What success, do critical discourses on gender seek to destabilise cultural concepts of masculinity?

The issue of male identity strikes to the core of current arguments in feminist and critical theory. The may initially seem strange to the outsider: surely, feminism is concerned with female identity and fighting against patriarchy? Yet this issue, and the issue of gender identity, has become the centre of a increasingly complex argument among gender theorists, there is (Butler: 1990:vii) “a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism."

This essay will analyse why this sense of trouble emerges. It will detail the history of critical feminist discourse as it has fought against patriarchy. This history entails several substantive shifts. First, feminism fought against patriarchy on the basis of essentialised notions of male and female identity. Then, following Foucault (1979, 1980a, 1980b), it was increasingly understood that the very notions of gender were condensed points of power relations.

Emerging feminist critical theory, for instance that of Judith Butler, has completely destabilised the notion of masculinity, removing it from any notion of naturalism. In doing so, a tension emerges in feminist critical theory: there is the possibility that such a destabilisation removes the stable reference points that are required for a political campaign. Further, such a destabilisation has the potential to not give enough importance to how ‘real’ cultural constructions appear to be in lived experience. Finally, in Butler’s work, while we can see an attempt to create a new political subjectivity based around the performative element of gender, we can also note that such performativity prevents any appeal to universality, to the real (in the Lacanian sense) of the sexual encounter. Thus, this essay will argue that while critical theories such as Butler’s destabilise masculinity with a great deal of success, they do so at the cost of providing a positive notion of the subject which allows the feminist project to continue.

II. The Essential Patriarch

Nietzsche’s critiques of essentialist identity (in the postmodern reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher of difference) had not filtered through in 19C century European society. Caplan (1987) has given a lucid reading of the way gender is constructed during this time period. The binary of male : female was constructed as structurally homologous to the binaries private : public and nature: society. These binaries were not thought of as cultural construction but as an objective and natural distribution of the world. These binaries were thought of as proper names. They were a way of assigning classes and properties to elements of society so as to ensure the perpetuation of that society and the hierarchical relationships within it.

Thus, the proper place for the man was in the social world: given his attributes of strength and phallus, he should deal with relationships with the outside world. In terms of the nuclear household (which was by necessity heterosexual and patriarchal), the man dealt with relationships to the outside world. In lieu of their closeness to the cycle of reproduction (as mothers), women were thought of as natural. As men reproduced the social world, women reproduced the biological world. Thus, women needed to be protected, and their sphere of activity should be circumscribed to the home. They also needed to be acculturated in correct activity: for at birth that were dangerously sexual, and that sexuality needed to be channelled in appropriate (for the – male – social world) ways. Caplan (1987:35) draws attention to the way these processes of enculturation functions as a means of exerting what Foucault calls biopower on women (the way in which sovereign power acts directly on the body of the subject: creating the subject through the giving of a name). For instance, between the 1790’s and 1830’s, the rise of a discourse of female passionlessness (females being expected to be submissive to the male sphere) is linked the rise of an evangelical Christianity that asks for the suppression of sexuality (and female voice) as the price to pay for Godliness (and acceptance within a male social world).

Several aspects of these relationships should be understood before we proceed to the attempt critical theory makes to dismantle them. It is important to note that each of the structural homologies noted above supports the others: women should only speak in the private sphere because they are closer to nature and need to be controlled, they need to be controlled because their sexuality violates the social sphere. Such representations are given as natural: the category of gender and the biological category of sex are not thought of as separate here but bound up with each other. These relationships are part of the natural order of things. As such, they are autonomous categories. Masculinity is bound up with the social world, with production and with control, not because femininity is private and natural, but because of the nature of man in and of itself. It is these aspects the first critical theories of feminism attack.

III. Speak, woman

Feminist theory emerged as what Ardner (1974:75) calls a muted group. Ardner’s theory claims that there are dominant modes of expression within a society that are generated by the dominated structures within it. The muted, groups, if they wish to communicate, must express themselves in the mode of the dominant group. Grosz (1994:128) notes the way in which this occurred in the 19C. Female hysteria was a way of expressing discontent with the current social world through patriarchal notions of sexuality: expressing the excess meaning in the construction of the female as sexual, which is to say, registering their complaint within the discourse of the dominant patriarchy. However, this expression of resistance by a muted group can also be understood in more subtle ways in the origins of feminist theory.

