The Queer Turn in Feminism

Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender

Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Catherine Porter

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780823253869, 9780823253852
• eBook ISBN: 9780823253876
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism

More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of gender and queer theories on both sides of the Atlantic. Looking at these theories through lenses that are both "American" and "French, " thus simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, she tries to account for their alleged exhaustion and currency on the two sides of the Atlantic. The book is divided into four parts. In the first, the author examines two specifically "American" features of gender theories since their earliest formulations: on the one hand, an emphasis on the theatricality of gender (from John Money's early characterization of gender as "role playing" to Judith Butler's appropriation of Esther Newton's work on drag queens); on the other, the early adoption of a "queer" perspective on gender issues.In the second part, the author reflects on a shift in the rhetoric concerning sexual minorities and politics that is
prevalent today. Noting a shift from efforts by oppressed or marginalized segments of the population to make themselves "heard" to an emphasis on rendering themselves "visible, " she demonstrates the formative role of the American civil rights movement in this new drive to visibility. The third part deals with the travels back and forth across the Atlantic of "sexual difference, " ever since its elevation to the status of quasi-concept by psychoanalysis. Tracing the "queering" of sexual difference, the author reflects on both the modalities and the effects of this development.The last section addresses the vexing relationship between Western feminism and capitalism. Without trying either to commend or to decry this relationship, the author shows its long-lasting political and cultural effects on current feminist and postfeminist struggles and discourses. To that end, she focuses on one of the intense debates within feminist and postfeminist circles, the controversy over prostitution.

1

PARABASIS (BEFORE THE ACT)

POINTS OF VIEW

“But after all, who is interested, today, in sexual difference, gender roles and hierarchies, or even sexualities, in the United States of America—or, to be more precise, in ‘theoretical America’? In her most recent work, at least the work she has been producing in the United States and for an American public, hasn’t Judith Butler moved away from the divided field of feminist theory and queer theory? Hasn’t she turned toward a more general theorization of the political, or to an attempt to reestablish moral philosophy on a ‘poststructuralist’ basis? Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s last essays addressed the issue of ‘affects’ and ‘feelings’; hadn’t she stopped contributing to the field of queer theory several years before her untimely death in 2009, even if she continued thinking and writing ‘in a queer fashion’ to the end? Didn’t well-known thinkers such as Janet Halley, a queer legal scholar at Harvard, and Andrew Parker, a queer literary critic, announce the end of queer theory as early as 2007, in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly titled After Sex?1 Two years earlier, hadn’t Janet Halley proclaimed the end of feminism—or rather the need to end it—in a book titled Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism? In an article published in 2010, even the historian Joan Scott wondered about the ‘usefulness’ of the ‘concept’ of gender that she had helped develop and promote in the 1980s.2 As for Wendy Brown, a well-known political theorist and (post)feminist, she has been playing Cassandra in the field of gender studies since 1997.

“This is all true, but still, gender studies and gender theory—or rather theories—are now well established in Europe. Long implanted in Northern Europe, they’re now welcomed and recognized in France and Spain. Universities are starting to make room for the questions they open up.3 Publishing houses are creating collections featuring ‘gender’ and/or ‘sexualities.’4 American feminist and postfeminist thinkers are being translated. Judith Butler and Joan Scott, of course, but also Teresa de Lauretis, Donna Haraway, and all their predecessors: Carole Pateman, Carole Gilligan, and many others. And when Judith Butler comes to France, which she has been doing regularly for some time now, she speaks primarily about ‘gender and sexuality,’ after all.

“Let’s think a little, finally, about the paradoxical way a certain Foucault has been received. For if it is true that Foucault conceived his History of Sexuality as a way to put an end to the modern myth of liberation of and through sex, isn’t it also true that his work has played a major role in the emergence of gender and sexuality theory and politics in North America? Didn’t he—in spite of himself—contribute to unleashing ‘amazing revolutions of love’ in the United States, first, and now in Europe?5

“So, all right, in the United States you can say that the theoretical scene of gender studies and queer studies is, for the most part, intro-retrospective. It is situated almost entirely under the sign of ‘after,’ as we see from the countless talks and publications that thematize ‘after-ness’ in various ways: the datedness, the posthumous character, but also the enduring if problematic legacy of women’s studies, gender studies, and their queer posterity. But in France, these questions are quite current. While all definitions are being challenged in North America, efforts to consolidate them are underway in France. And then isn’t the American ‘intro-retrospective’ discourse, as you put it, out of phase with the rest of the world, after all? On most of the continents of the planet, these ‘amazing revolutions of love’ haven’t yet begun.”

So I speculated and split myself in two as I began this book. For ever since I left France for the United States—more precisely, for Ithaca, New York—in 1984, I have been seeing double, and I have kept on doing so since my return to France, to Paris, in 2007. And this double vision functions, in particular, in the realms of gender and sexuality theory and politics.

