Undoing Gender (36 page)

Let me continue, then, by offering a few propositions to consider: (A) What operates at the level of cultural fantasy is not finally dissociable from the ways in which material life is organized.

(B) When one performance of gender is considered real and another false, or when one presentation of gender is considered authentic, and another fake, then we can conclude that a certain ontology of gender is conditioning these judgments, an ontology (an account of what gender
is
) that is also put into crisis by the performance of gender in such a way that these judgments are undermined or become impossible to make.

(C) The point to emphasize here is not that drag is subversive of gender norms, but that we live, more or less implicitly, with received notions of reality, implicit accounts of ontology, which determine what kinds of bodies and sexualities will be considered real and true, and which kind will not.

(D) This differential effect of ontological presuppositions on the embodied life of individuals has consequential effects. And what drag can point out is that (1) this set of ontological presuppositions is at work, and (2) that it is open to rearticulation.

The question of who and what is considered real and true is apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as Foucault makes plain, a question of power. Having or bearing “truth” and “reality” is an enormously powerful prerogative within the social world, one way in which power dissimulates as ontology. According to Foucault, one of the first tasks of critique is to discern the relation “between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge.”
⁵
Here we are confronted with the limits of what is knowable, limits that exercise a certain force but are not grounded in any necessity, limits that one interrogates only at a risk to one’s secure and available ontology: “[N]othing can exist as an element of knowledge if, on the one hand, it… does not conform to a set of rules and constraints characteristic, for example, of a given type of scientific discourse in a given period, and if, on the other hand, it does not possess the effects of coercion or simply the incentives peculiar to what is scientifically validated or simply rational or simply generally accepted, etc.”(52).

Knowledge and power are not finally separable but work together to establish a set of subtle and explicit criteria for thinking the world: “It is therefore not a matter of describing what knowledge is and what power is and how one would repress the other or how the other would abuse the one, but rather, a nexus of knowledge-power has to be described so that we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system” (52–53).

If we consider this relation of knowledge and power in relation to gender, we are compelled to ask how the organization of gender comes to function as a presupposition about how the world is structured.

There is no merely epistemological approach to gender, no simple way to ask what are women’s ways of knowing, or what might it mean to know women. On the contrary, the ways in which women are said to “know” or to “be known” are already orchestrated by power precisely at that moment in which the terms of “acceptable” categorization are instituted.

In Foucault’s view, the critic thus has a double task: to show how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own “conditions of acceptability of a system,” and “to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence.”
⁶
So it will not be enough to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things. Rather, it is necessary to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, and the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility it promises. What this means is that one looks for the conditions by which the object field is constituted as well as the limits of those conditions, the moment where they point up their contingency and their transformability. In Foucault’s terms, “schematically speaking, we have perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it” (58).

What this means for gender, then, is that it is important not only to understand how the terms of gender are instituted, naturalized, and established as presuppositional but to trace the moments where the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged, where the coherence of the categories are put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable.

The turn to drag performance was, in part, a way to think not only about how gender is performed, but how it is resignified through collective terms. Drag performers, for instance, tend to live in communities, and there are strong ritual bonds, such as those we see in the film
Paris is Burning
,
⁷
which make us aware of the resignification of social bonds that gender minorities within communities of color can and do forge. Thus, we are talking about a cultural life of fantasy that not only organizes the material conditions of life, but which also produces sustaining bonds of community where recognition becomes possible, and which works as well to ward off violence, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. This threat of violence tells us something about what is fundamental to the culture in which they live, a culture that is not radically distinct from what many of us live, even as it is not the same as what any of us probably live. But there is a reason we understand it, if we do; this film travels, because of its beauty, its tragedy, its pathos, and its bravery. Its pleasure crosses cultural boundaries in a way, because what also crosses those boundaries, and not always in the same way, is the threat of violence, the threat of poverty, and the struggle to survive—all of which are more difficult for people of color. It is important to note that the struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy. It is part of it. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise.

Fantasy is what establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points, it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.

This brings me back to the question of politics. How is it that drag or, indeed, much more than drag, transgender itself enters into the political field? It does this, I would suggest, by not only making us question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how contemporary notions of reality can be questioned, and new modes of reality instituted. Fantasy is not simply a cognitive exercise, an internal film that we project inside the interior theater of the mind. Fantasy structures relationality, and it comes into play in the stylization of embodiment itself. Bodies are not inhabited as spatial givens. They are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging, altering shape, altering signification—depending on their interactions—and the web of visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity, their constitutive past, present, and future.

