Undoing Gender (8 page)

It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from Foucaultian scholarship: (1) regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect; and (2) to become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a subject precisely through being regulated. This second point follows from the first in that the regulatory discourses which form the subject of gender are precisely those that require and induce the subject in question.

Particular kinds of regulations may be understood as instances of a more general regulatory power, one that is specified as the regulation of gender. Here I contravene Foucault in some respects. For if the Foucaultian wisdom seems to consist in the insight that regulatory power has certain broad historical characteristics, and that it operates on gender as well as on other kinds of social and cultural norms, then it seems that gender is but the instance of a larger regulatory operation of power. I would argue against this subsumption of gender to regulatory power that the regulatory apparatus that governs gender is one that is itself gender-specific. I do not mean to suggest that the regulation of gender is paradigmatic of regulatory power as such, but rather, that gender requires and institutes its own distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime.

The suggestion that gender is a norm requires some further elaboration. A norm is not the same as a rule, and it is not the same as a law.
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A norm operates within social practices as the implicit standard of
normalization
. Although a norm may be analytically separable from the practices in which it is embedded, it may also prove to be recalcitrant to any effort to decontextualize its operation. Norms may or may not be explicit, and when they operate as the normalizing principle in social practice, they usually remain implicit, difficult to read, discernible most clearly and dramatically in the effects that they produce.

For gender to be a norm suggests that it is always and only tenuously embodied by any particular social actor. The norm governs the social intelligibility of action, but it is not the same as the action that it governs. The norm appears to be indifferent to the actions that it governs, by which I mean only that the norm appears to have a status and effect that is independent of the actions governed by the norm.

The norm governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and action to become recognizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility on the social and defining the parameters of what will and will not appear within the domain of the social. The question of what it is to be outside the norm poses a paradox for thinking, for if the norm renders the social field intelligible and normalizes that field for us, then being outside the norm is in some sense being defined still in relation to it. To be not quite masculine or not quite feminine is still to be understood exclusively in terms of one’s relationship to the “quite masculine” and the “quite feminine.”

To claim that gender is a norm is not quite the same as saying that there are normative views of femininity and masculinity, even though there clearly are such normative views. Gender is not exactly what one “is” nor is it precisely what one “has.” Gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes. To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance. To conflate the definition of gender with its normative expression is inadvertently to reconsolidate the power of the norm to constrain the definition of gender. Gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalized, but gender might very well be the apparatus by which such terms are deconstructed and denaturalized. Indeed, it may be that the very apparatus that seeks to install the norm also works to undermine that very installation, that the installation is, as it were, definitionally incomplete. To keep the term “gender” apart from both masculinity and femininity is to safeguard a theoretical perspective by which one might offer an account of how the binary of masculine and feminine comes to exhaust the semantic field of gender. Whether one refers to “gender trouble” or “gender blending,” “transgender” or “cross-gender,” one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalized binary. The conflation of gender with masculine/feminine, man/woman, male/female, thus performs the very naturalization that the notion of gender is meant to forestall.

Thus, a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a
regulatory
operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption.

One tendency within gender studies has been to assume that the alternative to the binary system of gender is a multiplication of genders. Such an approach invariably provokes the question: how many genders can there be, and what will they be called?
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But the disruption of the binary system need not lead us to an equally problematic quantification of gender. Luce Irigaray, following a Lacanian lead, asks whether the masculine sex is the “one” sex, meaning not only “the one and only,” but the one that inaugurates a quantitative approach to sex. “Sex” in her view is neither a biological category nor a social one (and is thus distinct from “gender”), but a linguistic one that exists, as it were, on the divide between the social and the biological. “The sex which is not one” is thus femininity understood precisely as what cannot be captured by number.
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Other approaches insist that “transgender” is not exactly a third gender, but a mode of passage between genders, an interstitial and transitional figure of gender that is not reducible to the normative insistence on one or two.
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Symbolic Positions and Social Norms

Although some theorists maintain that norms are always social norms, Lacanian theorists, indebted to the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, insist that symbolic norms are not the same as social ones, and that a certain “regulation” of gender takes place through the symbolic demand that is placed on psyches from their inception.

The “symbolic” became a technical term for Jacques Lacan in 1953 and became his own way of compounding mathematical (formal) and anthropological uses of the term. In a dictionary on Lacanian parlance, the symbolic is explicitly linked with the problem of regulation: “The symbolic is the realm of the Law which
regulates
desire in the Oedipus complex.”
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That complex is understood to be derived from a primary or symbolic prohibition against incest, a prohibition that makes sense only in terms of kinship relations in which various “positions” are established within the family according to an exogamic mandate. In other words, a mother is someone with whom a son and daughter do not have sexual relations, and a father is someone with whom a son and daughter do not have sexual relations, a mother is someone who only has sexual relations with the father, and so forth. These relations of prohibition are encoded in the “position” that each of these family members occupies. To be in such a position is thus to be in such a crossed sexual relation, at least according to the symbolic or normative conception of what that “position” is.

