ESSHC Conference, Ghent 1316 April 2010 Theme: Theorizing Gender History

CRITICAL THEORY OF GENDER

*zur Kritik des Genderbegriffs* Paper based on a research that was realized within the frame of Binational MA in Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Praxis Institut fr Philosophie, Universitt Stuttgart (Germany, 2008)

Chrysoula (Elia) Ntaousani

MPhil/PhD student at London Consortium:
Birkbeck College (University of London), Architectural Association, TATE, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Science Museum London, United Kingdom

Photo : http://www.csw.ucla.edu/Newsletter/Apr06/Images/ThinkingGenderBulbE.gif , 15.03.2010.

PREFACE
In the late twentieth century, after all, we are ourselves literally embodied writing technologies. That is part of the implosion of gender in sex and language, in biology and syntax, enabled by Western technoscience. Donna J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature . London: Free Association Books, p. 128.

These thoughts were the stimulus for developing the text that follows, in an effort to treat the notions of sex, gender, desire and identity through the controversial points of view emerged among the feminist writings of the 1970s, the historians and psychoanalysts of the 1980s, the post-structuralists of the 1990s and the recent rise of sociobiology. It is all about a field where nature / biology is very often facing culture / socialisation and where dimorphism as well as binary schemes restrain gender and sexual difference from moving into multiplicity or at least to multiple transvariations. While post-stucturalists like J. Butler are passing from gender denaturalization1 to the undoing of gender, brain scientists do speak about a potential underestimation of innate biology at its equation with the anatomical sex; hormones and neurochemicals, constantly changing the brain state, not taken into account. Gender constitutes the key term that is being posed and reposed, thought and rethought, done and undone, belonging to seemingly different planets that I will try to bring here together by searching their overlapping areas which would permit to make ends meet. The paper is thus divided into three parts which refer to a critical vision of gender categories in various discursive domains. Part I treats the introduction of gender during the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s as the concept able to contest the naturalisation of the bipartite sex difference of men and women, male and female, in multiple arenas of struggle. Since gender was proposed in the 1980s as a useful category of historical analysis (Joan W. Scott), its social construction referred rather to the hierarchal and asymmetrical relationships between the sexes. When psychoanalysis enters the game in the late 1980s, the center of interest is actually getting displaced from the relationships of social power to the norms of sexual desire. Despite having passed from the biological (sex difference) to the ontological determinism (desire) through the social constructivism (power), the notion of gender remains trapped within the oppressive Western binarism of culture/nature and male/female, and therefore Part 2 explores the new ways of thinking gender in the 1990s towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion; that is, gender as representation and as subversive identity. Thereinafter, Butlers theory of performativity appears to decisively reinvent gender as a cultural intelligibility of agency, if not to redistribute the terms, extruding the existing discourse to its limits.
1

Butler, Judith (1999b), Preface 1999, in Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York:

Routledge, p. xx.

3
Although this performative notion did succeed not only to disqualify normative analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to release both genders and their social frame of reference from any determinism, Part 3 will show in what extent this very notion of gender (as doing) is apparently today again in crisis. Possible explanations for the impoverishment of gender -compared to sexual difference- and, consequently, for the necessity of its undoing will be inquired. In this sense, a mysterious elsewhere is emerging as a sort of agency that motivates us or establishes our sexuality and whose full meaning we tend to ignore. Last but not least, the innate neurochemical biology of Brizendine will broaden up the cognitive fields and open new perspectives of rethinking gender, the mysterious elsewhere and -why not?- biology itself.

1:

CONSTRUCTING GENDER [d e n a t u r a l i z i n g s e x d i f f e r e n c e]
Gender as Sex difference [politics]
Neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. J. Butler (1999 [1990]), Gender Trouble, p. xviii

The interest in gender issues as well as in the term of gender itself arose out of the writings in the 1960s and 1970s together with the typical post-Second World War feminist movements stance that the patriarchy of Western culture must have been the culprit not only for the sexual division of labour, but also for womens subordinated position in the society, for the mothering treated as their only biological destiny,2 for the problem that has no name of the suburban American housewife in the 1950s3 or for her two-to-one ratio of depression compared with a man. 4 At that time gender showed up in all cognitive fields from the physical sciences to the humanities in order to emphasize precisely a sex difference between women and men, female and male. Hence even the more abstract notion of sex differences turned out to be autorestrictive for the feminist thought of the 1970s, given that the latter remained always well inscribed in the patriarchal discourse and thus the sex difference not only affirmed its existence as difference in man, but it imposed a dichotomistic sex opposition between a universal man and a universal woman, denying consequently the differences emerging among women. 5
2

See Chodorow, Nancy (1978). Excerpts from 'Why Women Mother'. In J. Rendell, B. Penner, I. Borden (eds) Friedan, Betty (1963). Excerpts from 'The Problem that Has No Name'. In J. Rendell, B. Penner and I. Borden (eds) Brizendine, Louann (2007 [2006]). The Female Brain. London: Bantam Press, p. 24. de Lauretis, Teresa (1987). The Technology of Gender. In Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana

(2000), Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction . New York: Routledge, pp. 244-8.
3

(2000), Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction. New York: Routledge, pp. 33-44.
4 5

University Press, p. 1-2.

