Undoing Gender (44 page)

⁹
. Jacques Lacan,
Écrits: A Selection,
58.

¹⁰
. For a critique and radicalization of the Lacanian formulation of this account of the mimetic formation of desire, see See Mikkel Borsch-Jacobsen,
The
Freudian Subject
.

¹¹
. On jealousy and the displacement of homosexual desire, see Freud’s “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality.”

¹²
.
Boys Don’t Cry
(1999, Twentieth Century Fox, Director, Kimberley Peirce).

¹³
. Benjamin,
The Shadow of the Other,
37.

¹⁴
. Ibid., 83–84.

¹⁵
. See Drucilla Cornell,
The Philosophy of the Limit
; Emanuel Levinas,
Otherwise Than Being
.

¹⁶
. See Jean Laplanche,
Essays on Otherness
.

8. Bodily Confessions

¹
. This paper was given at the American Psychological Division Meetings, (Division 39) in San Francisco in the Spring of 1999.

²
. A different approach to the relation between the body and language in psychoanalysis can be found in Shoshana Felman’s
The Scandal of the Speaking Body
.

See my preface to that volume for further reflections on this issue.

³
. See Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 208–28.

⁴
. For a fuller account of Foucault’s early views on confession and repression, see the first chapter of Michel Foucault,
History of Sexuality
, vol. 1.

⁵
. Foucault,
Religion and Culture
.

⁶
. For a very interesting treatment of what confession “does,” see Peter Brooks,
Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature
.

⁷
. All citations from Sophocles’
Antigone
are from the Loeb Library Series.

Parts of the following discussion are recapitulations of an argument I make in
Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
.

⁸
. Sigmund Freud, “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt,” 332.

9. The End of Sexual Difference?

¹
. Luce Irigaray,
An Ethics of Sexual Difference
. 3.

²
. For a fuller discussion of Gilroy’s work on this topic, see the chapter “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?” in this volume.

³
. I thank Homi Bhabha for this point.

⁴
. Part of this discussion appeared in “Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency” in
Excitable Speech
.

⁵
. “La Chiesa si prepara alle guerre dei 5 sessi,”
La Repubblica
, May 20, 1995, 11.

⁶
. “IPS: Honduras Feminists and Church,” Interpress Service, May 25, 1995.

⁷
.
Report of the Informal Contact Group on Gender
, July 7, 1995.

⁸
. See Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough.”

⁹
. Biddy Martin, “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary.”

¹⁰
. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds.
The
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
.

¹¹
. Whereas feminism is key, and the concepts of “women” and even “wom-anist” are often central, the emphasis—in the work of Kimberle Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda—is more pervasively on the epistemological vantage point of those who are structurally subordinated and marginalized through their racialization.

The emphasis on the social character of this subordination is nearly absolute, except for some psychoanalytic efforts to delineate the psychic workings of racialization in which becoming “raced” is figured as an interpellation with resounding psychic effects. The salience of this last issue is found, I think, in what has become a veritable return to Fanon within contemporary race studies. And there, the emphasis is not social in a restricted sense but on a socially articulated imaginary, the specular production of racial expectations, and the visual estrangement and visceral workings of the racial signifier. Where sexual difference enters, as it does, say, in the work of Rey Chow, it is to underscore the misogynistic consequences of Fanon’s resistance to racism. More recently, Homi Bhabha has suggested in a Fanonian analysis of the white male subject that the splitting is to be understood in terms of a homophobic paranoia, one in which the threatened and externalizing relation to alterity forecloses homosexuality and sexual difference at once.

¹²
. This was a suggestion made to me by Debra Keates’s entry on sexual difference in
Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Critical Dictionary
.

¹³
. I have laid out elsewhere my theoretical difficulties with this way of understanding the disjunctive relation between gender and sexuality. I will try, though, to recapitulate briefly the terms of that argument. Whereas “sex and sexuality” have been offered as the proper objects for lesbian and gay studies, and this has been analogized with feminism whose proper object is described as “gender,” it seems to me that most feminist research would not fall under this description.

Feminism for the most part insists that sexual and gender relations, although in no sense causally linked, are structurally linked in important ways. A characterization of feminism as an exclusive focus on gender also misrepresents the recent history of feminism in several significant ways.

The history of radical feminist sexual politics is erased from the proper characterization of feminism:

1. the various antiracist positions developed within feminist frameworks for which gender is no more central than race, or for which gender is no more central than colonial positionality, or class—the entire movements of social-ist feminism, postcolonial feminism, Third World feminism—are no longer part of the central or proper focus of feminism;

2. MacKinnon’s account of gender and sexuality is taken as paradigmatic of feminism. She understands gender as the categories “women” and “men” that reflect and institutionalize positions of subordination and domination within a social arrangement of sexuality that is always presumed to be heterosexual; the strong feminist opposition to her work is excluded from the offered definition of feminism;

3. gender is reduced to sex (and sometimes to sex-assignment), rendered fixed or “given,” and the contested history of the sex/gender distinction is displaced from view;

4. the normative operation of gender in the regulation of sexuality is denied; 5. the sexual contestation of gender norms is no longer an “object” of analysis within either frame, as it crosses and confounds the very domains of analysis that this methodological claim for lesbian and gay studies strains to keep apart.

The significant differences between feminists who make use of the category of gender, and those who remain within the framework of sexual difference, are erased from view by this intellectually untenable formulation of what feminism is.

How would we understand the history of black feminism, the pervasive intersec-tionality of its project, were we to accept what is a white feminist concern with gender as an isolable category of analysis?

¹⁴
. InterPress Third World News Agency, www.ips.org.

¹⁵
. Primo Levi’s text,
Moments of Reprieve
, repeatedly stages the difference between survival and affirmation.

¹⁶
. See Judith Halberstam,
Female Masculinities
.

10. The Question of Social Transformation

¹
. See Hollibaugh Moraga, “What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With.”

²
. See also my interview with Rosi Braidotti, “Feminism By Any Other Name.”

³
. See Barbara Duden,
The Woman Beneath the Skin
.

⁴
. I consider this issue at greater length in
Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between
Life and Death
.

⁵
. Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” 50.

⁶
. Part of this discussion of Foucault is parallel with my essay, “Virtue as Critique.”

⁷
.
Paris Is Burning
(1990, Fox Lorber, Director, Jennie Livingston).

⁸
. See Giorgio Agamben on “bare life,” in
Homo Sacer
.

⁹
. For an excellent discussion of Anzaldúa’s critical discourse, see Norma Alarcon, “Anzaldúa’s Frontera: Inscribing Gynetics.”

¹⁰
. See the Introduction to Mahasweta Devi,
Imaginary Maps: Three Stories
, 198.

¹¹
. For a fuller discussion of these topics, see my
Precarious Life: Powers of
Violence, and Mourning
.

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The Lesbian and
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———. “Questions autour de la filiation.” Interview with Eric Lamien and Michel Feher.
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Agamben, Giorgio.
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
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