Reviews

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler

nono_mv's review against another edition

3.0

Okay I didn't read the whole things because it's an insane piece of academic writing that's a lot to digest -here are some of the notes I got from Barbora about it:

Basically: Both sex and gender are cultural constructs
Gender is not something that you just are, but something that you become by doing, or re-enacting norms associated with being a woman or a man in our society, that privileges men and heterosexuality, and punishes those who are not ‘doing it right’ (gender non-conforming, queer). “Gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect that very subject it appears to express.” That implies that there is no doer behind the deed, but the subject is constructed by the repetition and reenactment of those acts, norms, and behaviors.

The importance of repetition
“…The action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a re-enactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation.” So, it is not a singular intentional act, but you are doing gender through the act of repetition – it could be words, gestures, behaviors, desires, through which one becomes then socially intelligible in a heterosexual matrix.
o Not voluntary or intentional
o = an overall subjective body is actually based upon a reiteration of norms that rule within a certain discourse. Gender performativity is about a series of effects through the stylized repetition of conforming or gender troubling acts
o Not the same as performance (when one takes a role, acts. idea of a choosing subject and a stable pre-social actor)
o “When norms operate as the normalizing principle in social practice, they usually remain implicit, difficult to read, discernable more clearly, and dramatically in the effects they produce” (Butler 41).

Then it's a lot of very detailed topics but I found it interesting the way that concepts of phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality are talked about. They very idea of cause-effect, origin producing symptoms / expressions… This temporal structure is the violence

And final note: this text and their interpretation of drag was published in 1990, and nowadays, drag seems to be less about gender performance than about creative self-expression; + is much more diverse


Thanks Barbora <3

trouvant's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

At this point, the sedimented and reified field of gender "reality" is understood as one that might be made differently and, indeed, less violently.

A difficult but mind-expanding work that I did not understand completely but that I did enjoy grappling with, and which has spawned a lot more reading along several lines. I'll definitely return to it, hopefully better prepared. I respect Butler's dense, ultra-precise style, but I didn't always like it.

heatherp's review against another edition

Maybe finish later… or try a less academic onw

gemrob's review against another edition

4.0

no wonder people have completely ludicrous opinions on gender theory, this book was unreasonably hard.

Edit: second time around I had a lot more knowledge on poststructuralism and hence a lot more ideological context. Much more enjoyable lol. Amazing book.

kschukar's review against another edition

challenging reflective slow-paced

4.0

mo_mentan's review against another edition

3.0

i know that judith butler's work and especially this book are incredibly important texts for the academic discourse on gender. however, probably for the academic discourse and the academic discourse only.

i have been a leftist activist for several years now. i have read dozens of books on feminism and queer identities, i have discussions about it almost every day. it is my day to day life.

but i didn't understand ANYTHING this book was saying. seriously, i was always of the impression that anglophone academic discourse was so much more accessible than its german counterparts. but this text is seriously about the most inaccessible piece of writing i have ever read. i think i have read texts by kant and understood more. most of the time, i had absolutely no clue what they were talking about.

this doesn't mean this isn't an important, influential text, but it definetely isn't the one that will make gender discourse accessible and found the kind, serious and eye to eye discussion that we need as a society. it pains me to say that it felt pretentious and haughty. i don't feel more knowledgeable now, but less (and not for the right reasons).

gmp's review against another edition

challenging hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

melissammh's review against another edition

hopeful informative inspiring medium-paced

5.0

One of the most important foundations of queer theory. So fun to revisit and reread from the days when Butler blew my mind in college. 

lippe's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective

5.0

gaybf's review against another edition

4.0

1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire
I. "Women as the subject of Feminism"

• Foucault points out that juridical systems of power *produce* the subjects they subsequently come to represent. Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms--that is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control, and even "protection" of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent and retractable operation of choice. But the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures. [...] Juridical power inevitably "produces" what it claims merely to represent; hence, politics must be concerned with this dual function of power: the juridical and the productive.
• The prevailing assumption of the ontological integrity of the subject before the law might be understood as the contemporary trace of the state of nature hypothesis, that foundationalist fable constitutive of the juridical structures of classical liberalism. The performative invocation of a nonhistorical "before" becomes the foundational premise that guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed, and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract. 
• What sense does it make to extend representation to subjects who are constructed through the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject? What relations of domination and exclusion are inadvertently sustained when representation becomes the sole focus of politics? The identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation. Perhaps, paradoxically, "representation" will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of "women" is nowhere presumed. 

II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire

• The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that *man* and *masculine* might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and *woman* and *feminine* a male body as easily as a female one. 
• For Beauvoir, women are the negative of men, the lack against which masculine identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray, that particular dialectic constitutes a system that excludes an entirely different economy of signification. Women are not only represented falsely within the Sartarian frame of signifiying-subject and signified-Other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure of representation as inadequate. 
• This association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom. Beauvoir's analysis implicitly poses the question: Through what act of negation and disavowal does the masclune pose as a disembodied universality and the feminine gets constructed as a disavowed corporeality? The dialectic of master-slave, here fully reformulated within the non-reciprocal terms of gender asymmetry, prefigures what Irigaray will later describe as the masculine signifying economy that includes both the existential subject and its Other. 

IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond 

• The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. That the tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist. It can operate to effect other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist subordination, to name a few. And clearly, listing the varieties of oppression, as I began to do, assumes their discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their convergences within the social field. 
• The insistence in advance of coalitional "unity" as a goal assumes that soldarity, whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action. But what sort of politics demands that kind of advance purchase on unity? Perhaps a coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact. Perhaps also part of what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often torturous process of democratization. The very notion of "dialogue" is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not. The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated. Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal mode that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes "agreement" and "unity" and, indeed, that those are the goals to be sought. 
• An open coalition, then, will affirm identities that are alternatively instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitonal closure. 

V. Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance 

• The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of "identities" cannot "exist"--that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not "follow" from either sex or gender. "Follow" in this context is a political relation of entailment instituted by the cultural laws that establish and regulate the shape and meaning of sexuality. Indeed, precisely because certain kinds of "gender identities" fail to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities from within that domain. Their persistence and proliferation, however, provide critical opportunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of that domain of intelligibility and, hence, to open up within the very terms of that matrix intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender disorder. 
• The various explanatory models offered here suggest the very different ways in which the category of sex is understood depending on how the field of power is articulated (...) Central to each of these views, however, is the notion that sex appears within hegemonic language as a *substance*, as, metaphysically speaking, a self-identical being. This appearance is achieved through a performative twist of language and/or discourse that conceals the fact that "being" a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible. For Irigaray, grammar can never be a true index of gender relations precisely because it supports the substantial model of gender as a binary relation between two positive and representable terms. In Irigaray's view, the substantive grammar of gender, which assumes men and women as well as their attributes of masculine and feminine, is an example of a binary that effectively masks the univocal and hegemonic discourse of the masculine, phallogocentrism. silencing the feminine as a site of subversive multiplicity. For Foucault, the substantive grammar of sex imposes an artificial binary relation between the sexes, as well as an artificial internal coherence within each term of that binary. The binary regulation of sexuality suppresses the subversive multiplicity of a sexuality that disrupts heterosexual, reproductive, and medicojuridical hegemonies. 
• The identification of women with "sex," for Beauvoir as for Wittig, is a conflation of the category of women with the ostensibly sexualized features of their bodies and, hence, a refusal to grant freedom and autonomy to women as it is purportedly enjoyed by men. Thus, the destruction of the category of sex would be the destruction of an attribute, sex, that has, through a misogynist gesture of synechdoche, come to take the place of the person, the self-determining cogito. In other words, only men are "persons," and there is no gender but the feminine: (to paraphrase: The masculine is the general. -Wittig) 
• The internal coherence or unity of either gender, man or woman, thereby requires both a stable and oppositional heterosexuality. The institutional heterosexuality both requires and produces the univocity of each of the gendered terms that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within an oppositional, binary gender system. This conception of gender presupposes not only a causal relation among sex, gender, and desire, but suggests as well that desire reflects or expresses gender and that gender reflects or expresses desire, The metaphysical unity of the three is assumed to be truly known and expressed in a differentiating desire for an oppositional gender--that is, in a form of oppositional heterosexuality. Whether as a naturalistic paradigm which establishes a causal continuity among sex, gender, and desire, or as an authentic-expressive paradigm in which some true self is said to be revealed simultaneously or successively in sex, gender, and desire, here "the old dream of symmetry," as Irigaray as called it, is presupposed, reified, and rationalized. 

VI. Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement 

• While Wittig's humanism clearly presupposes that there is a doer behind the deed, her theory nevertheless delineates the performative construction of gender within the material practices of culture, disputing the temporality of those explanations that would confuse "cause" with "result." In a phrase that suggests the intertextual space that links Wittig with Foucault (and reveals the traces of the Marxist notion of reification in both of their theories), she writes: 
       A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the *mark* imposed by the oppressor; the "myth of woman," plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women. Thus, this mark does not preexist oppression... sex is taken as an "immediate given," a "sensible given," "physical features," belonging to a natural order. But what we belief to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an "imaginary formation." 
  Because this production of "nature" operates in accord with the dictates of compulsory heterosexuality, the emergence of homosexual desire, in her view, transcends the categories of sex: "If desire could liberate itself, it would have nothing to do with the preliminary marking by sexes." 
• In "The Lesbian Body" and elsewhere, however, Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality *per se* and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function. Here the proliferation of pleasures outside the reproductive economy suggests both a specifically feminine form of erotic diffusion, understood as a counterstrategy to the reproductive construction of genitality. 
• But the quarrel seems also to turn on the articulation of a temporal trope of a subversive sexuality that flourishes *prior* to the imposition of a law, *after* its overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge to its authority. Here it seems wise to invoke Foucault who, in claiming that sexuality and power are coextensive, implicitly refutes the postulation of a subversive or emancipatory sexuality which could be free of the law. We can press the argument further by pointing out that "the before" of the law and "the after" are discursively and performatively instituted modes of temporality that are invoked within the terms of a normative framework which asserts the subversion, destabilization, or displacement requires a sexuality that somehow escapes the hegemonic prohibitions on sex. For Foucault, those prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently productive in the sense that "the subject" who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those prohibitions does not have access to a sexuality that is in some sense "outside," "before," or "after" power itself. (more about power) 
• If "identifications," following Jacqueline Rose, can be exposed as phantasmatic, then it must be possible to enact an identification that displays its phantasmatic structure. If there is no radical repudiation of a culturally constructed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to acknowledge and "do" the construction one is invariably in. Are there forms of repetition that do not constitute a simple imitation, reproduction, and hence, consolidation of the law (the anachronistic notion of "male identification" that ought to be discarded from a feminist vocabulary)? What possibilities of gender configurations exist among the various emergent and occasionally convergent matrices of cultural intelligibility that govern gendered life? 
• The "presence" of so-called heterosexual convetions within homosexual contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically gay discourses of sexual difference, as in the case of "butch" and "femme as historical identities of sexual style," cannot be explained as chimerical representations of original heterosexual identities. ANd neither can they be understood as the pernicious insistence of heterosexist constructs within gay sexuality and identity. The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization of gender categories. The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight *not* as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of "the original" ... reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the *idea* of the natural and the original. ... What possibilities of doing gender repeat and displace through hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation the very constructs by which they are mobilized? 
• Clearly this project does not propose to layout within traditional philosophical terms an *ontology* of gender whereby the meaning of *being* a woman or a man is elucidated within the terms of phenomenology. The presumption here is that the "being" of gender is *an effect*, an object of a genealogical investigation that maps out the political parameters of its construction in the mode of ontology. To claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artificiality, where those terms are understood to reside within a binary relation and to suggest that certain cultural configurations of gender take the place of "the real" and consolidate and augment their hegemony through that felicitous self-naturalization. 

