As a linguist (in a previous academic life), I often wondered about (and still do, to an extent) the limitations of language to deliver, to disclose, everything, all about human suffering, due to one’s exclusion from the dominant culture’s discourse, or the benevolent socio-political and historic context of their time(s). Most theoretical work I have encountered on my linguistic exploits (Jacobson, Chomsky, Ilić) has not helped me come closer to a finite understanding of this problem of limited representation. No matter how beneficial these theories of language as “langue” and “parole” have been for my linguistic training, their philosophical conceptualizations are not expansive enough to offer a sustained account of what it would mean to rework the constricting impulses they contain so as to ameliorate the pain of exclusion/ otherness/ subordination they exact. Judith Butler’s “immanent” critique of a set of politically engaging theories/practices, titled Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, employs multiple theoretical/ disciplinary/ political “languages” as it struggles to open up the discussion surrounding gender’s ‘metaphysics of presence’. Ms. Butler’s reversal of the gender/sex binary, contesting the prevailing idea of gender as a surface expression of a deeper “sex”, constitutes a noteworthy introductory step in a long-awaited scholarly attempt to consider the ways through which language constructs all the objects it contends merely to describe.
Bearing this in mind, my question regarding Butler’s re-conceptualization of gender as a “performative act” goes along the lines of questioning whether gender’s “performativity” presumes a subject with too much agency.
If this be true, what, then, constitutes “too much agency”? If one such subject is discursively constituted (as a mere effect of language), is it solely determined by language? Could gender be just a matter of choice? If so, to what extent?
Ms. Butler’s theoretical work on gender as a “doing” rather than a “done” is clearly invested in the works of several French thinkers (Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Wittig). However, the theoretical move that I found quite innovative in Ms. Butler’s work on gender identity is connected with her reading of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic description of mourning and melancholia as a useful way to theorize the acquisition of gender. In “Trauer und Melancholie” (1917, translated in English as “Mourning and Melancholia”, 1925), Freud looks at melancholia as a reaction to an emotional loss, in which the pertinent loss is not dealt with properly, whereas in the case of mourning the loss has been properly grieved. As a result of this dichotomy, in grieving, a melancholic person does not aver properly; they hold on to the loss, retaining it as one of their own characteristics. In other words, the melancholic person encorporates “the other” who has been lost so as to prevent the otherwise irretrievable loss of that person.
Ms. Butler shows by means of Freudian theory how gender identity could be elucidated (similarly) as a preservation of a loss attachment, while, at the same time, stressing the notion that we cannot continue to work with an ‘untroubled’ gender concept without (implicitly) adjourning to a heterosexual structure. This recasting of Freudian theory (exposing the unfortunate mutual exclusivity existing between identification and desire) could function as a future modus operandi to cultural theorists looking for ways to be constructively critical of social normativity and its grip on (otherwise) ‘liberated’ theories/politics behind cultural legitimacy. Thus, “the culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.” (119)
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