The consequences of this view are clearly enormous. In many ways the structuralist legacy within psychoanalytic thinking exerted a monumental effect on feminist film and literary theory, as well as feminist approaches to psychoanalysis throughout the disciplines. It also paved the way for a queer critique of feminism that has had, and continues to have, inevitably divisive and consequential effects within sexuality and gender studies. In what follows, I hope to show how the notion of culture that becomes transmuted into the “symbolic” for Lacanian psychoanalysis is very different from the notion of culture that remains current within the contemporary field of cultural studies, such that the two enterprises are often understood as hopelessly opposed. I also plan to argue that any claim to establish the rules that “regulate desire” in an inalterable and eternal realm of law has limited use for a theory that seeks to understand the conditions under which the social transformation of gender is possible. Another concern regarding the symbolic is that the prohibition of incest can be one of the motivations for its own transgression, which suggests that the symbolic positions of kinship are in many ways defeated by the very sexuality that they produce through regulation.
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Lastly, I hope to show that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche.

To return to the incest taboo, the question emerges: what is the status of these prohibitions and these positions? Lévi-Strauss makes clear in
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
that nothing in biology necessitates the incest taboo, that it is a purely
cultural
phenomenon.

By “cultural,” Lévi-Strauss does not mean “culturally variable” or “contingent,” but rather according to “universal” laws of culture.

Thus, for Lévi-Strauss, cultural rules are not alterable rules (as Gayle Rubin subsequently argued), but are inalterable and universal. The domain of a universal and eternal rule of culture—what Juliet Mitchell calls “the universal and primordial law”
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—becomes the basis for the Lacanian notion of the symbolic and the subsequent efforts to divide the symbolic from both the biological and social domains. In Lacan, that which is universal in culture is understood to be its symbolic or linguistic rules, and these are understood to support kinship relations.

The very possibility of pronominal reference, of an “I,” a “you,” a “we,” and “they” appears to rely on this mode of kinship that operates in and as language. This is a slide from the cultural to the linguistic, one toward which Lévi-Strauss himself gestures toward the end of
The
Elementary Structures of Kinship
. In Lacan, the symbolic becomes defined in terms of a conception of linguistic structures that are irreducible to the social forms that language takes. According to structuralist terms, it establishes the universal conditions under which the sociality, that is, communicability of all language use, becomes possible. This move paves the way for the consequential distinction between symbolic and social accounts of kinship.

Hence, a norm is not quite the same as “symbolic position” in the Lacanian sense, which appears to enjoy a quasi-timeless character, regardless of the qualifications offered in endnotes to several of Lacan’s seminars. The Lacanians almost always insist that a symbolic position is not the same as a social one, that it would be a mistake to take the symbolic position of the father, for instance, which is after all the paradigmatically symbolic position, and mistake that for a socially constituted and alterable position that fathers have assumed throughout time. The Lacanian view insists that there is an ideal and unconscious demand that is made upon social life which remains irreducible to socially legible causes and effects. The symbolic place of the father does not cede to the demands for a social reorganization of paternity. Instead, the symbolic is precisely what sets limits to any and all utopian efforts to reconfigure and relive kinship relations at some distance from the oedipal scene.
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One of the problems that emerged when the study of kinship was combined with the study of structural linguistics is that kinship positions were elevated to the status of fundamental linguistic structures. These are positions that make possible the entry into language, and which, therefore, maintain an essential status with respect to language. They are, in other words, positions without which no signification could proceed, or, in different language, no cultural intelligibility can be secured. What were the consequences of making certain conceptions of kinship timeless, and then elevating them to the status of the elementary structures of intelligibility?

Although Lévi-Strauss purports to consider a variety of kinship systems, he does so in the service of delimiting those principles of kinship that assume cross-cultural status. What is offered by structuralism as a “position” within language or kinship is not the same as a “norm,” for the latter is a socially produced and variable framework.

A norm is not the same as a symbolic position. Moreover, if a symbolic position is more appropriately regarded as a norm, then a symbolic position is not the same as itself, but is, rather, a contingent norm whose contingency has been covered over by a theoretical reification that bears potentially stark consequences for gendered life. One might respond within the structuralist conceit with the claim, “But this is the law!” What is the status of such an utterance, however? “It is the law!” becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise. “It is the law” is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law, a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself. Thus, the status given to the law is, not surprisingly, precisely the status given to the phallus, where the phallus is not merely a privileged “signifier” within the Lacanian scheme but becomes the characteristic feature of the theoretical apparatus in which that signifier is introduced. In other words, the authoritative force that shores up the incontestability of the symbolic law is itself an exercise of that symbolic law, a further instance of the place of the father, as it were, indisputable and incontestable.