(overall explanation!!) 

• The following chapt investigates some aspects of the psychoanalytical structuralist account of sexual difference and the construction of sexuality with respect to its power to contest the regulatory regimes outlined here as well as its role in uncritically reproducing those regimes. The univocity of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and the binary framework for both sex and gender are considered throughout as regulatory fictions that consolidate and naturalize the convergent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist oppression. 
  
  The final chapter considers the very notion of "the body," not as a ready surface awaiting signification, but as a set of boundaries, individual and social, politically signified and maintained. No longer believable as an interior "truth" of dispositions and identity, sex will be shown to be performatively enacted signification (and hence not "to be), one that, released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered meanings. ...the text attempts to think through subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender thru mobilization of subversive confusion and proliferation etc. 

2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix 

• The postulation of the "before" within feminist theory becomes politically problematic when it constrains the future to materialize an idealized notion of the past or when it supports, even inadvertently, the reification of a precultural sphere of the authentic feminine. This recourse to an original or genuine femininity is a nostalgic and parochial ideal that refuses the contemporary demand to formulate an account of gender as complex cultural construction. This ideal tends not only to serve culturally conservative aims, but to constitute an exclusionary practice within feminism, precipitating precisely the kind of fragmentation that the ideal purports to overcome. 
• The binary relation between culture and nature promotes a relationship of hierarchy in which culture freely "imposes" meaning on nature and, hence, renders it into an "Other" to be appropriated to its own limitless uses, safeguarding the ideality of the signifier and the structure of signification on the model of domination. 
• Indeed, if constructed gender is all there is, then there appears to be no "outside," no epistemic anchor in a precultural "before" that might serve as an alternative epistemic point of departure for a critical assessment of existing gender relations. Locating the mechanism whereby sex is transformed into gender is meant to establish not only the constructedness of gender, its unnatural and nonnecessary status, but the cultural universality of oppression in nonbiologistic terms. How is this mechanism formulated? Can it be found or merely imagined? Is the designation of its ostensible universality any less of a reification than the position that grounds universal oppression in biology? 
    Only when the mechanism of gender construction implies the *contingency* of that construction does "constructedness" *per se* prove useful to the political project to enlarge the scope of possible gender configurations. 

I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange 

• For Levi-Strauss, the masculine cultural identity is established through an overt act of differentation between patrilineal clans, where the "difference" in this relation is Hegelian--that is, one which simultaneously distinguishes and binds. But the "difference" established between men and the women who effect the differentation between men and the women who effect the differentation between men eludes the dialectic altogether. In other words, the differentiating moment of social exchange appears to be a social bond between men, a Hegelian unity between masculine terms that are simultaneously specified and individualized. 
• In effect, the relations among patrilineal clans are based in homosocial desire... a repressed and, hence, disparaged sexuality, a relationship between men which is, finally, about the bonds of men, but which takes place through the heterosexual exchange and distribution of women. 

II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Stratgies of Masquerade 

• To ask after the "being" of gender and/or sex in Lacanian terms is to confound the very purpose of Lacan's theory of language. Lacan disputes the primacy given to ontology within the terms of Western metaphysics and insists upon the subordination of the question "What is/has being?" to the prior question "How is 'being' instituted and allocated through the signifying practices of the paternal economy?" The ontological specification determined by a language structured by the paternal law and its mechanisms of differentation. A thing takes on the characterization of "being" and becomes mobilized by that ontological gestyre only within a structure of signification that, as the Symbolic, is itself pre-ontological. 
• For women to "be" the Phallus means, then, to reflect the power of the Phallus, to signify that power, to "embody" the Phallus, to supply the site to which it penetrates, and to signifiy the Phallus through "being" its Other, its absence, its lack, the dialectical confirmation of its identity. By claiming that the Other that lacks the Phallus is the one who *is* the Phallus Lacan clearly suggests that power is wielded by this feminine position of not-having, that the masculine subject who "has" the Phallus requires this Other to confirm and, hence, be the Phallus in its "extended" sense.      This ontological characterization presupposes that the appearance or effect of being is always produced through the structures of signification. 
• Lacan continues this exposition of heterosexual comedy by explaining that this "appearing as being" the Phallus that women are compelled to do is inevitably *masquerade*. The term is significant because it suggests contradictory meanings: on the one hand, if the "being," the ontological specification of the Phallus, is masquerade, then it would appear to reduce all being to a form of appearing, the appearance of being, with the consequence that all gender ontology is reducible to the play of appearances. On the other hand, masquerade suggests that there is a "being" or ontological specification of femininity *prior to* the masquerade, a feminine desire or demand that is masked and capable of disclosure, that, indeed, might promise an eventual disruption and displacement of the phallogocentric signifying economy. 
• Significantly, Lacan locates the discussion of the mask in conjunction with an account of female homosexuality. He claims that "the orientation of feminine homosexuality, as observation shows, follows from a disappointment which reenforces the side of the demand for love." Who is observing and what is being observed are conveniently elided here, but Lacan takes his commentary to be obvious to anyone who cares to look. What one sees through "observation" is the founding disappointment of the female homosexual, where this disappointment recalls the refusals that are dominated/resolved through masequerade. One also "observes" somehow that the female homosexual is subject to a strengthened idealization, a demand for love that is pursued at the expense of desire. 
• The mask is taken on through the process of incorporation which is a way of inscribing and then wearing a melancholic identification in and on the body; in effect, it is the signification of the body in the mold of the Other who has been refused. Dominated through appropriation, every refusal fails, and the refuser becomes part of the very identity of the refused, indeed, becomes the psychic refuse of the refused. The loss of the object is never absolute because it is redistributed within a psychic/corporeal boundary that expands to incorporate that loss. This locates the process of gender incorporation within the wider orbit of melancholy. 
• In any case, Riviere would have us consider that such women sustain masculine identifications not to occupy a position in a sexual exchange, but, rather, to pursue a rivalry that has no sexual object or, at least, that has none that she will name. 
  Riviere's text offers a way to reconsider the questiion: What is masked by masquerade? In a key passage that marks a departure from the restricted analysis demarcated by Jones's classificatory system, she suggests that "masquerade" is more than the characteristic of an "intermediate type," that it is central to all "womanliness": 
  
