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	 The Politics of Ontology

      *John Garrison *
      / Independent Scholar/
      JohnSF@gmail.com 

      (c) 2006 John Garrison.
      All rights reserved.

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      Review of:
      Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

   1. Judith Butler's Undoing Gender offers her latest thinking on a
      variety of issues related both to gender and also to the larger
      idea of becoming "undone." In this volume, Butler goes beyond her
      earlier examinations of gender performativity to explore what
      defines humanness. Butler's consideration of that defining process
      offers new insights into issues pertinent to both feminist and
      queer theorists. More importantly, however, the essays in this
      volume have practical implications for social movements; make new
      connections between discourse and knowledge; and offer an
      important re-consideration of the current state of the study of
      philosophy.

   2. The book collects eleven essays, many of which are revised
      versions of papers that have appeared in journals and anthologies
      during the past few years. The diverse contexts from which these
      papers are drawn make for lively and evocative reading. Indeed,
      this volume opens a variety of new lines of inquiry into the
      broader applications of Butler's thinking for both scholars and
      activists. Undoing Gender comes at a time when Butler's work is
      widely read outside of Gender Studies disciplines and is beginning
      to pursue a wider breadth of philosophical investigation. During
      the past ten years, Butler, the Maxine Eliot Professor of
      Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Women's Studies at the
      University of California, Berkeley, has come to be a prolific
      writer and speaker, with a much more visible position within
      academia than at the time she wrote what is perhaps her most
      well-known book, Gender Trouble.

   3. What is exciting about Undoing Gender's central analysis of gender
      is that it directly addresses civil rights issues actively at
      stake within the larger culture. Several essays focus on the
      relationship between an array of social movements--intersex,
      transgender, transsexual, feminism, queer studies--and explore
      their differing positions around notions of sexuality and personal
      identity. In these sections, Butler's analysis yields new insights
      into how sexual difference is politicized and policed. Early in
      the volume, Butler notes that these issues are not simply relevant
      to "the New Gender Politics" (11), but will speak to even larger
      issues, as

          the question of who and what is considered real and true is
          apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as Michel
          Foucault makes plain, a question of power. (27)

      Importantly, Butler's analysis disaggregates the variety of
      movements too often grouped under the broad rubric "queer rights,"
      focusing on the often-overlooked transgender and intersex
      communities. In doing so, Butler demonstrates the degree to which
      these different movements and communities are driven by competing
      priorities and ontological claims. For example, she cites the
      intersex community's opposition to coercive surgery on infants or
      children with hermaphroditic anatomy as a point at which a social
      movement is calling into question generally held ontological
      concepts. That is, this community's opposition to surgery can be
      interpreted as a resistance to sexual dimorphism and offers a
      "critical perspective on the version of 'human' that requires
      ideal morphologies and the constraining of bodily norms" (4). By
      contrast, the transsexual movement seeks to legitimize elective
      surgery to change from one gender to another. Both movements,
      operating from different epistemological frameworks, seek to
      "undo" normative concepts of fixed, binary gender identities
      within our culture.

   4. To some readers, this may sound like familiar territory for
      Butler: seeking to better delineate the terms by which gender is
      defined against the backdrop of cultural production. However, the
      book represents a deeper engagement for Butler with the practical
      politics and current issues in feminist and queer movements today.
      In part, this may be in answer to critics who have expressed
      concern that academic feminists have begun to split into two
      camps: those who are actively involved in practical social
      struggles and those who have retreated into isolated academic
      positions. This latter group has been characterized perhaps most
      famously by Martha Nussbaum in her essay "The Professor of Parody"
      which appeared in The New Republic. Nussbaum suggests that these
      feminist theorists are interested only in the "verbal and symbolic
      politics" of feminism and engage in little discussion around the
      status of women outside of the United States. In that same essay,
      Nussbaum characterizes Butler as the "American feminist [who] has
      shaped these developments more than any other."

   5. Undoing Gender, however, strikes new--and more pragmatic--critical
      ground for Butler by its emphasis on the rules by which the
      /policing of gender/ operates. The book's analysis focuses on the
      specific working functions of various regulatory efforts--from the
      narrowing definition of gender norms found in DSM-IV's Gender
      Identity Disorder diagnosis to the allowable definition of "woman"
      in the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO)
      platform on the status of women. One essay, "Bodily Confessions,"
      focuses on the nature of psychotherapeutic discourse and was
      originally presented as a paper at the 1999 American Psychological
      Division Meetings in San Francisco. The presence of this paper on
      that convening's agenda suggests new opportunities for high theory
      to intersect with practice in the very arenas where legal and
      institutional change can take place.

   6. In her discussion of DSM-IV, Butler illuminates the interplay
      between the rhetoric of the medical institution and personal
      declarations of gender normalcy. For example, it is necessary for
      one to declare oneself as suffering from a diagnosable disorder in
      order to receive insurance reimbursement for a sex-change
      operation and hormonal treatment as a "medically necessary"
      procedure. Thus, a transgendered person must subscribe to the idea
      that their identity is a psychological disease in order to be
      "treated." In this and other cogent examples, Butler makes clear
      the larger operations inherent in the self-reinforcing mechanisms
      by which regulatory systems operate and the profound realness
      those mechanisms provide to the Law. This reality effect is
      perhaps best described by Foucault, for whom

          all [transgression] ends up doing is reinforcing the law in
          its weakness . . . The law is that shadow toward which every
          gesture necessarily advances; it is itself the shadow of the
          advancing gesture. (35)

      Butler goes on to discuss the Vatican's objection to including
      "gender" in the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations
      (NGO) platform on the status of women due to a concern that it was
      a coded word for "homosexuality." In her analysis, Butler agrees
      to some extent with the Vatican's reference to "the possible
      inclusion of lesbian rights as 'anti-human'," as Butler argues
      that to admit "the lesbian into the realm of the universal might
      undo the human" and expand conventional notions of what it means
      to live a normative life (190).

   7. Much of Butler's broader analysis focuses on how one is deemed to
      be an acceptable identity category--human, citizen, normal--and
      the relationship between this phenomena and social justice. She
      begins with the assertion that when a class of citizens' normalcy
      is called into question, the result is often denial of civil
      rights and an increased frequency of violence. In thinking about
      the kind of resulting loss that members of disenfranchised
      communities often face, she looks at how problematizing these
      people's normativity calls into question the degree to which they
      are living a "grievable life" (18). Here, she cites the fact that
      many people and institutions desensitize themselves to the
      catastrophic AIDS deaths in Africa or violence against sexual
      minorities by categorizing the victims of such tragedies as the
      Other. This desensitization operates by undoing a given
      population's right to full personhood. This very "experience of
      becoming undone" (1) is the thread that connects the essays in
      this volume and offers a new entry point to consider international
      human rights issues.

   8. Butler's discussions often turn to language as the point at which
      the issues of identity and social power converge. The essay
      "Bodily Confessions" looks specifically at the nature of discourse
      in both confession and psychoanalysis. Butler interrogates
      Foucault's claim in The History of Sexuality: Volume I that
      psychoanalysis is a natural inheritor of the "pastoral power"
      inherent in confession, and thereby creates an environment
      designed to manifest power and control. Though Foucault later
      recanted this assertion, Butler uses this claim as a means to
      examine the nature of analytic speech and to explore the
      relationship between the words spoken in the therapy environment
      and the need to confess. These discussions touch upon the links
      between language and the body, thereby tying Undoing Gender to
      another of Butler's earlier works, Bodies That Matter. In that
      volume, she offered an in-depth exploration the relationship
      between speech acts and the body.

   9. Throughout the book, Butler raises Derridean questions of
      authorship and the extent to which we lose control of the meaning
      of what we say once it is uttered. Butler shows that declarations
      of identity (whether gendered, racial, or otherwise) inevitably
      belong in part to the public sphere that hears our spoken claims
      and gives them meanings beyond our control. In order to examine
      more closely issues related to discourse, she looks at a range of
      examples from contemporary politics. Both the DSM-IV and Vatican
      examples support Butler's argument that civil rights are directly
      related to whether or not someone is recognized as normal or
      human. And this recognition in the political sphere often occurs
      at the level of discourse. Invoking again the idea of becoming
      undone, Butler argues that

          if the schemes of recognition that are available to us are
          those that "undo" the person by conferring recognition, or
          "undo" the person by withholding recognition, then recognition
          becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially
          produced. (2)

      Undoing an individual's right to full personhood can be achieved
      either by identifying them to be excluded or ignoring them to
      render them invisible.

  10. Undoing Gender's interrogation of the complex relationship between
      exclusion, discrimination, and identity places it squarely among
      the work of other contemporary queer theorists. Didier Eribon's
      recent Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, for example, looks
      at the ways in which queer identities are in part formed by the
      societal discourse that gays adopt in order to define themselves.
      Eribon explores "the power of name-giving, the role of shame" as a
      shaper of personal identity, to which end he focuses his analysis
      on early depictions of gays in literature. He situates
      representations of gay people in Marcel Proust, André Gide, and
      Oscar Wilde in relation to theoretical frameworks presented by
      both Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt in order to shed new light
      on the intermingled evolution of gay identity and social power.
      Butler's book lacks the strong sense of historicity found in
      Eribon's and therefore at times feels less grounded. However,
      Undoing Gender's consideration of social movements does make the
      book feel more relevant. Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires
      offers another useful counterpoint to Undoing Gender. Gopinath
      identifies and analyzes queer female subjectivities within a broad
      array of South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music to
      demonstrate the destabilizing power of these perspectives often
      rendered invisible by the logic of blood, authenticity, and
      patrilineal descent. Impossible Desires goes on to discuss events
      within the larger culture that signify a lack of tolerance for
      sexual difference within both the national and diasporic states of
      India. Gopinath's book reflects the growing number of scholars in
      contemporary queer studies discussing the intersection between
      homophobia, racism, transnationalism, and globalization. Butler's
      book touches only briefly on the intersection of these issues, and
      some readers may find themselves wanting more.

  11. Still, Undoing Gender is a natural companion to both Insult and
      the Making of the Gay Self and Impossible Desires. All three texts
      look at ways in which negative discourse--or the absence of
      discourse--around sexual minorities marginalizes them and
      contributes not only to societal misperceptions, but also to how
      minorities understand themselves.

  12. While Undoing Gender does move beyond Butler's earlier thinking on
      gender and sexuality, it also includes a reconsideration of her
      ideas regarding gender performativity outlined in Gender Trouble.
      In this earlier volume, Butler sought to expose the heterosexism
      present in feminist theory and to explore the extent to which
      gender identities are largely socially constructed from a series
      of gestures, speech acts, and other theatrically produced reality
      effects. In Undoing Gender, she directly answers critics and
      others who have commented on Gender Trouble, responding to their
      concerns and better articulating some of the book's finer points.
      Here, she addresses arguments raised by formalist Lacanians such
      as Joan Copjec, Charles Shepherdson, and Slavoj Zizek, as well as
      critic Carol Anne Tyler and theorist Rosi Braidotti. Tyler, for
      instance, asserts that it will always be different for a woman to
      transgress gender norms than for a man, due to predefined,
      differing positions of social power. In response, Butler states
      her "worry that the frameworks we commit ourselves to because they
      describe patriarchal domination well and may well recommit us to
      seeing that very domination as inevitable or as primary" (213).
      Here, Butler reaffirms the radicalism that makes her philosophical
      work so important and also underscores the necessity for the
      writing of Undoing Gender: the need to destabilize the very
      regulatory functions and frameworks that police culturally
      produced gender identities described in her earlier work.

  13. The final essay in this volume, "Can the 'Other' Philosophy
      Speak?" helps us learn more about Butler's personal history and
      understand how she came to study philosophy, feminism, and gender
      issues. We see her early encounters with Spinoza when in the
      family basement, "hiding out from painful family dynamics" (235).
      We hover alongside her in Paul de Man's classes at Yale as she
      finds herself "compelled and repelled" by the scholar's
      discussions of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (238). Like
      Derrida's The Work of Mourning, these sections of the book examine
      Butler's own lineage of thinkers and texts that have shaped who
      she is. This effort at personal criticism (which also appears, in
      a more limited way, in Eribon's book) follows the recent trend
      among scholars to offer a window into their own experiences and to
      suggest their own relationship to the material they study.
      Butler's choice to include personal criticism here underscores a
      way that academics involved in high theory can more deeply engage
      with readers and connect to the cultural contexts which their
      exegeses examine. For Butler, her personal disclosure naturally
      segues into a discussion of how one seeks out philosophy, and
      whether philosophy can have practical implications for our lives.

  14. Interestingly, Butler invokes this very question of the
      relationship of one's life and influential texts in her recent
      essay eulogizing Derrida's life in the London Review of Books. In
      that essay, Butler recalls sharing a stage with Derrida in 1993
      and asking him "whether he had many debts to pay." Derrida has
      difficulty understanding her, and believes she is asking him about
      his "death," rather than "debts." Butler recalls,

          at this point I could see that there was a link between the
          two . . . but it was not until I read his later work that I
          came to understand how important that link really was.

      The final section of Undoing Gender invokes this same sentiment.
      That is, it feels as if Butler is offering an homage to those
      works, thinkers, and experiences that have profoundly influenced
      her. Readers familiar with her earlier work may feel, as Butler
      describes feeling in the quote above, that such linkages and
      influences become clearer as one reads Undoing Gender in the
      context of Butler's other books and essays.

  15. This same essay contemplates how philosophy, or at least the modes
      of philosophical critique, has begun to appear in English,
      comparative literature, and other academic departments. Butler
      explores how philosophy has unintentionally produced a "spectral
      double of itself" (241) and engendered a broader understanding of
      who can be said to practice philosophy, including
      interdisciplinary thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Cornel West.
      Here Butler also discusses the trend among graduate students and
      young scholars outside traditional philosophy departments to seek
      out thinkers--such as Derrida, Irigaray, and Cixous--to pursue new
      methods of critique falling under the broad name of "theory." This
      essay may both galvanize philosophy departments to consider how to
      re-position themselves as relevant to graduate students today and
      may also encourage more universities to explore adopting
      interdisciplinary programs such as U.C. Berkeley's Rhetoric
      Department on whose faculty Butler sits or Stanford University's
      Modern Thought and Literature program. "Can the 'Other' Philosophy
      Speak?" is the liveliest of the book's essays, the kind that helps
      the reader better define their own position in relation to a
      lineage of thinkers and within the larger scholarly community.

  16. Some critics may argue that, with this book, Butler does not break
      the same radical ground that she did with Gender Trouble. However,
      what is refreshing about Undoing Gender is its frank openness, its
      willingness to introduce new lines of inquiry and leave many
      questions unanswered. Butler herself suggests that "we make no
      decision on what sexual difference is but leave that question
      open, troubling, unresolved, propitious" (192). At this and other
      points, Undoing Gender takes important steps--both for Butler as a
      critic and for queer theory as a discipline--toward new
      opportunities to expand frontiers, make boundaries more porous,
      and build new coalitions between both social movements and schools
      of thought.

      /JohnSF@gmail.com 
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          Works Cited

      Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
      "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993.

      ---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
      London: Routledge 1990.

      ---. "Jacques Derrida." London Review of Books 26.21 (4 Nov.
      2004): 32.

      Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Trans. Pascale-Anne
      Brault. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

      Eribon, Didier. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Trans.
      Michael Lucey. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.

      Foucault, Michel. "Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the
      Outside." Foucault/Blanchot. Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot.
      Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi. New York: Zone, 1990. 7-58.

      Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South
      Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

      Nussbaum, Martha C. "The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of
      Judith Butler." Review. The New Republic 220 (22 Feb. 1999): 37.