As a consequence of being in the mode of becoming, and in always living with the constitutive possibility of becoming otherwise, the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation. These corporeal realities are actively inhabited, and this “activity” is not fully constrained by the norm. Sometimes the very conditions for conforming to the norm are the same as the conditions for resisting it. When the norm appears at once to guarantee and threaten social survival (it is what you need to live; it is that which, if you live it, will threaten to efface you), then conforming and resisting become a compounded and paradoxical relation to the norm, a form of suffering and a potential site for politicization. The question of how to embody the norm is thus very often linked to the question of survival, of whether life itself will be possible. I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those who experience survival itself as a burning issue.

This is one way in which the matter is and continues to be political.

But there is something more, since what the example of drag sought to do was to make us question the means by which reality is made and to consider the way in which being called real or being called unreal can be not only a means of social control but a form of dehumanizing violence. Indeed, I would put it this way: to be called unreal, and to have that call, as it were, institutionalized as a form of differential treatment, is to become the other against which the human is made. It is the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality. To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one’s language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one’s favor.

If gender is performative, then it follows that the reality of gender is itself produced as an effect of the performance. Although there are norms that govern what will and will not be real, and what will and will not be intelligible, they are called into question and reiterated at the moment in which performativity begins its citational practice. One surely cites norms that already exist, but these norms can be significantly deterritorialized through the citation. They can also be exposed as nonnatural and nonnecessary when they take place in a context and through a form of embodying that defies normative expectation. What this means is that through the practice of gender performativity, we not only see how the norms that govern reality are cited but grasp one of the mechanisms by which reality is reproduced
and
altered in the course of that reproduction. The point about drag is not simply to produce a pleasurable and subversive spectacle but to allegorize the spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is both reproduced and contested.

The derealization of gendered violence has implications for understanding how and why certain gender presentations are criminalized and pathologized, how subjects who cross gender risk internment and imprisonment, why violence against transgendered subjects is not recognized as violence, and why it is sometimes inflicted by the very states who should be offering such subjects protection from violence.

So what if new forms of gender are possible, how does this affect the ways that we live and the concrete needs of the human community? How are we to distinguish between forms of gender possibility that are valuable and those that are not? These are questions that have been understandably posed to my arguments. I would respond that it is not a question merely of producing a new future for genders that do not yet exist. The genders I have in mind have been existing for a long time, but they have not been admitted into the terms that govern reality. It is a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living. Because the norms governing reality have not admitted these forms to be real, we will, of necessity, call them new. But I hope we will laugh knowingly when and if we do. The conception of politics at work here is centrally concerned with the question of survival, of how to create a world in which those who understand their gender and their desire to be nonnormative can live and thrive not only without the threat of violence from the outside but without the pervasive sense of their own unreality, which can lead to suicide or a suicidal life. Lastly, I would ask what place the thinking of the possible has within political theorizing. One can object and say, ah, but you are trying only to make gender complexity possible. But that does not tell us which forms are good or bad; it does not supply the measure, the gauge, the norm. But there is a normative aspiration here, and it has to do with the ability to live and breathe and move and would no doubt belong somewhere in what is called a philosophy of freedom. The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity.

From Norms to Politics

In the essay, “Gender Regulations,” I argue that the sense of what a norm is and what, finally, is “normative” depends on the kind of social theory from which these terms emerge. On the one hand, norms seem to signal the regulatory or normalizing function of power, but from another perspective, norms are precisely what binds individuals together, forming the basis of their ethical and political claims. When, in the analysis above, I oppose violence done by restrictive norms, I appear to appeal to a norm of nonviolence. It would seem to follow that norms can operate both as unacceptable restrictions and as part of any critical analysis that seeks to show what is unacceptable in that restrictive operation. This second sense of norms is associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas who identifies norms as the basis for the possibility of community or, indeed, any understanding that humans might hold in common. If we cannot accept that there is this possibility of commonness in the sense that he holds out, are we still precluded from making strong political claims, for instance, against gendered violence?

If we consider Habermas’s argument in
Between Facts and Norms
, it is clear that he relies on norms to supply a common understanding for social actors and speakers: “Participants, in claiming validity for their utterances, strive to reach an understanding with one another about something in the world… the everyday use of language does not turn exclusively or even primarily on its representational (or fact-stating) functions: here all the functions of language and language-world relations come into play, so that the spectrum of validity claims takes in more than truth claims” (16). He further explains that “in explicating the meaning of linguistic expressions and the validity of statements, we touch on idealizations that are connected with the medium of language” (17). He makes clear that without these idealizations at the heart of language, we would not have the resources by which to orient ourselves to disparate kinds of claims made by any number of social actors. Indeed, the presumption of a common set of idealizations is what gives our action order and what orders it in advance, as well as what we take account of as we seek to order ourselves in relation to one another and a common future “With the concept of communicative action, which brings in mutual understanding as a mechanism of action coordination, the counterfactual presuppositions of actors who orient their action to validity claims also acquire
immediate relevance
for the construction and preservation of social orders; for these orders
exist
through the recognition of normative validity claims
” (17, my emphasis).