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Maybe this is why Donna J. Haraway presents the notion of gender as a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sexual difference in multiple arenas of struggle. 6 Or as Joan W. Scott puts it, the word denoted a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as sex or sexual difference. 7 In other words, the American feminists were looking for a term that would help them to introduce a social dimension of distinctions arisen from sex. Social was not necessarily meaning the association of society with culture and subsequently its contradiction to nature; it was mainly all about denoting the socially constructed destinies and denouncing the roles assigned to women and men within the patriarchal hierarchy based on biological characteristics.

Gender as Social construction [history]

Gender was therefore proposed as a useful category of historical analysis (Joan W. Scott), referring to the relationships between the sexes. This notion was supposed to carry no associations like the ones the analytical category of class did, but to be rather neutral, just like the very notion of race was. Yet race had nothing to refer to within the framework of the Western nature/culture distinction in the way gender had as a social category imposed on a sexed body. No wonder therefore gender ended up to be either a synonym or -even worse- a substitute for women, books and articles replacing women with gender in their titles in order to provide scientific neutrality and objectivity on the one hand and to dissociate their content from the political aspect of feminism on the other. 8 (To take things further, this misuse and abuse of gender had the opposite results: gender studies or gender issues today, even if they are not anymore related just to women and whether or not they have a political dimension, they are a priori associated to and identified with a compulsory feministic perspective.) In this sense, the sex-gender system failed to interrogate the patriarchal and colonialist Western discourse and remained thus enclosed within a family of binary pairs, such as nature/culture, raw/cooked, resource/product, animal/human, feminine/masculine, where each time the latter dominates the former and the former subordinates to the latter.9 In other words, gender did not manage to offer the possibility of a new world where the social relations between the sexes would be redesignated; its usage insists that the world of women is part of the world of men, created in and by it. 10 While the effort to remove women from the category of nature and to place them in culture as subjects and not objects of history was coming to a dead end, the notion of gender as a social
6

Haraway, Donna J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Scott, Joan Wallach (Dec. 1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. In The American Historican Ibid, p. 1054-1057. Haraway, Donna (1991), op. cit., p. 133-135. Scott, Joan Wallach (1986), op. cit., p. 1056.

Books, p. 131.
7

Review, vol. 91 (5), p. 1054.

8 9

10

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construction applied on anatomically differentiated bodies -and thus imposed on the raw material of sex (nature)- turned out to be as deterministic as the biology-is-destiny formulation (culture-isdestiny). 11 Indeed Gayle Rubin will denote very explicitly: Every society *+ has a sex/gender system a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be. 12 A case that exemplifies this very concept is the Western argument about motherhood coming from nature and consequently fatherhood from culture. Since mothers make babies biologically and this is well proved, fatherhood must not be inferred within the western binary system of relationships of power. To take the argument further, Haraway simplifies the model by pointing out that in this sense women make babies (and its pair, that man makes himself)13 or according to Aristotle, woman brings forth life, but life comes from man. 14 In the late 1970s, when the notion of gender as a cultural interpretation of sex reveals a certain cultural determinism and ends up to be inefficient, Nancy Chodorow writes the book The reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of Gender, where she criticises the settled western social normativity, according to which it is womans biological destiny to bear and deliver, to nurse and to rear children (Edith Jacobson).
15

Treating thus the reproduction of

mothering as a social and yet normative convention that perpetuates the subordination of women, Chodorow offers a critical reading of womens psychology, by associating their urge to become mothers with the norm of heterosexual desire.

Gender as Subjective identity [psychoanalysis]

But Chodorow is not the only one turning to Freud and Lacan in order to redesignate or even reinvent gender. Since the notion of a social construction inscribed on (already) sexed bodies failed to break the normativity of the patriarchal western discourse, to broaden the cognitive fields and open new perspectives, psychoanalysis was called in the 1980s to do what historical analysis and political science had not managed: to describe the transformation of the biological sexuality of individuals as they are enculturated. 16 Thus the center of interest as far as gender is concerned, was displaced from the relationships of social power to the norms of sexual desire.
11

When feminist theorists claim that gender is the cultural interpretation of sex or that gender is culturally If gender is constructed, could it be

constructed, what is the manner or mechanism of this construction?

constructed differently, or does its constructedness imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing the possibility of agency and transformation? Butler, Judith (1999a [1990]), Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, p. 12.
12

Rubin, Gayle (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the political economy of sex in Rayna R. Reiter (eds), Haraway, Donna (1991), op. cit., p. 135. , in greek, Aristotle. Chodorow, Nancy (1978), op. cit., p. 56. Rubin, Gayle (1975), op. cit., p. 189.

Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 165.

13 14 15 16

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Gender would rather then be conceived as subjective identity (according to Joan Wallach Scott) or as a psychological construction of desire (according to Gayle Rubin)18 and new approaches of the sex-gender system would explode in American psychological literature of the 1980s. The implication of the heterosexual normativity in this new vision of gender is pointed out not only in Chodorows writings concerning motherhood and mothering, but also in essays of feminist authors like Adrienne Rich or Monique Wittig and of anthropologists like Gayle Rubin. Despite following different theoretical paths, all of them underline during the very same decade the centrality of compulsory heterosexuality in the issue of womens oppression. Although psychology is used to provide a scientific objectivity and prestige to this argument, the political perspective emerges again in order to treat the problematic structure of relationships of power settled as chain of hierarchy. Since women, and women only seem responsible for children care in the sexual division of labor, 19 Chodorow accuses the political institution of motherhood for being responsible not only for the reproduction of particular forms of labor power but also for an entire social system of reproduction of masculinity and social inequality. 20 Same way for Adrienne Rich, who suggests that heterosexuality [as well] needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution21 that disempowers women both socially, as it reduces them to a product of social relation of appropriation, naturalised as sex, and individually, as it lets them believe that what makes a woman is a specific relation of appropriation by a man. 22 Women have thus become voluntarily the consumer victims of various treatments, tranquillizers, psychotherapies and other normative judgements in order not to lose their femininity as prescribed in the above argument widely spread in America of the 1950s together with the so-called housewifes syndrome or fatigue. As Redbook was commenting at that time, few women would want to thumb their noses at husbands, children and community and go off on their own. Those who do may be talented individuals, but they rarely are successful women; 23 as if being an individual deprives the woman from her femininity or as if individuals and women are two different species, namely men and women. But if men, and only men, could be individuals, then what about the American suburban housewife claiming that the problem is always being the childrens mommy, or the ministers wife and never being myself?24 She seems also to incorporate and express a difference between being a mother and housewife and being herself. Does this means that she is not a woman but an individual, therefore a man? Alas, she is already a successful woman in terms of mans appropriation: motherhood and marriage made her so; these are traits or attributes that she can assimilate, yet
17 18 19

17

Scott, Joan Wallach (1986), op. cit., p. 1068. Haraway, Donna (1991), op. cit., p. 137. Rich, Adrienne (1993 [1980+), Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. In Henry Abelove, Michle Chodorow, Nancy (1978), op. cit., p. 56. Rich, Adrienne (1993 [1980]), op.cit., p. 232. Haraway, Donna (1991), op. cit., p. 138. Friedan, Betty (1963), op. cit., p. 39. Ibid, p. 41.

Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, p. 231.
20 21 22 23 24

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they do not encompass her whole existence as a human being. The lack of something else that has no name and the denial of the mere equation of her existence to her given role as mother and housewife let the argument collapse as she shows up to be all at the same time an individual and a woman. Nevertheless, the suburban housewife was not capable of seeing the constructedness of this argument that was presented as naturalised as sex and therefore if a woman had a problem in the 1950s and 1960s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself! 25 After all, if being woman in the middle of the twentieth century identified with being a housewife and having kids, then this implies that indeed motherhood and heterosexuality are the two compulsory and normative political institutions that should open the pathway to the happiness or better, that do reveal the root of womens oppression.

2:

PERFORMING GENDER [d e n a t u r a l i z i n g d e s i r e]
Despite having passed from the biological (sexual difference) to the ontological

determinism (psychological construction - desire) through the social constructivism (social construction power), the notion of gender was still remaining trapped within the oppressive Western binarism of culture/nature and male/female, and therefore new ways of thinking gender had to emerge towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion.

Gender as Representation [semiotics]

Indeed in the late 1980s and 1990s, philosophy and cultural theory embark upon taking in their turn the issue further from the historical, sociological and psychoanalytical conceptualization of the position of women as oppressed by male dominance. In this context, Teresa de Lauretis tries to deconstruct the binary pair of man (oppressor, subject, culture) / woman (oppressed, object, nature) by using the semiotics and the theory of representation. The notion of gender as representation, both social and subjective, identifies namely with its own constitution; more precisely, with a representation of a relation that gender itself constructs (or deconstructs) between one entity and other entities. Since Teresa de Lauretis considers gender as both the product and the process of its reproduction, gender semiotic apparatus seems to assign meanings that are constructed (not given, and thus eventually changeable) to the individuals of a certain society the meanings being identity, value, prestige, status in social hierarchy or location in family structures. 26
25 26

Ibid, p. 35. de Lauretis, Teresa (1987), op. cit., p. 3-4.