The first feminists, such as the suffragettes who campaigned for women’s rights, claimed the category of women as their own. They drew attention to all the areas of life in which women had been silenced. They attacked patriarchy as an entity across the globe that oppresses women. Thus, they used the essentialised notions of gender provided for by patriarchy to attack it. This can be seen in Rubin’s (1975:335) understanding of sex/gender as the “set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.” What is important to note in this definition is that sex and gender are seen as inseparable. Man will always be masculine (and thus, always patriarchal).

There were several important reasons why such a stance was taken. For a movement just beginning, it was almost inevitable the hegemonic voice of the oppressor would be used. Further, for any movement or body that speaks about a minority group, it is necessary that there is a point of departure: an analytic entity that can be so named and so constitute a point about which one can fight. Furthermore, the utilisation of essentialised notions of masculinity allowed feminists to link the fight of western feminists to the plight of oppressed women across the globe, all, they would claim, fighting against a structurally similar male oppressor. This voiced attack was not on the male – though it was in some of its more vehement exponents – but on the construction they placed on society. It was a fight for recognition for the category women, rather than an attack on the construction of the category women. As such, it revealed (Butler: 1990:vi) “the radical dependency of the masculine subject on the female ‘Other’… [it] suddenly exposes his autonomy as illusory.” This then, is the first destabilising of the masculine identity that feminist critical theory attempts: it destabilises the category of masculinity as something autonomous and independent. However, such a destabilisation was increasingly seen as unsatisfactory. Later feminist theorists went further, and began to analyse how (ibid: vii) “power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender.”

IV. The History of Sexuality

Butler (1990,1993) sets out to analyse gender as a genealogy. By this, she refers to the tradition of analysis of Nietzsche and Foucault. This is a radical shift from the notion of critical practice that we see above. A genealogy does not (1990:vii) “search for the origins of gender…[or] a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view.” Thus, the genealogical project no longer searches for a pre-existing feminity, but also it means that it can no longer criticise a pre-existing essentialised masculinity. Rather, it must (ibid: ix) “investigate the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin.” Such an analytic approach necessitates that the category of male is empty of an authentic, essential value: it is a category created by the institutions and discourses of political interest. At this stage, we can see that this is a complete destabilisation of the gender category male.

This approach is inspired by the work of Foucault, especially the History of Sexuality (1980b). He attacks the naturalistic conception of sex, asserting that sexuality itself, the supposedly biological categories that we talk of, are culturally constructed. Thus he comments (ibid: 35) that “what is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting is as the secret.” Foucault analyses the emergence of the modern discourse around sexuality and gender, he criticises the idea sexuality should be seen as a disobedient natural drive (as it would be seen in 19C discourses on femininity and masculinity). Instead, sexuality is the social par excellence. He notes (ibid: 103) that sexuality should be seen as “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power… it is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather endowed with the greatest instrumentality.” Thus, what is considered male is determined in relation to what is considered female, and this relation is a relation saturated with power. This means the concept of masculinity is critically destabilised.

In this process, feminism has found itself also critically destabilised (which Butler embraces as a process). This decentring means the cry of unity between women across the globe can no longer be entertained; there is not a single essentialised male hegemony but a variety of modalities of oppression. Thus, feminism continued at an even faster pace to compensate for this decentring by aligning itself with the struggles of the dispossessed across the globe. Despite, this, some feminists have been critical of the project Butler introduced. Benhabib notes (1995:20) that this uncertainty “may eliminate not only the specificity of feminist theory, but place in question the very emancipatory ideals of the women’s movement altogether.” For if gender is essentially empty, how can one stand in place and fight for the name ‘women.’ Furthermore, in this process does feminist critical theory not decentre itself as well? For if such categories as woman and man are empty, that what remains is a critique of institutions, and of gender processes, without a critique of the subject. The following section will address these questions, for now, it is important to emphasis an element of Butler’s thought that can be easily misunderstood.

Butler (1990:142) argues that “there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed.” This is not a return to an existential theory where the self is only constituted through its acts. Butler here criticises Beauvoir (1997) when she claims that there is an ‘I’ that acts its gender. Butler does not attempt to claim that with the realisation of the cultural construction of gender we can act as if these cultural constructions do not have weight and density. What Butler is proposing is a theory of the subject that abandons a claim to essentialism without abandoning the weight of those claims. She argues that the ‘I’ is created by discourse, and that it is not possible to found a theory of agency on such an ‘I’ when it is always already signified. Thus, she criticises previous theories of gender as seeing language (and thus, discursive formations) as being something outside of agency and the construction of the sexualised self.