I should explain that I arrived at Cornell University at a time when what has been called “French thought” was at the height of its ascendancy in the humanities. Now, this “thought,” variously characterized as poststructuralist or postmodernist, was intimately concerned with the question of the feminine and the question of sexual differences, as Alice Jardine, herself an active participant in this history, showed in 1985 in Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity.6 While Jardine used the term “modernity,” as writers in France were doing in the 1970s, for what came to be called “postmodernity” soon afterward, her book sought to bring to light the role of the motifs of “the feminine” or “the woman” (Lacan, Lyotard), “sexual difference” (Lacan again, but even more importantly Derrida, Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva), “becoming-woman” (Deleuze), and “sexuality,” in the constellation that became known as “French thought” in the United States. Jardine thus helped shed light on the intricate interconnections between this “French thought” and what gradually developed in the United States between 1980 and 1990, in contact with that thought, under the name of “gender theory” and then “queer theory.”

Cornell has, in fact, been one of the privileged sites of “French thought” from the mid-1970s on. It was also one of the first American universities (thus one of the first in the world) to welcome a program of study devoted to questions of gender and sexuality, embryonically as a “female studies” program in 1969, then officially as a legitimate field of study and research in a women’s studies program as of 1973. Most of the major players in the fragments of intellectual history I offer in this book also passed through Cornell, as students, faculty members, and/or visiting lecturers.7

And now it is “American thought,” or what is being received under this name, that seems to be playing a central role in the rise of gender studies in France. And even if this so-called American thought is also penetrating French intellectual space in other forms (e.g., cognitive science, cognitivist or analytic philosophy), it is in the area of gender and sexuality and its interdisciplinary crossings with “postcolonial” analyses of “race” and “culture” that American thinkers are receiving particular attention and having a significant impact, which is at once intellectual, “popular” (via the media), and political.

In reality, the questions being raised in the field of gender studies today have constituted one of the main axes of Franco-American dialogue for almost seventy years. Since the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex after the author’s return from America, then in the wake of the American reception of “French thought” in the domain of sexuality and gender, and right up to the recent translation in France of the principal American texts in this field (works that are themselves in many respects “digests” of “French thought”), “French” and “English” have been widely, perhaps predominantly, spoken when “speaking” sex(es), gender(s), and sexuality (sexualities) has been on the agenda.8 What is designated as “gender theory” today is thus in more than one respect a “Franco-American” invention. In thinking about these questions, then, one cannot avoid reflecting on this “politico-cultural axis,”9 and, more generally, on the relation between, on the one hand, a politics and a conception of genders and, on the other hand, the languages and cultures in which or from which this politics and this conception are being developed.

I certainly do not mean to limit the field of reflection to this “cultural axis” alone. The intellectual and political history of approaches to these questions clearly cannot be limited to these two geocultural zones, nor to their relations or intersections under precise historical conditions. I recognize and do not wish to minimize the contributions of other political and cultural continents, in particular those that do not belong to Western history, even though I should like to recall in passing that it was also in the United States, or rather in American universities, that postcolonial theory and postcolonial studies were born.10 I am well aware that in this regard we are going to witness—we are already witnessing—major continental shifts bringing entirely new inflections.

No Western tropism on my part, then. I simply want to make clear, on the margins of this book, the reason for the “double vision” that affects my perspective. I lived through the “French” and Francophone moment in the United States, in the American university context. And now I am living through the “American” moment in France. Imagine my double good fortune and my redoubled astonishment when, after witnessing the fabrication of “French thought” in the United States, I came back to France in time to witness the “reinvention” of gender studies, presumed to have been imported from the United States.11 A participant-observer, as social scientists would say, on both sides in succession and simultaneously, I find myself obliged to practice and to think, in a single movement, both retrospection and anticipation; I find myself caught between “already done” and “barely begun,” between “there, it’s over” and “we’re finally there.” To be sure, the experience is increasingly common today: All border-crossers know this dislocation of periods and places, through a telescoping of heterogeneous space-times, in this era of globalized material and symbolic exchanges, mass teletechnologies, and instantaneous transmission of information. Still, one must try to draw the complex intellectual and political lessons that such an experience imposes.

OBJECT CHOICE

A certain number of books and articles that have recently been published in France lay out a history, or rather elements of a history, of the constitution of the field of gender theory as feminist theory in the United States. For my part, without seeking to substitute an “origins narrative” of my own for the story that is beginning to circulate, and without making any claim whatsoever that my treatment of the questions that interest me will be exhaustive, I am attempting to bring different perspectives to bear and to bring to light other swatches of intellectual and cultural history that are harder to spot from Europe, by virtue of my own hybrid, “dislocated” vantage point. Far from seeking coherence and aiming at synthesis, I shall make a point along the way of noting the aporias, the dissonances, even the productive inconsistencies of the theoretical and political field of gender theory and queer theory as these have been constituted in the United States. Thus the four essays that follow are propelled by—and conceived as—certain questions that I am raising for myself, and that I am putting to gender theory and its queer variant. In particular, I shall observe the theoretical and political behavior of two “odd couples” following the emergence of feminist gender theory in the 1980s: one couple formed by “gender theory” and “performance theory,” the other formed by “gender theory” and “queer theory”; obviously, these two couples are intimately connected.

In chapter 2, I ask myself how and why gender theory in the United States has developed as a theory of “performance,” contributing to the “queering” of feminist thought and practices on the one hand, and the creative and mutually beneficial alliance of contemporary “performance” art with (post)feminist and queer thought on the other hand. By defining gender as an “act,” a word that signifies both action and acting (in the theatrical sense), and by characterizing heterosexuality, understood as a cultural practice, as “an intrinsic comedy,” Judith Butler conceptualizes gender as performance.12 And she is not alone. Now, this conception does not stem solely, perhaps not even principally, as is too often suggested today, from a neo-Foucaldian analytics of power relations. It seems to me to have, in addition, at least two other identifiable though perhaps hard-to-reconcile “sources”: on the one hand, what has been called in the United States the sociology of interaction, which stresses the theatricality of social relations, and which played an important role in the genesis of the notion of “gender” starting in the 1950s and, on the other hand, its “French” contemporary—the Lacanian analytics of desire—which, as we know, gives pride of place to masquerade, inviting us to read “feminine” and “masculine” identity formations as so many “displays” destined to support the play of sexual seduction. We understand, then, why cross-dressing, or “drag,” has been a major object of interest and an anchor point for “American” gender theory and why the figure of the “drag queen” has imposed itself as the icon of a gender theory constituted from the outset as queer, even before being recognized as such.

In chapter 3, I take up the question of the centrality of the notion of performance in another way. Looking at the rhetoric and the politics of “visibility” in the political and theoretical field of “minority” identities and sexualities today, I reflect on a different mode of articulation and mobilization of the notion of “act.” By way of this notion, which precedes and informs the more recent one of performance, several contemporary registers are conceptualized and connected: artistic action (for a certain artistic performance stems at once from “acting” and “acting out”), political action (it is no accident that one of the earliest movements of resistance to homophobia, which engaged in spectacular collective actions against the stigmatization of homosexuals suffering from AIDS, was called “Act Up”), and even sexual experience, since this is essentially envisaged, in a queer perspective, as a shift into enactment or an accomplishment of acts. The stress placed by a certain queer thought on sexual activity and even on the “sex act” itself, as the only pertinent object for “sexuality studies,” aims to evade the questionable, reifying notion of “sexual identity,” even while challenging the normative presuppositions and moral connotations that are usually attached to the description—or even the mere mention—of what is traditionally called sexual “behavior.”

Envisaging here the question of “gender and sexuality performance” from a political perspective, I attempt once again to propose elements of the genealogy of this “call for visibility” that governs, in part, the discourse and the strategy of political struggles in this area. Once again, I stress the role played by the American sociology of interaction in the representation of social relationships; one could, of course, take the opposite tack and claim that this sociology merely formalizes the way in which social relations are thought and experienced in the United States. But I also try to show what the motif and the goal of “visibility” owe to the American civil rights movement, thus to the way in which the question of race has been raised in the United States.

In this sense, like gender theory and its queer avatar, a certain politics of gender(s) and sexualities seems to me to be inflected by the contexts of its original production, even if the differentiated places, modes, and times of its reception can, of course, always pull it or relaunch it in unprecedented directions.

In chapter 4, I start from a reflection on the way(s) in which language and linguistic practices register and precipitate movements of history and continental divides in order to analyze a certain “becoming-queer” of “sexual difference,” a “becoming-queer” that participates in the contemporary “queering” of feminist thought, which interests me in several respects. By following the “travels” of the idiom “sexual difference,”13 thus by stressing, against its partial or presumed reification, the instability of the uses of one of the key terms in thinking about gender and differences of sex from the time people began to take an interest in these questions, I am seeking to bring out the conceptual heterogeneity—in my eyes as irreducible as it is productive—of the theoretical field of gender studies. This semantic instability ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• 1. Parabasis (Before the Act)
• 2. Queens and Queers: The Theater of Gender in “America”
• 3. Paradoxes of Visibility in / and Contemporary Identity Politics
• 4. The Ends of an Idiom, or Sexual Difference in Translation
• 5. Roxana’s Legacy: Feminism and Capitalism in the West
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Series Page