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However, if these elements are traits that gender attributes to individuals, then identity or social status not only do not incorporate gender or at least coexist with it, but they rather occur from its representation, one that seems to preexist. Is then gender becoming the locus of identity from where individuals features derive or where their constitution is both taking place and getting accomplished? Or else, is then gender supposed to be the creator of the humans social identity as subject (therefore a subject of the subject)? And if so, doesnt then this notion of gender end up being as deterministic as the biology-is-destiny or the culture-is-destiny formulation? Indeed Teresa de Lauretis is stating: Gender has the function (which defines it) of constituting concrete individuals as men and women;
27

she is equating here gender with the

Althusserian notion of ideology, one that has the function of building up determinate individuals as subjects. Despite this parallelism, de Lauretis does not simplemindedly reduce the subject of feminism to the representation of a universal Woman or of an essence (like motherhood, nature, femininity et cetera) inherent in all women nor does she refer to women as real historical beings and specific social subjects. 28 She apprehends instead the subject of feminism as a rather theoretical concept, not very fixed and almost flexible, able to move in and out of the ideology of gender therefore in and out of representation or even of reality, I would say. Nevertheless, neither the removal of gender from reality and its placement in representation nor the theoretical slippage between these two distinct and yet overlapping spheres seems adequate enough to dissociate real-life women from the negative pole of the western dichotomy of man/woman, where the former is mystically and persistently meant to dominate the latter. The argument could potentially offer a new perspective in pointing out the semiotic reasons that place women in this side of the binary pair, but would by no means release them from the negativism of the specific pole. After all, even if it really managed to remove them from the category of the nature and place them in culture or to make their position less negative, the argument of confusion between gender representation and reality would still keep women enclosed within the same framework of binary sets. In order to dismantle this bipolar scheme of man versus woman, Teresa de Lauretis underlines the necessity of overcoming the normative political institution of heterosexuality, namely the scheme of heterosexual desire, just like Chodorow, Rich or Wittig had done, all by denoting that the affirmation of other sexualities (as well) could serve as a getaway to the universalistic notion of gender as sexual difference. 29 For otherwise, even if the notion of gender as social and subjective representation ultimately succeeds in disarticulating this very asymmetry of the duality man/woman and in interrogating the patriarchal and colonialist Western discourse, motherhood and heterosexuality remaining the two compulsory political norms that reveal the root of womens oppression, it still proves no less inefficient and insufficient (than the social or ontological scheme) in deconstructing the overall conceptual binarism - and thus the notion of gender itself.

27 28 29

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 10. Hoofd, Ingrid (1997). Chandra Mohanty and the Technology of Gender. In <http://www.klari.net/ingrid/

articles/femtheo.html>; 15.03.2010.

Gender as Subversive identity [post-structuralism]

While the conception of gender as representation or constitutive (therefore predating) locus of identities and relations fails to tone in with reality and while, subsequently, the effort to get rid of determinism meets a dead end, Judith Butler brings in the early 1990s gender back to the world of the so-called reality by claiming that what we take to be real, what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality call it subversive or call it something else. 30 Unlike the representation and its reproduction, this notion of gender as a subversive identity neither creates (establishes) the individual as if it had the power of an external and almighty subject of history nor precedes essence as if it were the mark of a biological, cultural or social difference, assigning meaning to (and thus determining) the human existence.
31

Moreover, the

conception of gender as identity forecloses the possibility of treating it as an inert attribute that one possesses and thereinafter either expresses or internalises. That is, identity does not pre-exist as a locus from where various traits derive and nor does gender as a constitutive factor of a pregendered entity; they are both simultaneously getting formed and transformed, for as Butler explicitly denotes: it would be wrong to think that the discussion of identity ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that persons only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility. 32 In short words, the subjects are already and ever-gendered. As a matter of fact, it is precisely this very gender intelligibility that is going to open up new horizons and replace the notion of gender identity, given that the latter refers up to this point to just one more conceptual device that fails both to break through the biological, cultural or whatever determinism and to liberate women from its normativity. Despite succeeding in deconstructing the binary pairs subject/object and gender/sex by keeping the articulation of gender simultaneous to the very articulation of ourselves, the notion of gender as subversive identity forecloses a priori its subversion; for already being an identity excludes the possibility of a new identity,33 the alternative transformation or expansion of the existing one not permitting the subversive breakdown of the deterministic norms.