  The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the "masquerade". My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. 
• Although she fears that her castrating wish might be understood, she denies that here is a contest over a common object of desire without which the masculine identification that she does acknowledge would lack its confirmation and essential sign. Indeed, her account presupposes the primacy of aggression over sexuality, the desire to castrate and take the place of the masculine subject, a desire avowedly rooted in a rivalry, but one which, for her, exhausts itself in the act of displacement. But the question might usefully be asked: What sexual fantasy does this aggression serve, and what sexuality does it authorize? 
• By instituting the Symbolic as invariably phantasmatic, the "invariably" wanders into an "inevitably," generating a description of sexuality in terms that promote cultural stasis as a result. 
• That we cannot know that past from the position of the founded subject is not to say that that past does not reemerge within that subject's speech as *felure*, discontinuity, metonymic slippage. As the truer noumenal reality existed for Kant, the prejuridcal past of *jouissance* is unknowable from within spoken language; that does not mean, however, that this past has no reality. The very inaccessibility of the past, indicated by metonymic slippage in contemporary speech, confirms the original fullness as the ultimate reality. 
• This figuration of the paternal law as the inevitable and unknowable authority before which the sexed subject is bound to fail must be read for the theological impulse that motivates it as well as for the critique of theology that points beyond it. The construction of the law that guarantees failure is symptomatic of a slave morality that disavows the very generative powers it uses to construct the "Law" as a permanent impossibility. What is the power that creates this fiction that reflects inevitable subjection? What are the cultural stakes in keeping power within that self-negating circle, and how might that power be reclaimed from the trappings of prohibitive law that is that power in its dissimulation and self-subjugation? 

III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender 

• In the experience of losing another human being whom one has loved, Freud argues, the ego is said to incorporate that other into the very structure of the ego, taking on attributes of the other and "sustaining" the other through magical acts of imitation. The loss of the other whom one desires and loves is overcome through a specific act of identification that seeks to harbor that other within the very structure of the self: "So by taking flight into the ego, love escapes annihilation". This identification is not simply momentary of occasional, but becomes a new structure of identity; in effect, the other becomes part of the ego through the permanent internalization of the other's attributes. ... "The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up". Later, Freud makes clear that the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego and its "object-choice." 
• Regardless of the boy's repudiation of the mother (do we construe the punishing father as a rival or as an object of desire who forbids himself as such?), the repudiation becomes the founding moment of what Freud calls gender "consolidation." Forfeiting the mother as object of desire, the boy either internalizes the loss through identification with her, or displaces his heterosexual attachment, in which case he fortifies his attachment to his father and thereby "consolidates" his masculinity. As the metaphor of consolidation suggests, there are clearly bits and pieces of masculinity to be found within psychic landscape, dispositions, sexual trends, and aims, but they are diffuse and disorganized, unbounded by the exclusivity of a heterosexual object choice. Indeed, if the boy renounces both aim and object and, therefore, heterosexual cathexis altogether, he internalizes the mother and sets up a feminine superego which dissolves and disorganizes masculinity, consolidating feminine libidinal dispositions in its place. 
• Strictly speaking, the giving up of the object is not a negation of the cathexis, but its internalization and, hence, preservation. 
  What precisely is the topology of the psyche in which the ego and its lost loves reside in perpetual habitation? Clearly, Freud conceptualizes the ego in the perpetual company of the ego ideal which acts as a moral agency of various kinds. The internalized losses of the ego are reestablished as part of this agency of moral scrutiny, the internalization of anger and blame originally felt for the object in its external mode. In the act of internalization, that anger and blame, inevitably heightened by the loss itself, are turned inward and sustained; the ego changes place with the internalized object, thereby investing this internalized externality with moral agency and power. Thus, the ego forfeits its anger and efficacy to the ego ideal which turns against the very ego by which it is sustained; in other words, the ego constructs a way to turn against itself. Indeed, Freud warns of the hypermoral possibilities of this ego ideal, which, taken to its extreme, can motivate suicide.  
• The identifications consequent to melancholia are modes of preserving unresolved object relations, and in the case of same-sexed gender identification, the unresolved object relations are invariably homosexual. Indeed, the stricter and more stable the gender affinity, the less resolved the original loss, so that rigid gender boundaries inevitably work to conceal the loss of an original love that, unacknowledged, fails to be resolved. 
      But clearly not all gender identification is based on the successful implementation of the taboo against homosexuality. If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of that taboo, and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, *to become* that object through the construction of the ego ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity. Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex, but in the production and "dispostion" of sexual desire. 
• In melancholia, the loved object is lost through a variety of means: separation, death, or the breaking of an emotional tie.
• ...the law produces the conceit of the repressed desire in order to rationalize its own self-amplifying strategies, and, rather than exercise a repressive function, the juridical law, here as elsewhere, ought to be reconceived as a discursive practice which is productive or generative--discursive in that it produces the linguistic fiction of repressed desire in order to maintain its own position or a teleological instrument. The desire in question takes on the meaning of "repressed" to the extend that the law constitutes its contextualizing frame; indeed, the law identifies and investigates "repressed desire" as such, circulates the term, and, in effect, carves out the discursive space for the self-conscious and linguistically elaborated experience called "repressed desire." 
• The very entry into the cultural field deflects that desire from its original meaning, with the consequence that desire within culture is, of necessity, a series of displacements. (!)

IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification 

• The alternative perspective on identification that emerges from psychoanalytic theory suggests that multiple and coexisting identifications produce conflicts, convergences, and innovative dissonances within gender configurations which contest the fixity of masculine and feminine placements with respect to the paternal law. In effect, the possibility of multiple identifications (which are not finally reducible to primary or founding identifications that are fixed within masculine and feminine positions) suggests that the Law is not deterministic and that "the" law may not even be singular. 
• Introjection is understood to be the work of mourning, but incorporation, which denotes a *magical* resolution of loss, characterizes melancholy. Whereas introjection founds the possibility of metaphorical signification, incorporation is antimetaphorical precisely because it maintains the loss as radically unameable; in other words, incorporation is not only a failure to name or avow the loss, but erodes the conditions of metaphorical signification itself. 
• When we consider gender identity as a melancholic structure, it makes sense to choose "incorporation" as the manner by which that identification is accomplished. Indeed, according to this scheme above, gender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body and that determines, in effect, the living versus the dead body. As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation *literalizes* the loss *on* or *in* the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear "sex" as its literal truth. The localization and/or prohibition of pleasures and desires in given "erotogenic" zones is precisely the kind of gender-differentiating melancholy that suffuses the body's surface. The loss of the pleasurable object is resolved through the compulsory effects of the gender-differentiating law. 
• What does it mean to sustain a literalizing fantasy? If gender differentiation follows upon the invest taboo and the prior taboo on homosexuality, then "becoming" a gender is a laborious process of becoming *naturalized*, which requires a differentiation of bodily pleasures and parts on the basis of gendered meanings. Pleasures are said to reside in the penis, the vagina, and the breasts or to emanate from them, but such descriptions correspond to a body which has already been constructed or naturalized as gender-specific. In other words, some parts of the body become conceivable foci of pleasure precisely because they correspond to a normative ideal of a gender-specific body. Pleasures are in some sense determined by the melancholic structure of of gender whereby some organs are deadened to pleasure, and others brought to life. Which pleasures shall live and which shall die is often a matter of which serve the legitimating practices of identity formation that take place within the matrix of gender norms. 
      Transexuals often claim a radical discontinuity between sexual pleasures and bodily parts. Very often what is wanted in terms of pleasure requires an imaginary participation in body parts, either appendages or orifices, that one might not actually possess, or, similarly, pleasure may require exaggerated or diminished set of parts. The imaginary status of desire, of course, is not restricted to the transexual identity; the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its *occasion* and its *object*. The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself. (etc) 
• The sexed surface of the body thus emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. (gets more complicated.....page 97)

V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 

• Both Freud and Marcuse identify the productive effects of sublimation, arguing that cultural artifacts and institutions are the effects of sublimated Eros. Although Freud saw the sublimation of sexuality as producing a general "discontent," Marcuse subordinates Eros to Logos in Platonic fashion and saw in the act of sublimation the most satisfying expression of the human spirit. In a radical departure from these theories of sublimation, however, Foucault argues on behalf of a productive law without the postulation of an original desire; the operation of this law is justified and consolidated through the construction of a narrative account of its own genealogy which effectively masks its own immersion in power relations. 
• In this essay, Rubin further maintains that before the transformation of a biological male or female into a gendered man or woman, "each child contains all of the sexual possibilities available to human expression." 
• With the loosening of the compulsory character of heterosexuality and the simultaneous emergence of bisexual and homosexual cultural possibilities for behavior and identity, Rubin envisions the overthrow of gender itself. Inasmuch as gender is the cultural transformation of a biological polysexuality into a culturally mandated heterosexuality and inasmuch as that heterosexuality deploys discrete and hierarchized gender identities to accomplish its aim, then the breakdown of the compulsory character of heterosexuality would imply, for Rubin, the corollary breakdown of gender itself. Whether or not gender can be fully eradicated and in what sense its "breakdown" is culturally imaginable remains intriguing but unclarified implications of her analysis. 
• But what leads (Levi-Strauss) to the conclusion that gender is merely a function of compulsory heterosexuality and that without that compulsory status, the field of bodies would no longer be marked in gendered terms? Clearly, Rubin has already envisioned an alternative sexual world, one which is attributed to a utopian stage in infantile development, a "before" the law which promises to reemerge "after" the demise or dispersal of that law. If we accept the Foucaultian and Derridean criticisms of the viability of knowing or referring to such a "before," how would we revise this narrative of gender acquisition?... Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive? 
• ...then homosexuality emerges as a desire which must be produced in order to remain repressed. In other words, for heterosexuality to remain intact as a distinct social form, it *requires* an intelligible conception of homosexuality and also requires the prohibition of that conception in rendering it culturally unintelligible. 
    Within psychoanalysis, bisexuality and homosexuality are taken to be primarily libidinal dispositions, and heterosexuality is the laborious construction based upon their gradual repression. 
• The theory which presumes bisexuality or homosexuality  as the "before" to culture and then locates that "priority" as the source of a prediscursive subversion, effectively forbids from within the terms of the culture the very subversion that it ambivalently defends and defends against. As I will argue in the case of Kristeva, subversion thus becomes a futile gesture, entertained only in a derealized aesthetic mode which can never be translated into other cultural practices. 
• This full pleasure that haunts desire as that which it can never attain is the irrecoverable memory of pleasure before the law. Lacan is clear that that pleasure before the law is only fantasized, that it recurs in the infinite phantasms of desire. But in what sense is the phatasm, itself forbidden from the literal recovery of an original pleasure, the constitution of a fantasy of "originality" that may or may not correspond to a literal libidinal state? Indeed, to what extent is such a question decidable within the terms of Lacanian theory> A displacement or substitution can only be understood as such in relation to an original, one which in this case can never be recovered or known. 
• Mobilizing the distinction between what is "before" and what is "during" culture is one way to foreclose cultural possibilities from the start. 

