it would seem that a new psychic topography is required. Of course, it is possible to presume, as many French psychoanalysts have done, that reproduction follows universally from heterosexual parental coitus, and that this fact provides a psychic condition for the human subject.

This view proceeds to condemn forms of non-heterosexual unions, reproductive technology, and parenting outside of nuclear heterosexual marriage as damaging for the child, threatening to culture, destructive of the human. But this recruitment of psychoanalytic vocabularies for the purpose of preserving the paternal line, the transmission of national cultures, and heterosexual marriage is only one use of psychoanalysis, and not a particularly productive or necessary one.

It is important to remember that psychoanalysis can also serve as a critique of cultural adaptation as well as a theory for understanding the ways in which sexuality fails to conform to the social norms by which it is regulated. Moreover, there is no better theory for grasping the workings of fantasy construed not as a set of projections on an internal screen but as part of human relationality itself. It is on the basis of this insight that we can come to understand how fantasy is essential to an experience of one’s own body, or that of another, as gendered.

Finally, psychoanalysis can work in the service of a conception of humans as bearing an irreversible humility in their relations to others and to themselves. There is always a dimension of ourselves and our relation to others that we cannot know, and this not-knowing persists with us as a condition of existence and, indeed, of survivability. We are, to an extent, driven by what we do not know, and cannot know, and this “drive” (
Trieb
) is precisely what is neither exclusively biological nor cultural, but always the site of their dense convergence.
⁶
If I am always constituted by norms that are not of my making, then I have to understand the ways that constitution takes place. The staging and structuring of affect and desire is clearly one way in which norms work their way into what feels most properly to belong to me.

The fact that I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself follows from the fact that the sociality of norms exceeds my inception and my demise, sustaining a temporal and spatial field of operation that exceeds my self-understanding. Norms do not exercise a final or fatalistic control, at least, not always. The fact that desire is not fully determined corresponds with the psychoanalytic understanding that sexuality is never fully captured by any regulation.

Rather, it is characterized by displacement, it can exceed regulation, take on new forms in response to regulation, even turn around and make it sexy. In this sense, sexuality is never fully reducible to the “effect” of this or that operation of regulatory power. This is not the same as saying that sexuality is, by nature, free and wild. On the contrary, it emerges precisely as an improvisational possibility within a field of constraints. Sexuality, though, is not found to be “in” those constraints as something might be “in” a container: it is extinguished by constraints, but also mobilized and incited by constraints, even sometimes requiring them to be produced again and again.

It would follow, then, that to a certain extent sexuality establishes us as outside of ourselves; we are motivated by an elsewhere whose full meaning and purpose we cannot definitively establish.
⁷
This is only because sexuality is one way cultural meanings are carried, through both the operation of norms and the peripheral modes of their undoing.

Sexuality does not follow from gender in the sense that what gender you “are” determines what kind of sexuality you will “have.” We try to speak in ordinary ways about these matters, stating our gender, disclosing our sexuality, but we are, quite inadvertently, caught up in ontological thickets and epistemological quandaries. Am I a gender after all? And do I “have” a sexuality?

Or does it turn out that the “I” who ought to be bearing its gender is undone by being a gender, that gender is always coming from a source that is elsewhere and directed toward something that is beyond me, constituted in a sociality I do not fully author? If that is so, then gender undoes the “I” who is supposed to be or bear its gender, and that undoing is part of the very meaning and comprehensibility of that “I.” If I claim to “have” a sexuality, then it would seem that a sexuality is there for me to call my own, to possess as an attribute. But what if sexuality is the means by which I am dispossessed? What if it is invested and animated from elsewhere even as it is precisely mine?

Does it not follow, then, that the “I” who would “have” its sexuality is undone by the sexuality it claims to have, and that its very “claim” can no longer be made exclusively in its own name? If I am claimed by others when I make my claim, if gender is for and from another before it becomes my own, if sexuality entails a certain dispossession of the “I,” this does not spell the end to my political claims. It only means that when one makes those claims, one makes them for much more than oneself.

1. Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy

What makes for a livable world is no idle question. It is not merely a question for philosophers. It is posed in various idioms all the time by people in various walks of life. If that makes them all philosophers, then that is a conclusion I am happy to embrace.

It becomes a question for ethics, I think, not only when we ask the personal question, what makes my own life bearable, but when we ask, from a position of power, and from the point of view of distributive justice, what makes, or ought to make, the lives of others bearable? Somewhere in the answer we find ourselves not only committed to a certain view of what life is, and what it should be, but also of what constitutes the human, the distinctively human life, and what does not. There is always a risk of anthropocentrism here if one assumes that the distinctively human life is valuable—or most valuable—or is the only way to think the problem of value. But perhaps to counter that tendency it is necessary to ask both the question of life and the question of the human, and not to let them fully collapse into one another.