She suggests that (ibid: 145) “the subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantialising effects.” For Butler then, the possibility of subversion lies in the enacting of these repetitions: for instance in the parodic play of the draw queen that distorts the notion of masculinity and reveals that which is hidden by the (naturalising) social law: which is the flux at the heart of the process of repetition. Thus, while Butler seeks to completely destabilise the notion of masculinity, she does not do so by ignoring the power of the category, but rather she attempts to do so, through the power of the category itself.

V. Gender Trouble

To understand "women" as a permanent site of contest,
or as a feminist site of antagonistic struggle, is to presume
that there can be no closure on that category and that
there ought never to be. That the category can never be
descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.
(Butler: 1993:45)

For Butler, the essentialised notion of woman, or the essentialised notion of male identity as something to fight against, would deprive feminism of the very hope of political efficacy. It is precisely because the category of man is never closed, is always in tension with itself, that the hope remains for a world of gender categories that is better than the one we have today. The frequent misreadings of Butler as a philosopher of differánce in the Derridean sense would mean she only saw gender as an effect of performativity, rather than a production. For Butler (ibid: 283) “gender in its ideality might be construed as an intentional object, as constituted but which does not exist.” She advocates utilising the tools of gender as we have them in a process of performativity. Such (ibid: 241) “gender performativity will always involve a difficult labour of forging a future from resources inevitably impure.” Thus, while for Butler gender categories are inevitable bound up with power, like Foucault, she advocates an “urgent, pessimistic activism” which always attempts to subvert these categories of power while realising one can never dispense with them altogether.

That said, we should recognise that problems remain with Butler’s theory of performativity. These problems can be seen by briefly analysing her approach to homosexuality. Butler claims (ibid: 111) “What in Lacan would be called sexed positions, and what some of us might more easily call gender, appears to be secured through the depositing of non-heterosexual identifications in the domain of the culturally impossible.” Butler here is using the Lacanian distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary to argue male homosexual desire is necessarily consigned to the imaginary sphere and that its repudiation is bound up with every performance of male identity.

The problem with such a notion of performativity is one that Butler would not see as a problem. It is that performance always remains constrained by its stage, the culturally set notions of the imaginary and the appearance. In other words, performativity can never offer a genuine break with gender category but merely distort these categories, while never quite escaping them. For Butler, fully adhering to Foucauldian conception of power, this would not be a problem. However, given her use of Lacan, we can see that perhaps there are ways to break more fully the notion of gender down. Zizek (1993: 56) notes: “sexuality is the effect on the living being of the impasses which emerge when it gets entangled in the symbolic order, i.e., the effect on the living body of the deadlock or inconsistency that pertains to the symbolic order qua order of universality.” What he points to here is the classic Lacanian theme of the lack of fit between the name one is given and the order of oneself. We remarked on this lack of fit in the first section when we saw how Grosz analysed female sexuality giving rise to hysteria in the 19C: an expression of anger at the –sexual – name of women they had been given. What Butler’s notion of performativity effaces it the possibility of a proper name: a genuinely universal revolutionary possibility that extends through the world of appearance to the symbolic. As such, we can say that Butler’s notion of gender destabilises the notion of masculinity completely because that is the limit of her ambition: a permanent destabilisation. However successful such a project might be, it is limited in scope because it does not appreciate fully the construction of the subject in hegemony.

VI. Conclusion: Before the Law

The Law produces and then conceals the nothing of a subject before the law in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalised foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law’s own regulatory hegemony.
(Butler: 1990:2)

This essay has shown the way in which critical theories of gender have destabilises naturalistic conception of gender: showing the radical dependency a concept of masculinity has on a notion of femininity, and the way in which these constructions are concealed by a discourse that presents them as natural. Thus, we have seen that discourse produces the subjects that it then uses to legitimate its own regulatory hegemony. We have also seen how critical theories, in particular that of Butler, have attacked the hegemony that assigns these roles. However, we have also briefly looked at the problem with Butler’s work on performativity. Unless a positive notion of the subject can emerge, one that speaks to a universal, a proper name equivalent to the self, then the destabilising project of critical theory has a danger of providing an absent centre of ontology that leads to a negative politics that actually serves the hegemony.

VII. Bibliography

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Zizek, S. 1993: Tarrying With the Negative. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press