30 31

Butler, Judith (1999b), op. cit., p. xxiii. Existence precedes essence is a key foundational concept of existentialism, based on the idea of exist ence

without essence. In western philosophy, Sartre (who did not believe that God was the creator of the humanity) was arguing that if there is no God to have possibly conceived nature, then -and after having first come to existence- we must build up our own essence out of ourselves and of interaction with our surroundings. Since there is no longer some universal human nature, serious implications of self-responsibility arise over who we become and who we are. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1946). Existentialism is a Humanism in Walter Kaufman (ed) (1987), Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian Publishing Company. Full version of Sartres lecture is available at <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm>; 15.03.2010.
32 33

Butler, Judith 1999 [1990], op. cit., p. 22. Ibid, p. 21.

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Gender as Intelligibility of agency [performativity]

The notion of gender having passed from the biological (sexual difference) to the ontological determinism (psychological construction - desire) through the social constructivism (social construction power), Judith Butler unfolds in the 1990s her theory in her effort not only to disqualify normative analytical categories that lead to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to denaturalize gender34 and thus reinvent it as new performative notion, namely as a cultural intelligibility of agency one that would release both gender and its social frame of reference from any ontological or cultural determinism. As philosophy enters the game, even self-proclaimed evidences or socially natural formulations are now put into question. The formerly linear scheme of causal transition sex-gender-sexual desire, directly related to the cultural construction of a coherent (gender) identity, is such an exemplary case that Butler deconstructs or at least extrudes to its limits with the final intention of dislodgement and broadening. This compulsory order sex - gender -desire, where sex serves as the given ground for the several cultural influences to overlay by forming gender and where desire not only reflects and expresses gender but also gender reflects and expresses desire, 35 predisposes an inner coherence of the one or the other entity, man or woman, restricting thus gender within the rigidity of the historically established binary pair. But the concept of a coherent inner self, achieved (cultural) or innate (biological), is a regulatory fiction that is unnecessary if not inhibitory for feminist projects of producing and affirming [...] agency36 and intelligibility. Indeed, intelligibility in Butlers theory of performativity does not refer to (gender) characteristics that externalise an inert substance of a socalled abiding self. It is important to point out here the difference between externalization and performance. Something is expressed when it preexists, but the one that performs is only at that very time constituted. Therefore intelligible genders are not those expressing a coherent presettled identity within the given man/woman pair but those, which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire37 even outside the binary by extruding its limits with a certain deployment or redistribution of terms. This latter coherence is then constructed rather progressively and empirically through a regulated process of stylized repetition of acts, inscribed on the surface of body; that is, through sexual practices that have the power to destabilize gender (unlike compulsory heterosexuality, which consolidates it as a normative category of analysis38) by producing a univocal continuity, under
34

The dogged effort to denaturalize gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the

normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. Butler, Judith (1999b), op. cit., p. xx.
35 36 37

Butler, Judith 1999 [1990], op. cit., p. 30. Haraway, Donna (1991), op. cit., p. 134. The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical opposition

between feminine and masculine, where these are understood as expressive attributes of male and female. Butler, Judith 1999 [1990], op. cit., p. 23.
38

Butler, Judith (1999b), op. cit., p. xi.

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which the linearity you were born female, become woman and desire men is better enunciated as you desire men because you are woman and you are woman because you were born female. 39 Butler is nevertheless not interested in subverting the existent and introducing a new, reversed but still compulsory, order of gender construction (desire - gender - sex); she rather imports the performative mechanism of her theory with the scope to deconstruct all causalities and consequently, to destabilize gender by releasing it from any binary normativity. The alternative model she offers is not anymore a linear scheme of sequence but only a performative interaction among the three vertices of the triangle sex, gender and desire. 40 Within this context, Butler has no intention to abolish heterosexuality altogether for replacing it with whatever alternative normativity and practice of theorising. The so-called heterosexual matrix is neither the cause nor the norm that reproduces heterosexual attitude as the proper, acceptable or exemplary, form of sexual practice; it is just the given (and arbitrary) regulatory frame, within which performativity is taking place and according to which all constructed forms are designated as intelligible or not, based on the repeated practices and behaviours of agency. As a matter of fact, this very agency is then supposed not only to liberate women from the oppressive norms both of compulsory heterosexuality and of obligatory mothering but also to reoffer a status of social subjectivity to them as well as to other, non-coherent genders that do not fit within the binary pair of woman (female) / man (male), remaining thus excluded from humanity as illegible, illegal or abnormal. That is, the notion of gender is getting once more reshaped and redesignated in order to overcome its binary normativity as ontological construction of desire and, ultimately, to broaden up the fields, including a multiplicity of previously foreclosed genders. Recapitulating the performative vision of things, gender is considered neither as a given attribute that one has nor as a settled, immutable identity that one is; it does not denote a noun that acts but is always a doing itself. And yet, if I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. 41 In this sense, gender is rather understood as an identity tenuously taking shape through time. But because the very notion of continuous alteration leads to the denial of any identity as such, [gender] is better conceived as a transitory cultural intelligibility of agency within the frame of a constituted social temporality;42 one that renders the (already and ever-gendered) self culturally coherent through a regulated process of stylized repetition of acts and practices inscribed on the surface of body and where the body does not refer to a pre-existing locus of agency but rather to a permeable surface formed together with those repeated and repetitive acts of performativity. 43
39