3. Subversive Bodily Acts 

I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva 

• Kristeva challenges the Lacanian narrative which assumes cultural meaning requires the repression of that primary relationship to the maternal body. She argues that the "semiotic" is a dimension of language occasioned by that primary maternal body, which not only refutes Lacan's primary premise, but serves as a perpetual source of subversion within the Symbolic. For Kristeva, the semiotic expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic language in which multiple meanings and semantic nonclosure prevail. In effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law. 
• Foucault's framework suggests a way to solve some of the epistemological and political difficulties that follow from Kristeva's view of the female body. We can understand Kristeva's assertion of a "prepaternal causality" as fundamentally inverted. Whereas Kristeva posits a maternal body prior to discourse that exerts its own causal force in the structure of drives, Foucault would doubtless argue that the discursive production of the maternal body as prediscursive is a tactic in the self-amplification and concealment of those specific power relations by which the trope of the maternal body is produced. In these terms, the maternal body would no longer be understood as the hidden ground of all signification, the tacit cause of all culture. It would be understood, rather, as an effect or consequence of a system of sexuality in which the female body is required to assume maternity as the essence of its self and the law of its desire. 
• Foucault explicitly takes a stand against emancipatory or liberationist models of sexuality in "The History of Sexuality" because they subscribe to a juridical model that does not acknowledge the historical production of "sex" as a category, that is, as a mystifying "effect" of power relations. His ostensible problem with feminism seems also to emerge here: Where feminist analysis takes the category of sex and, thus, according to him, the binary restriction on gender, as its point of departure, Foucault understands his own project to be be an inquiry into how the category of "sex" and sexual difference are constructed within discourse as necessary features of bodily identity. ... As Foucault remarks about some humanist efforts at prison reform, the criminal subject who gets emancipated may be even more deeply shackled than the humanist originally thought. To be sexed, for Foucault, is to be subjected to a set of social regulations, to have the law that directs those regulations reside both as the formative principle of one's sex, gender, pleasures, and desires, and as the hermeneutic principle of self-interpretation. The category of sex is thus inevitably regulative, and any analysis which makes that category presuppositional uncritically extends and further legitimates that regulative strategy as a power/knowledge regime. 
• In other words, Foucault invokes a trope of prediscursive libidinal multiplicity that effectively presupposes a sexuality "before the law," indeed, a sexuality waiting for emancipation from the shackles of "sex." On the other hand, Foucault officially insists that sexuality and power are coextensive and that we must not think that by saying yes to sex we say no to power. ... sexuality is always situated within matrices of power. 

(?may be off on placement) II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity 

• But rather than understand h/er anomalous body as the cause of h/er desire, h/er trouble, h/er affairs and confession, we might read this body, here fully textualized, as a sign of an irresolvable ambivalence produced by the juridical discourse on univocal sex. In the place of univocity, we fail to discover the multiplicity, as Foucault would have us do; instead, we confront a fatal ambivalence, produced by the prohibitive law, which for all its effects of happy dispersal nevertheless culminates in Herculine's suicide. 
• Is it the awareness of their likeness that conditions the sexual play of the young women in the convent, or is it, rather, the eroticized presence of the law forbidding homosexuality that produces these transgressive pleasures in the compulsory mode of a confessional? Herculine maintains h/er own discourse of sexual difference even within this ostensibly homosexual context: s/he notes and enjoys h/er difference from the young women s/he desires, and yet this difference is not a simple reproduction of the heterosexual matrix for desire. S/he knows that her position in that exchange is transgressive, that she is a "usurper" of a masculine prerogative, as s/he puts it, and that s/he contests that privilege even as s/he replicates it. 
    The language of usurpation suggests a participation in the very categories from which s/he feels inevitably distanced, suggesting also the denaturalized and fluid possibilities of such categories once they are no longer linked causally or expressively to the presumed fixity of sex. 
• If melancholy invokes self-recrimination, as Freud argues, and if that recrimintation is a kind of negative narcissism (attending to the self, even if only in the mode of berating that self), then Herculine can be understood to be constantly falling into the opposition between negative and positive narcissism, at once avowing h/erself as the most abandoned and neglected creation on earth but also as the one who casts a spell of enchantment on everyone who comes near h/er, indeed, one who is better for all women than any "man." 
• Herculine's sexual disposition is one of ambivalence from the outset, and, as argued earlier, h/er sexuality recapitulates the ambivalent structure of its production, construed in part as the institutional injunction to pursue the love of the various "sisters" and "mothers" of the extended convent family and the absolute prohibition against carrying that love too far. H/er sexuality is not outside the law, but is the ambivalent production of the law, one in which the very notion of *prohibition* spans the psychoanalytic and institutional terrains. H/er confessions, as well as h/er desires, are subjection and defiance at once. In other words, the love prohibited by death or abandonment, or both, is a love that takes prohibition to be its condition and its aim. 
       After submitting to the law, Herculine becomes a juridically sanctioned subject as a "man," and yet the gender category proves less fluid than h/er own references to Ovid's "Metamorphosis" suggest. H/er heteroglossic discourse challenges the viability of the notion of a "person" who might be said to preexist gender or exchange one gender for another. If s/he is not actively condemned by others, s/he condemns h/erself (even calls h/erself a "judge"), revealing that the juridical law in effect is much greater than the empirical law that effects h/er gender conversion. Indeed, Herculine can never embody that law precisely because s/he cannot provide the occasion by which that law naturalizes itself in the symbolic structures of anatomy. In other words, the law is not simply a cultural imposition on an otherwise natural heterogeneity; the law requires conformity to its own notion of "nature" and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the Phallus, though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign. 

