Judith Butler and Political Theory

Troubling Politics

Samuel A Chambers, Terrell Carver, Samuel Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415383660
• eBook ISBN: 9781135989606
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

Over the past twenty-five years the work of Judith Butler has had an extraordinary impact on numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary projects across the humanities and social sciences. This original study is the first to take a thematic approach to Butler as a political thinker. Starting with an explanation of her terms of analysis, Judith Butler and Political Theory develops Butler's theory of the political through an exploration of her politics of troubling given categories and approaches. By developing concepts such as normative violence and subversion and by elaborating her critique of heteronormativity, this book moves deftly between Butler's earliest and most famous writings on gender and her more recent interventions in post-9/11 politics.

This book, along with its companion volume, Judith Butler's Precarious Politics, marks an intellectual event for political theory, with major implications for feminism, women's studies, gender studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer theory and anyone with a critical interest in contemporary American 'great power' politics.

Part I
Terms of political analysis

1
Power/sex/gender

Gender is not the obvious place for a political theorist to start, even a feminist one. It is also not obvious that Butler set out in the first place to be a political theorist or even a feminist in some easily recognisable way. Nor did she start with gender as her main category. As Butler says in her preface (1999) to the anniversary edition of Gender Trouble (originally published in 1990), she ‘understood herself to be in an embattled and oppositional relation to certain forms of feminism’, although she also understood her text to have been ‘part of feminism itself’ (Butler 1999:vii). Understandably and informatively, Butler imbues the anniversary preface (1999) with her concerns, concepts and categories at that time, and she looks back at her 1990 text in that light. For our purposes here it is really more useful to take the 1990 text without this later framing, and to examine quite carefully what Butler says there, and in reverse order of expectations—thus Power/Sex/ Gender. From our perspective what makes Butler a political theorist (perhaps malgré lui—intentionality is not an issue here) is precisely her philosophical focus on power, to which sex and gender are adjuncts theoretically and of which they are results in practice.

Political theory, gender and ‘Divine’

Butler is in fact an unusually well-focused political theorist with respect to power, because she frames other concepts in power-terms at the outset, rather than working in the opposite direction, as so many others—political theorists, social theorists, feminist and gender theorists, etc.—would generally do. That is, we would ‘know’ what gender is, ‘what’ it refers to, and we would then look for power-relations and effects of this ‘given’. A term such as gender would be a readily available descriptive universal, an analytical category (with a history, of course) that could be ‘applied’ (with suitable adaptations) in political studies. The how, when and whether of power-relations and effects would follow on, much as Greek subjects formed a polis or as generic humans contract to legitimate sovereignty—two familiar narratives with which political theorists occupy themselves. In other words, human subjects would be assumed to have bodies and subjectivities, and would be assumed to ‘have’ gender in some way to be dealt with in relation to politics.

Obviously Butler was not ‘doing’ political theory in the usual way when she launched into Gender Trouble; nor was she following an easy pathway in feminist philosophy, as she herself notes in her original commentary on her title. In her original preface of 1990 she explains that she set out to ‘trouble’ gender, whereas most readers of the title Gender Trouble (then and now) would probably assume that she was referring to some conceptual and practical problems already troubling it which she could then fix (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxviii). Troubling Gender would have been a more accurate title in her own terms but publishers and readers do not respond so positively to this turn of the tables. They are more amenable to overtly positive and upbeat messages about finding something in trouble and putting matters to rights.

As we have already shown in some detail in the Introduction, Butler associates trouble not merely with gender, as in the title, but with herself in an autobiographical sense—linking her current motivations with childhood experiences, subtly re-setting these into contemporary philosophical terms, and foregrounding the concept of power. While Butler’s opening trope of herself as ‘bad girl’, causing trouble and getting into trouble, may seem merely amusing, it aligns almost subliminally with a larger and more disturbing issue, namely her relationship with feminism as a movement. While she makes this explicit in the 10th-anniversary preface, she puts the argument subtly in the earlier text. There, Butler casts herself as feminism’s bad girl, suggesting that trouble ‘need not carry such a negative valence’ (i.e. she’s right to cause trouble) and effectively putting feminism in the role of a strict and controlling parent. Having suggested that current ‘feminist debates over the meanings of gender’ were driven by a desire to remedy the ‘indeterminacy of gender’, i.e. to stabilise the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’, Butler then notes that those categories are only ‘untroubling’ when ‘they conform to a heterosexual matrix’, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and ‘phallogocentrism’—concepts with a clearly negative political valence for Butler (1999 [1990]:xxvii–xxviii). In other words, for Butler, feminism’s commitment to ‘woman’ and ‘women’ was itself imbued with the man/woman naturalising logic of gender and caught up in a regime of heterosexual privilege.

From that perspective any human identity as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ already sets ‘a common ground’ of constraint (as odd an idea as this seems), and in particular it constrains anyone who refuses heterosexuality (e.g. in her phrase ‘gay and lesbian cultures’). In short, the ‘foundational categories of identity—the binary of sex, gender, and the body’—make trouble for some people, not least Butler herself, and she presents this as a central political problem, not an occasion for tolerance, sympathy or therapy within a liberal framework (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxviii–xxix). This is why feminism, as a self-avowed liberating movement of theory and practice, figures in Butler’s original preface as something of a bad parent: ‘The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble’ (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxvii). She finds this troubling, and remains determined to trouble it, i.e. to disrupt it. Butler calls the idea of ‘female trouble’—the notion of a particular female problem or affliction—entirely laughable, and yet, echoing other feminists, she calls for ‘laughter in the face of serious categories’ (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxviii). Here, Butler invokes one strand of feminism against another. She poses the ‘playful’ feminism supported by her childhood trope against those feminists who are troubled by the ‘indeterminacy of gender’ and who then seek to secure feminism by securing ‘woman’—thereby securing gender and gender oppression. From Butler’s perspective, this is all too serious (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxvii, xxix).

While engaging in feminist debates within the movement was not particularly controversial (though in terms of strategy and tactics it was usual, of course, for sparks to fly), Butler’s next move assuredly was. If she had merely complained as a lesbian or on behalf of lesbians that the movement was complicit with heterosexual privilege and concomitant homophobia, there would have been relatively little fuss, and no great troubling of feminism. There have been numerous strongly worded and theoretically grounded lesbian critiques of mainstream feminism, both before and after Butler. At the same time, however, lesbian feminism is generally taken to be a part of feminism, just as lesbians are generally understood to be women. Mounting a lesbian critique would not therefore have made Butler’s work especially radical, or troubling.

However, Butler’s opening shot is to write at some length about ‘Divine’—a female impersonator both ‘in person’ and in an underground camp film—as an important instance of feminist ‘laughter in the face of serious categories’. As her hook, Butler uses the John Waters film that features Divine, Female Trouble, which might even be the model for Butler’s title. And she also mentions the rather more famous cult classic by Waters, Hair Spray—where Divine plays both the mother of the lead character and the antagonistic male police chief—perhaps to make sure we get the point (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxviii). Few feminists would have found the move Butler makes here particularly funny, and only with the subsequent and consequent developments in gender studies and queer theory has the scandal died down. With this step, Butler troubles sex, gender and the body all at once from what is purported, via laughter, to be a feminist frame of reference. What kind of woman was this? The question applies to both Butler and Divine.

The history of enquiring ‘What is woman?’ is an old one in feminism; arguably it is what feminism is all about, or at least it is a central and continuing point of debate (Squires and Kemp 1997). Presumably what sparked these debates were exclusionary practices and definitions which ostensibly defined ‘woman’ as different from, and generally inferior to, ‘man’ (notwithstanding other exclusions and gradations of hierarchy within those categories). Feminist answers, or indeed answers that became feminist, varied, of course, but they did so along fairly identifiable lines, e.g. ‘someone who can do all, or most, of what men can do, and other things they can’t’, or ‘someone different from, and indeed superior to, men or most men in terms of virtue’. The latter claims generally related to psycho-biological arguments, particularly but not exclusively concerning motherhood (Elshtain 1987). It would seem then that men made a problem for themselves, and even made themselves a problem, when they defined and devalued ‘woman’. Consequently, women made feminism when they sought to redefine and revalue ‘woman’ in various kinds of theory and practice. Butler undercuts profoundly this entire line of argument, by suggesting that, however this kind of feminism proceeds, it is inevitably a search for stability in gender relations. For Butler, this search for stability entails the heterosexual matrix, compulsory heterosexuality and plenty of trouble for those who find those identities, and that form of life, deeply and personally troubling—if not utterly unlivable (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxviii–xxix).

In Chapters 6 and 7 we address in detail Butler’s most-discussed and perhaps most troubling concept—the heterosexual matrix. Here, however, we focus on the crucial concept ‘naturalisation’, which gets rather less explicit attention. Butler gets to this concept by invoking Foucault’s account of ‘juridical notions of power’ that appear to regulate in negative terms, e.g. through prohibition, regulation, control, ‘protection’. Although ‘juridical systems of power’ are founded on ‘the contingent and retractable operation of choice’, they actually ‘produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent’ (Butler 1999 [1990]:5). As Butler explains, this account differs from the usual or commonsensical understanding of power precisely because power of this kind works through a process which conceals its own workings, i.e. the subject-producing practices that are both exclusionary and legitimating ‘do not “show” once the juridical structure of politics has been established’ (Butler 1999 [1990]:5).¹ Political analysis, Butler argues, then takes these ‘juridical structures’ as a ‘foundation’ for the subject-producing political processes themselves (Butler 1999 [1990]:5). The ‘foundation’ metaphor, of course, implies solidity, stability and security in reasoning or argumentation (see Seery 1999), and to that mix Butler adds a concept of ‘naturalisation’. Naturalisation describes the way in which subject-construction is concealed, and references the apparently non-malleable, pre-political character of this subject, which can therefore be taken as foundational. These threads are drawn together as and when Butler invokes the classic ‘foundationalist fable’ of political theory in its characteristically modern guise: ‘the state of nature hypothesis’, which she says is ‘constitutive of the juridical structures of classical liberalism’ (Butler 1999 [1990]:5).

Butler’s argument is generally and rightly read with respect to the constitution of ‘woman’ as a gendered subject. Further, this gendered subject is produced through certain political operations, operations that Butler repeatedly invokes but, at this point, does not extensively illustrate. However, Butler actually casts her argument in very general terms about ‘the subject’ as such. That is, she outlines what it is to be any kind of human person with a subjectivity that is not merely and uniquely individual but also socially intelligible, categorial and ultimately legal under the prevailing juridical system—a system produced and maintained politically. She contends that our ‘prevailing assumption of the ontological integrity of the subject’ is a ‘contemporary trace of the state of nature hypothesis’, which she sees as ‘the fictive foundation’ of the law’s claim to legitimacy. In Butler’s composite recollection of the contractarian literature, the ‘state of nature’ presents us with a human subject ‘who stands “before” the law’ in some fictive or fabulist temporal sense (Butler 1999 [1990]:4–5). For Butler it is that invocation of a temporal ‘before’ in classical liberal theories of sovereignty and legitimacy that links the foundational metaphor to nature via a state of nature. What is said to have been ‘already’ in existence in this state of nature (namely the human subject) is thus naturalised through the activity of making this claim convincingly. That is, the subject is ontologically secured in a supposedly pre-political and even pre-social realm. In the liberal fable, these subjects create the social and institute the political ‘freely’ by means of consent. With that ‘foundationalist fiction’ the political operations that continue to secure legitimacy and the juridical systems that continue to constitute the human subject (in diverse categorial ways) are effectively concealed. As Butler says, these operations seem merely to represent what had already been constituted elsewhere, whereas on Butler’s argument political and juridical power continually produce what they merely claim to represent (Butler 1999 [1990]:4–6). While political theorists might want to take Butler to task on the finer points of her presentation of the social contract, even as a myth, and also on its links to classical liberalism (again, a concept merely invoked but not discussed), the form and content of her discussion—while polemically cast as trouble for feminism—have an impeccable origin in political theory and have broad implications in philosophy.

The ‘natural’ and ‘the Divine’

Following this tactic of argumentative generality, Butler pursues lines of least conciliation in her troubling of contemporary feminism. In her original preface to Gender Trouble Butler does not even bother to engage with lesbian identity and liberal tolerance within feminism, never mind society at large. There had already been some questioning and engagement, indeed troubling, of ‘woman’ as a category by lesbian feminists, especially by Wittig (1973) in her famous claim that lesbians are not women, and therefore stand categorially and experientially outside ‘the straight mind’. Butler went a great deal further even than this withdrawal from the category ‘woman’. Leaving ‘woman’ on one side disturbs gender perhaps, and certainly troubles feminists, but it did not trouble the world on the scale that Butler apparently had in mind. Focusing on power, she argues that it cannot be properly understood and analysed as an inter-relation between human subjects. This was of course the classic mode of analysis in political theory as well as in commonsensical accounts. Rather, following Foucault, Butler describes power as that which produces human subjects (as subjectivities), defines identities (such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’) and sets up categories (like ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’). Accepting all that as ‘given’—subjects, identities, categories—leaves little scope for real trouble, according to Butler. If the power structures against which one rebels and by which one gets reprimanded are already presumed to be in place, then the battle turns out to be either long over or inconceivable in the first place (Butler 1999 [1990]:xxvii– xxix). What for Butler could possibly challenge ‘the order of things’?

Perhaps choosing Divine as the challenge relates to the name, as well as the character, given the cosmic scale of Butler’s enterprise. And it is worth asking at this point precisely what her enterprise is. Certainly Butler seeks much more than justice and respect for gay people, although she has clear concerns with homophobia, intolerance and bigotry in this regard. Perhaps Butler demands the destabilisation o...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: troubling politics
• Part I Terms of political analysis
• Part II Theories of the political
• Part III The politics of heteronormativity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index