arnelakis, Giorgos (2003), , notes for the discipline Special Ntaousani, Elia (2006), Social temporality of gender and gendered corporealisation of time two parallel analyses

topics of gender and space: identity, diversity, space, thens: N.T.U.A. School of Architectural Engineering, p. 11.
40

of identity as performative transition, in ESREA Conference, University of Thessaly: <http://esrea2006.ece.uth.gr/ downloads/ntaousani.pdf>, p.1-3; 15.03.2010.
41 42 43

Butler, Judith (2004 a), Introduction: Acting in Concert in Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, p. 3. Butler, Judith 1999 [1990], op. cit., p. 179. Ntaousani, Elia (2006), op. cit., p. 1-3.

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3:

UNDOING GENDER [e s t a b l i n g s e x u a l d i f f e r e n c e]
Gender as Doing [criticism]
Despite preserving some sexual duality based on anatomical characteristics,44 Butler

elaborated her theory of performativity in the 1990s by denying the transition or slippage to a subsequent social bipolarity. She upheld instead a gender multiplicity, for as she stated, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. 45 I would moreover point out that, due to the incessant dislodgment, this multiplicity approaches to infinity not only as for the different subjects (there are as many sexes as the individuals, according to Wittig) but even in the case of this same (also mutating) self. 46 Notwithstanding, this free-floating and so expanded, almost ideal, notion of a multiple and performative gender does not seem to serve anymore as a panacea for the deconstruction of all normativities, maybe because such an open theoretical concept obliterates its own meaning as something already conceived by exactly its very permeability and tenuous mutation. Or it may also be so because of a discontinuity between the gender intelligibility of agency as a theoretical tool and the gender as a kind of doing or as a non-stop practice performed in everyday life, namely a discontinuity between language and act. 47 The notion of performative gender as doing was actually supposed to carry no ontological associations like the ones the notion of gender as identity (that is, as social construction or interpretation of sex) did, but to be fairly neutral in its connotations, just like the notion of sexual practice. Yet sexual practice seems to escape the framework of the Western nature/culture, female/male and woman/man binary sets (in a way that gender does not manage to) by not in advance or obligatorily equating to heterosexuality, although the latter remains incontestably the normative sexual practice of the western discourse. No wonder therefore that gender as doing ended up by the turn of the century to be a synonym for homosexuality the way that gender identity substituted women in the 1980s. Articles are in fact replacing queer with gender in their titles in order to provide scientific
44

Despite constituting the given common sense and rule, sexual binarism (masculine or feminine being) is

biologically not the only reality. Let me bring here the cases of hermaphrodites, see for instance J. Eugenides novel Middlesex: Between the two sexes or the research of Dr. David Page in the late 1987 claiming that a good 10% of the population has chromosomal variations that do not fit neatly into the XX-female and XY-male set of categories (Butler 1999a [1990], op. cit., pp. 136-7)!
45 46 47

Ibid., p. 10. Ntaousani, Elia (2006), op. cit., p. 3. We say something, and mean something by what we say, but we also do something with our speech, and what

we do, how we act upon another with our language, is not the same as the meaning we consciously convey. Butler, Judith (2004 b), The end of sexual difference? in Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, p. 199.

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neutrality and objectivity, on the one side, and to dissociate their content from the political aspect of the issue, on the other. (To take things further, this misuse and abuse of gender as doing had the opposite results: gender studies or gender issues today, even if they are not related just to homosexuality and whether or not they have a political dimension, they are a priori rejected for being identified with a queer discourse.) In this sense, despite its success not only to disqualify analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to finally extrude western binarism to its limits and to release both gender and its social frame of reference from any (biological, ontological or cultural) determinism, the very notion of gender (as doing) is apparently, once again, in crisis.

Gender as Sexual Difference [ambiguity]

On one hand, the notion of gender as intelligibility of agency managed to disarticulate the bipolarity of the pair sex (nature) / gender (culture) by introducing desire as a key term in the performative discourse through the stylized repetition of acts even though this does not mean that the signification of the word gender has not evolved as differentiated from the word sex and/or in close relation, if not complementarily, with it. On the other hand, the gender multiplicity that arose from the denial of the causal transition biological duality (sex) to social bipolarity (gender) did not obliterate this former sexual duality. Within this frame of perspective, how can then the term gender appear nowadays as foggy as never before, sometimes even counter-changing position with sex in political discourses? How can it be that today, after so much theorising, so many written books and several more decades of activism, sex difference re-emerges postulating in some way the displacement or even the replacing of gender? How is it, after all, possible that feminism claims to have gender as its object of inquiry, whereas lesbian and gay studies denote sex and sexuality as their primary topic? Judith Butler expresses this ambiguity when giving the example of Vaticans announcement that gender ought to be stricken from the United Nations NGO platform on the status of women, because it either refers directly to a code for homosexuality or offers a way for homosexuality to become its own gender, thus to unsettle the purely binary set of masculine/feminine. Butler accurately then points out: The Vatican seeks to undo gender in an effort to rehabilitate sex, but method-oriented queer theory seeks to undo gender in an effort to foreground sexuality.48 Interestingly indeed, there seems to be a difference between sex and sexuality, although these two terms are often put together or even used one for the other. This separation of sexuality from sex arises from the introduction of sexual practice into the game; one that does not remain constrained within the frame of mere reproductive purposes and, for this reason, is not compulsorily heterosexual. The confusion between gender and sex does not then denote any recursion towards the anatomical differences between the two sexes, whose biological determinism the gender as a social construction was called to denaturalize during the first feminist movement of the 1960s. The
48

Ibid., p. 181-184.

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theoretical slippage rather proceeds towards the liberating multiplicity of different sexual practices that exercise and simultaneously reform desire and which, through a regulated process of stylized repetition, become thus constitutive of performative (and proliferating) genders. This must actually be the third turning point in the history of the gender evolution (if ever there was one such indeed), given that the center of interest concerning this very notion of gender has been displaced throughout the decades from social power to normativity of desire and thereinafter to sexuality where sexual practices are not the same as sexual norms, for as Butler puts it heterosexuality doesnt belong exclusively to heterosexuals.
49

Although in the two first

cases gender was the one supposed to deconstruct both the asymmetrical relationships of power and the compulsory order of heterosexual desire, it is on the contrary sexuality in the last case that through the repetition of sexual practices exceeds, destabilizes and finally displaces gender, according to the theory of performativity. At last, this might be another possible explanation for the impoverishment of gender -compared to sexual difference- and for the necessity of its undoing, besides the already mentioned extreme broadening of its conceptual field (see p. 16).

Undoing Gender [agency]

The notion of gender does not seem to get evacuated only because of its standing for homosexuality, but maybe its extreme sociality and cultural constructedness plays a crucial role as well, whereas the problem that sexual difference poses is precisely a permanent difficulty of determining where the biological, the psychic, the discursive, the social begin and end. 50 In other words, if all we need nowadays is a preferably neutral notion, carrying no ontological associations and being irreducible to terms such as feminism or homosexuality, then gender as a doing extremely negotiable, by no means given and incessantly reconstructed is certainly not the case. Sexual difference gets, on the contrary, rather understood as a border concept neither fully given nor fully constructed but partially both, resisting to the self-obliterating problematic, according to which what is constructed is of necessity prior to construction, even as there appears no access to this prior moment except through construction. 51 If indeed the performatively repeated sexual practice transcends, unsettles and ultimately displaces gender, then sexuality emerges as an improvisation within a discourse of constraints, by both conforming to the norms of (heterosexual) desire and undoing them. Since it is therefore never fully captured or restrained by any regulation, sexuality (or desire) appears as a sort of agency that is albeit outside and beyond oneself, as if one was motivated by an elsewhere whose full meaning and purpose we cannot definitively establish. 52

49 50 51 52

Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 185-186. Ibid. Butler, Judith (2004 a), op. cit., p. 15.

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In this sense, not only ones sexuality does not follow from ones gender, but the opposite is also only partially true. That is, if the sexuality that one temporarily has neither derives from nor constitutes the gender one currently is then both might be together formed by terms that stand outside oneself, in an elsewhere whose full substance permanently escapes by being already constructed thus prior to construction- or tenuously taking shape through time. And yet, in both cases, what is happening to my agency? Is it undermined by this very elsewhere that motivates my sexuality? Or do I preserve the agency of my desire? Is there a discontinuity between sexuality and desire? When I say my sexuality, is it an attribute that I possess? If gender is a doing, then how can I perform it when deprived of my agency from this elsewhere that motivates my sexuality? If, on one hand, gender is a doing and me someone who cannot be without doing, then I am not because (my) gender is undone. Since, one the other hand, gender is a doing and me I have my gender by being one, I am undone by being a gender.

CONCLUSION or The Mysterious Elsewhere

In order not to confuse it with the recursion to a given locus, from where the gendered self deterministically derives and where it is getting formed or accomplished, Judith Butler carefully ascribes the above utterance of a site that motivates us (and that establishes our sexuality) to a sphere beyond ourselves, to a sort of agency that is outside us, namely a sociality that has no author.53 However, the neurobiologist Louann Brizendine gives in 2006 a different alternative for this elsewhere, which is neither fully given nor fully constructed but partially both, by revealing how our innate biology affects our (perception of) reality. And yet, there seems to be a potential underestimation of biological sex here through its mere equation with the anatomical sex, hormones and neurochemicals not being seriously taken into account. Of course, when Brizendine writes that first we have to learn to recognize how the [female] brain is genetically structured and shaped by evolution, biology and culture [because] without that recognition, biology becomes destiny and we will be helpless in the face of it, 54 we can only expect Butler to disagree with her, by accusing both biology alone (sex) and any cultural construction (gender) for becoming destiny, even if their distinction would permit gender to emerge as a deliberate, multiple and limitless interpretation of sex.

53 54

Ibid., p. 15. Brizendine, Louann (2007 [2006]). The Female Brain. London: Bantam Press, p. 29.

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Notwithstanding, Louann Brizendine uses scientific findings to support the idea of a gendered brain state that continuously takes shape through time due to its incessantly changing proportions of hormones along the years. The very notion of continuous transition leads her, just like Butler, to foreclose the notion of a seamless identity and/or of a fixed behavioural expression. In this sense, Brizendine's agency, if there is one to be implied, is cultural more under the form of resistance to the genetically structured and chemically changing brain and less in Butlers way of stylized repetition of acts, where biology is not even an issue. As Brizendine states, a hormone alone does not cause a behaviour; hormones merely raise the likelihood that under certain circumstances a behaviour will occur55 or in other words if youre aware of the fact that a biological brain state is guiding your impulses [hence, our sexuality], you can choose not to act or to act differently than you might feel compelled.56 It may be then that this foggy elsewhere, whose substance, meaning and purpose we ignore, is nothing else but the innate neurobiological chemistry of our brain hence, not the anatomical sex! Within this frame, Brizendine seems to have the answers for all the mystery of this other locus that motivates us. Firstly, the so-called elsewhere, although beyond us, is apparently not outside our body but within our very own brain. Secondly, that innate biology is not already constructed, thus prior to construction, but is tenuously taking shape through time. And last but not least, this very brain chemistry does not deprive us from our own agency neither undermines it. No doubt therefore that the recent rise of socio-biology introduces new challenges in the sex, gender and identity discourse. As neurobiologists like Brizendine would say, the understanding of our innate biology empowers us to better plan the future57 and our societies. Brain chemistry may show up as the new key term for rethinking gender. Or it may be that it is just about time to rethink biology itself.

REFERENCES
BRIZENDINE, Louann (2007 [2006]). The Female Brain. London: Bantam Press
a

BUTLER, Judith (2004 ). Introduction: Acting in Concert. In Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-16. BUTLER, Judith (2004b). The End of Sexual Difference? In Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, pp. 174-203.

55 56 57

Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 207.

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BUTLER, Judith (1999 a [1990]). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. BUTLER, Judith (1999 b). Preface 1999. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, pp. vii-xxvi. CHODOROW, Nancy (1978). Excerpts from 'Why Women Mother'. In J. Rendell, B. Penner, I. Borden (eds) (2000), Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction. New York: Routledge, pp. 244-8. de LAURETIS, Teresa (1987). The Technology of Gender. In Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp.1-30. FRIEDAN, Betty (1963). Excerpts from 'The Problem that Has No Name'. In J. Rendell, B. Penner and I. Borden (eds) (2000), Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction. New York: Routledge, pp. 33-44. HARAWAY, Donna J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. HOOFD, Ingrid (1997). Chandra Mohanty and the Technology of Gender. In: <http://www.klari.net/ingrid/articles/femtheo.html>; 15.03.2010. ARNELAKIS, Giorgos (2003). , notes for the discipline Special topics of gender and space: identity, diversity, space, thens: N.T.U.A. School of Architectural Engineering, Department urban and regional planning & Department architectural space and communication. NTAOUSANI, Elia (2006). Paper: Social temporality of gender and gendered corporealisation of time two parallel analyses of identity as performative transition, ESREA Conference, University of Thessaly. In: <http://esrea2006.ece.uth.gr/downloads/ntaousani.pdf>; 15.03.2010. RICH, Adrienne (1993 *1980+), Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. In Henry Abelove, Michle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 227-254. RUBIN, Gayle (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the political economy of sex in Rayna R. Reiter (eds), Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. SARTRE, Jean-Paul (1946). Existentialism is a Humanism in Walter Kaufman (ed) (1987), Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian Publishing Company. Full version of Sartres lecture is available at <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm>; 15.03.2010. SCOTT, Joan Wallach (Dec. 1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. In The American Historican Review, vol. 91 (5) : 1053-75.