Concluding scientific postscript

• Within "The History of Sexuality, Volume I," Foucault appears to locate the quest for identity within the context of juridical forms of power that become fully articulate with the advent of the sexual sciences, including psychoanalysis, toward the end of the nineteenth century. (just liked this summary)
• Because within the framework of reproductive sexuality the male body is usually figured as the active agent, the problem with Page's inquiry is, in a sense, to reconcile the discourse of reproduction with the discourse of masculine activity, two discourses that usually work together culturally, but in this instance have come apart. Interesting, then, is Page's willingness to settle on the active DNA sequence as the last word, in effect giving the principle of masculine activity priority over the discourse of reproduction. 
  This priority, however, would constitute only an appearance, according to the theory of Monique Wittig. The category of sex belongs to a system of compulsory heterosexuality that clearly operates through a system of compulsory sexual reproduction. In Wittig's view, to which we now turn, "masculine" and "feminine," "male" and "female" exist *only* within the heterosexual matrix; indeed, they are the naturalized terms that keep that matrix concealed and, hence, protected from a radical critique. 

III. Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex 

• But what sort of echo and re-presentation of Beauvoir does Monique Wittig offer? Two of her claims both recall Beauvoir and set Wittig apart from her: one, that the category of sex is neither invariant nor natural, but is a specifically political use of the catwgory of nature that serves the purposes of reproductive sexuality. In other words, there is no reason to divide up human bodies into male and female sexes except that such division suits the economic needs of heterosexuality and lends a naturalistic gloss to the institution of heterosexuality. Hence, for Wittig, there is no distinction between sex and gender; the category of "sex" is itself a *gendered* category, fully politically invested, naturalized but not natural. The second rather counter-intuitive claim that Wittig makes is the following: a lesbian is not a woman. A woman, she argues, only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation to a man; that relation, she argues, is heterosexuality. A lesbian, she claims, in refusing heterosexuality, is no longer defined in terms of that oppositional relation. Indeed, a lesbian, she maintains, transcends the binary opposition between woman and man; a lesbian is neither a woman nor a man. But further, a lesbian has no sexl she is beyond the categories of sex. Through the lesbian refusal of those categories, the lesbian exposes (pronouns are a problem here) the contingent cultural constitution of those categories and the tacit yet abiding presumption of the heterosexual matrix. Hence, for Wittig, we might say, one is not born female, one *becomes female*; but even more radically, one can, if one chooses, become neither female nor male, woman nor man. Indeed, the lesbian appears to be a third gender or, as I shall show, a category that radically problematizes both sex and gender as stable political categories of description. 
• Is there a "physical" body prior to the perceptually perceived body? An impossible question to decide. Not only is the gathering of attributes under the category of sex suspect, but so is the very discrimination of the "features" themselves. That penis, vagina, breasts, and so forth, are *named* sexual parts is both a restriction of the erogenous body to those parts and a fragmentation of the body as a whole. Indeed, the "unity" imposed upon the body by the category of sex is a "disunity," a fragmentation and compartmentalization, and a reduction of erotogeneity. No wonder, then, that Wittig textually enacts the "overthrow" of the category of sex through a destruction and fragmentation of the sexed body in "The Lesbian Body." As "sex" fragments the body, so the lesbian overthrow of "sex" targets as models of domination those sexually differentiated norms of bodily integrity that dictate what "unifies" and renders coherent the body as a sexed body. In her theory and fiction, Wittig shows that the "integrity" and "unity" of the body, often thought to be positive ideals, serve the purposes of fragmentation, restriction, and domination. 
• The "naming" of sex is an act of domination and compulsion, an institutionalized performative that both creates and legislates social reality by requiring the discursive/perceptual construction of bodies in accord with principles of sexual difference. Hence, Wittig concludes, "we are compelled in our bodies and our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us... 'men' and 'women' are political categories, and not natural facts." 
• Discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression--that is, take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility and unintelligibility. (!!!!!!!!!!!!) 
• The power Wittig accords to this "system" of language is enormous. Concepts, categories, and abstractions, she argues, can effect a physical and material violence against the bodies they claim to organize and interpret: "There is nothing abstract about the power that sciences and theories have to act materially and actually upon our bodies and minds, even if the discourse that produces it is abstract. It is one of the forms of domination, its very expression, as Marx said. I would say, rather, one of its exercises. All of the oppressed know this power and have had to deal with it." The power of language to work on bodies is both the cause of sexual oppression and the way beyond that oppression. Language works neither magically nor inexprably: "there is a plasticity of the real to language: language has a plastic action upon the real."
• These asymmetrical positions cannot be understood to follow from the "nature" of men or women, for, as Beauvoir established, no such "nature" exists: "One must understand that men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics." 
• Significantly, her novels (Aristophanes?) follow a narrative strategy of disintegration, suggesting that the binary formulation of sex needs to fragment and proliferate to the point where the binary itself is revealed as contingent. The free play of attributes or "physical features" is never an absolute destruction, for the ontological field distorted by gender is one of continuous plenitude. 
• Literary works, however, maintain a privileged access to this primary field of ontological abundance. The split between form and content corresponds to the artificial philosophical distinction between abstract, universal thought and concrete, material reality. (p162)
• My own conviction is that the radical disjunction posited by Wittig between heterosexuality and homosexuality is simply not true, that there are structures of psychic homosexuality within heterosexual relations, and structures of psychic heterosexuality within gay and lesbian sexuality and relationships. Further, there are other power/discourse centers that construct and structure both gay and straight sexuality; heterosexuality is not the only compulsory display of power that informs sexuality. 
• But here we might ask: what is left when the body rendered coherent through the category of sex is *dis*aggregated, rendered chaotic? Can this body be re-membered, be put back together again? Are there possibilities of agency that do not require the coherent reassembling of this construct? 
• Can one understand lesbian sexuality not only as a contestation of the category of "sex," of "women," of "natural bodies," but also of "lesbian"? 
• Lesbianism that defines itself in radical exclusion from heterosexuality deprives itself of the capacity (to?) resignify the very heterosexual constructs by which it is partially and inevitably constituted. As a result, that lesbian strategy would consolidate compulsory heterosexuality in its oppressive forms.  
      The more insidious and effective strategy it seems is a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves, not merely to contest "sex," but to articulate the convergence of multiple sexual discourses at the site of "identity" in order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic. 

IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions 

• There are many occasions in both Sartre's and Beauvoir's work where "the body" is figured as a mute facticity, anticipating some meaning that can be attributed only by a transcendent consciousness, understood in Cartesian terms as radically immaterial. But what establishes this dualism for us? What separates off "the body" as indifferent to signification, and signification itself as the act of a radically disembodied consciousness or, rather, the act that radically disembodies that consciousness? To what extend is that Cartesian dualism presupposed in phenomenology adapted to the structuralist frame in which mind/body is re-described as culture/nature? With respect to gender discourse, to what extent do these problematic dualisms still operate within the very descriptions that are supposed to lead us out of that binarism and its implicit hierarchy? 
• As "a volume in perpetual disintegration," the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history. And history is the creation of values and meanings by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body. This corporeal destruction is necessary to produce the speaking subject and its significations. This is a body, described through the language of surface and force, weakened through a "single drama" of domination, inscription, and creation. This is not the *modus vivendi* of one kind of history rather than another, but is, for Foucault, "history" in its essential and repressive gesture. 
• (Iris) Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an "expulsion" followed by a "repulsion" that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation. (inner/outer, etc)
• The critical question is not *how* did that identity become *internalized*? as if the internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? 

From interiority to gender performatives

• According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this *on the surface* of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are *performative* in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are *fabrications* manufactured and sustrained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the integrity of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. If the "cause" of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the "self" of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological "core" precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity. 
• I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity. (more on drag p 186)
• The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities. Within feminist theory, such parodic identities have been understood to be either degrading to women, in the case of drag and crossdressing, or an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the practice of heterosexuality, especially in the case of butch/femme lesbian identities. But the relation between the "imitation" and the "original" is, I think, more complicated than that critique generally allows. Moreover, it gives us a clue to the way in which the relationship between primary identification--that is, the original meanings accorded to gender--and subsequent gender experience might be reframed. 
• (p 190, re: Wittig) The notion of a "project," however, suggests the originating force of a radical will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term *strategy* better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what "humanizes" individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right. Because there is neither an "essence" that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain the discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions--and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction "compels" our belief in its necessity and naturalness. 
• Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a *stylized repetition of acts.* ... This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted *social temporality*. (191)
• If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal. The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. (!!!!!!!!!) 

Conclusion: From Parody to Politics 

• The theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariable close with an embarrassed "etc." Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated "etc." that so often occurs at the end of such lines? This is a sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself. It is the *supplement*, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all. This illimitable *et cetera*, however, offers itself as a new departure for feminist political theorizing. 
• The language of appropriation, instrumentality, and distanciation germane to the epistemological mode also belong to a strategy of domination that pits the "I" against the "Other" and, once that separation is effected, creates an artificial set of questions about the knowability and recover-ability of that "Other." 
• ...the very injunction to be a given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother, to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit worker, in sum, to signify a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a variety of different demands all at once. The coexistence of convergence of such discursive injunctions produces the possibility of a complex reconfiguration and redeployment; it is not a transcendental subject who enables action in the midst of such convergence. There is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains "integrity" prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very "taking up" is enabled by the tool lying there. (IF only I had read that in high school!!!!!!)
• Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible. The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize. The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them. ***************************
• There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics, for gender ontologies always operate within established political contexts as normative injunctions, determining what qualifies as inteligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality, setting the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility. Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground.