On historical bodies and the self
Historical philosophy, philosophical history
Universiteit van Amsterdam 22-04-2019 Masterthesis Master philosophy L. A. Heiligers
Supervisor: Jacques Bos Second reader: Michiel Leezenberg
Table of contents
Introduction 1
1. Michel Foucault, self, bodies and history 6 2. Judith Butler, body, self and history 19
3. Subject and body in history 36
Discussion 53
Conclusion 62
1
Introduction
This thesis is about the relation between history and theory. It investigates the importance of theory for historical research. About how theory can lead historians towards new historical insights. The relationship between historians and philosophers has not always been fruitful. History, for a long time, was an endeavor that focused on facts. Empirical research of historical sources was its main project. History prided itself in describing the past, as accurately as the sources allowed. This Rankean style of historical writing, historicism, did not claim to be critical, it wanted to show what had actually occurred: wie es eigentlich gewesen. The primary sources were the center of attention in this historical positivism.
But, history was not immune to theory altogether. Marxism as a theoretical framework inspired many works of history. It inspired a history from below, a history of the working class. This social history wanted to highlight the everyday lives of ordinary people. In the early days of social history, these ‘ordinary people’ did not include women. As a response to this absence, women’s history wanted to describe the lives of women from the lower classes as well. Before social history, women’s history mainly portrayed the lives of queens and similar prominent women. After this focus on social history, the historical study of women’s lives started to focus on gender. Postmodernism was an important inspiration for this development.1
Postmodernism lead to new ways of approaching history. Often, a more theoretical approach to the historic métier resurfaced. Gender history, which blossomed after the publication of Joan Scott’s Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, took part in this theoretical perspective. Gender historians were not afraid to apply theory because they wanted their work to contain a critical function. Philosophers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler were important inspirations for this development. Therefore, they are an important part of this thesis. With its analytical attitude gender history unveiled assumptions that were present in the historical field. Gender history showed how the classic historicism presupposed a universal male subject. A concept to be proven a historical construct. While doing so, historicism made a theoretical choice, even if it was an unconscious one.
This thesis investigates the contrast between description, embodied by history, and critique. I want to show how history can thrive while connecting with theoretical and critical
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thinking. The starting point of this argument is that historians should use theory. Since gender history has been known for its critical perspective this field plays a central role. Gender history is connected to the critical dimension. They do not only want to show how things were in the past, they also want to support feminism.
Gender theory developed from a focus on the social construct that gender is, towards a focus on sex. In the 1980’s the idea of gender was revolutionary. While writing on gender, sex as a category became an object of inquiry too. Sex itself became understood as constructed as well. De Beauvoir’s work already contained a notion that both sex and gender are socially produced. Foucault, and Butler even more so, unveiled how sex is a construct. Gender stated a problem, the theorization of this problem turned out to be a structure that can be found in sex itself. Sex and gender have a shared ontology; they are both constructed.
The revelation that both gender and sex are social constructs leads to the idea that they can be understood as historical constructs. Sex now, is definitely not the same as sex in the nineteenth century. The role sex started to play, once uncovered as a construct by Foucault and Butler, is interesting for the history of the body.
Besides historicizing bodily categories like sex, Foucault also historicized the subject. The idea of subjectivity proved not to be a constant, it was also a category which adapted varying meanings through time. This research focusses on the history of the self and the body. Can a history of body and sex provide us with an image of the historical self? Bodies and selves are related. The body, or at least ideas about the body, influence someone’s conception of self. For example, the body is the place where the symbolic construction of sexual difference takes place, which is an important condition for subjectivity.2
When self and body (sex) are constructed, they are also historical. Furthermore, the relation between body and self is historical, it is connected to a certain time and place with its own epistemology. If subjectivity is related to bodies, we might suggest that historical bodies are related to historical selves. The historical body can be an entryway in researching historical selves.
The self is built from an accumulation of categories. Anna Marie Smith describes in the
Oxford handbook of feminist theory how a variety of categories is being deployed to bring a
2 Shatema Threadcraft, ‘Embodiment’ in Lisa Disch, Mary Hawkesworth ed. Oxford handbook of feminist theory
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subject into being.3 All these categories, among which biological sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class and so on, are historical constructs. It is therefore not a big leap to claim that the subject has a historicity as well.
The idea that the self is a historical concept is derived from Michel Foucault. He
presented the self as a historical artefact. Foucault wrote a genealogy of the subject wherewith he wanted to critique the modern self. The body plays a big part in some of the genealogies of the middle Foucault. A fact which supports the idea that the body and self are intertwined. His history of sexuality uncovered subject-producing powers. It revealed how certain norms
concerning sexuality were internalized and therewith produced subjectivity. The first chapter of this thesis looks into Foucault’s ideas on bodies, subjectivity and history. Since Foucault was an inspiration for the other authors that are being discussed, it made sense to start with his work.
The second chapter focusses on Judith Butler. Butler claims that there is no subject before discourse. Subjectivity is an effect, a means and a tool of discourse. Both Butler and Foucault describe subjectivity as a construct. This sparked an important debate about agency, how can an individual have agency when her or his self is constructed? Furthermore, Foucault’s idea on the body as fully determined by social and cultural powers sparked feminist critique, which was especially vocal on the apparent lack of agency in Foucault’s idea of a constructed subject and body. Lois McNay claimed that: “Foucault’s understanding of individuals as passive bodies has the effect, albeit unintentional, of pushing women back into this position of passivity and silence.”4
Another reason why Butler is important for this thesis is the fact that she understands the body as a part of discourse. Not only the category of gender, but also the idea of a natural sex is a construct. Using Foucault’s introduction of the diary of Herculine Babin, Butler stated that: “it is not her anatomy, but the ways in which that anatomy is ‘invested’ that causes the problem.”5
Butler was clearly inspired by Foucault, but introduced several new ideas on body, gender, sex, identity and subjectivity. Her work is important to investigate the relation between body and self. Butler is less obviously connected to the historical perspective. What has Butler got to offer the historical métier? Her point that sex and gender are interchangeable is important. Can we capture
3 Smith, Anna Marie ‘Subjectivity and subjectivation’, in Lisa Disch, Mary Hawkesworth ed. The Oxford handbook of feminist theory (Oxford 2016) www.oxfordhandbooks.com
4 Margaret A. Mclaren, Feminism, Foucault and embodied subjectivity (New York 2002) 83. 5 Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, feminism, power and the body (New York, London 1991) 56.
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the historical body through sources that describe sex, can the constructedness of sex maybe lead to historical ideas of the self?
This thesis starts with philosophers that have inspired (gender) historians. But,
interestingly enough, both these philosophers are also occupied with history. I have taken the dichotomy between history and philosophy and try to show that they are more codependent than one expects. Philosophical critique is being incorporated by Foucault and Judith Butler. Both philosophers acknowledge how history contributed to their critical dimension. In Foucault’s work this is rather explicit, historical examples provide the foundation for his Crime and
punishment and History of sexuality. Butler is historically inspired because she is inspired by
Foucault. Furthermore, her descriptions of subversion are historical. She points out specific moments of subversion like drag in the movie Paris is burning or the diary of Herculine Barbin, the nineteenth century hermaphrodite.
Barbin’s story inspired both sides, the theoreticians and the historians. Barbin, as an historical object, lead to new ideas in philosophy, but s/he also inspired historians to welcome gender theory in their field. For example, Barbin plays a part in the work of Foucault, Butler and historian Geertje Mak. Barbin’s story is an example of how gender connects to the self. Gender can contradict one’s idea of self or confirm one’s self. Maybe this is an important source to describe that history and philosophy need each other.
The third chapter evolves around the historical side of the discussion. I introduce three case studies of historical works that are concerned with the body and self. The case studies are written by historians who are inspired by theory in their work. And I hope to prove by their example that when history relates itself to theory, it can lead to new historical perspectives and insights. It is about whether the historical relation between body and self can be uncovered by an historical method that is inspired by philosophy.
The three case-studies are Thomas Laqueur’s Making sex, Barbara Duden’s Geschichte
unter der Haut: ein Eisenacher Arzt und seine Patientinnen um 1730 and Geertje Mak’s Doubting sex, Inscriptions, bodies and selves in nineteenth-century hermaphrodite case histories. Laqueur wrote a history about the idea of sex. Duden investigated how bodies were
experienced in the past.6 Mak’s book covers hermaphroditism in the nineteenth century. The case-studies are all examples of historians that have investigated bodies in the past. But, how to
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get to the historical body? Since I assume that the body is connected to subjectivity this is an important question to raise when investigating the historical self.
Geertje Mak introduces praxiography in her Doubting sex. This method has been coined empirical philosophy by Annemarie Mol, the philosopher and anthropologist that inspired Mak to work with this approach. Empirical philosophy in the historical field raised the following question. As an anthropologist, Mol can place herself in the middle of the praxis she is investigating. For obvious reasons, this is impossible for a historian. Historians are, mostly, working with written sources. These sources may very well describe a certain praxis, but the historian cannot have the same access to praxis as the anthropologist.
With written sources one is always depended on what the author chose to describe, what terminology was used, which words were selected. In Duden’s work this is an important aspect of the accessibility of the historical body. She researches metaphors. In Laqeur’s Making sex words play an important part as well, especially when he shows how some parts of the body did not have proper names for a long time. All in all, these books are examples of investigations where praxis is hard to come by. Is praxiography truly the answer when trying to grasp the historical body? Since its praxis is still written down? Or is a study of metaphors and expressions/ words inevitable?
This project wants to connect (gender) history and philosophy. The authors in the third chapter all expanded the historical métier. They do not shy away from a more experimental type of history that, to some, might seem a bit more speculative. I believe historians have to keep an open mind for the expanding of history if we want to investigate topics like bodily experience and subjectivity in the past. It might require reading between the lines, looking into metaphors and linking history to philosophical questions and critique.
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1. Michel Foucault, self, bodies and history
This first chapter will revolve around Michel Foucault’s work on subjectivity and the body. Foucault used history to say something about the modern subject. Historical restrictions and laws concerning bodily life are important themes in his middle work, which involved the genealogies, and his later work on biopolitics. In this chapter I want to map out Foucault’s thinking about subjectivity and the (historical) body. I will finish by looking into Foucault’s historical
methodology to answer the question of how we can grasp historical bodies, and maybe even say something about subjectivity in the past.
Foucault about the self/subjectivity. The self as a historical construct
Foucault was in many ways inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche coined the idea that the belief in ‘man’ as a constant factor is nothing more than the description of the idea of ‘man’ in a certain period of time. Nietzsche therefore provided a new method of historical philosophizing. This new history’s aim was to investigate the ideas that were believed to be truths. These ideas were always connected with the historical period of their occurrence. Nietzsche described ‘man’ as one of those ideas, as a result of historical philosophizing. Foucault’s idea of self was strongly influenced by this notion, he was critical of traditional approaches of the self, especially dualistic positions.7
Foucault defined critique as “the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth.”8
Questioning so-called truths is evidently an extremely important factor. Foucault wants to prove how effects of power and discourses of truth are historically contingent. An example is his essay
What is enlightenment? In Nietzschean fashion he does not start analysing from a theoretical
philosophical position, he turns towards experience and asks questions about how we constitute the self.9
While doing so, Foucault discovered that power constructs the modern self. Foucault ascribes a positive energy to power: Power can be productive, power creates the idea of the self. Especially the apparatus power/knowledge produces the modern self. Since power/knowledge is
7 James D. Marshall, ‘Critical theory of the self: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Foucault’, Studies in philosophy and education 22 (2001) 83-84
8 Thomas Lemke, ‘Critique and experience in Foucault’, Theory, culture & society 28:4 (2011) 27. 9 Marshall, Studies in philosophy and education 22 (2001) 83.
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a product of a certain time, we can say that the self, or at least the idea of self, is historically variable. Foucault shows that our current ideas of the self are shaped by power structures that are historically contingent, and therefore the self is understood as contingent.10
Foucault wants to deconstruct the humanist idea of an independent self. The idea of a subjectivity that is based on a rational subjectivity is an historical object, it has not always been around. Foucault criticizes humanistic assumptions in order to account for how individuals are produced by disciplinary technologies. He believes that the humanist discourses that place the subject at the centre of reality or history have failed to grasp the extent to which the subject is fragmented and decentred in the social field. But to describe the ways in which individuals have been dominated by power structures is not equivalent to rejecting identity tout court. To
illuminate this, it is useful to consider the following quote by Ian Hacking: “Foucault said that the concept of Man is a fraud, not that you and I are nothing.” To suggest, as Foucault does, that the human is a social and historical construct is not to discredit every attempt to understand ourselves, but merely those that claim to be universal.11
In the same deconstructivist effort, Foucault renounces psychoanalytic theories of identity because of their tendency to represent individual identity as a fixed and unified phenomenon. Foucault employs a relational model of identity. He highlights the many relationships through which individuals are produced. Foucault refutes theories on subjectivity, he rather understands subjectivity as a myriad of theories/relationships/factors.12
Hacking’s utterance is exemplary for one of the important debates that followed
Foucault’s ideas about the self. This debate revolved around agency. Many theoreticians thought that Foucault’s subject, which was produced by power, lacked agency. According to Sawicki, and many others, we can definitely say that Foucault did not entirely reject the notion of
agency.13 His second volume of the history of sexuality, The use of pleasure, presents practices of the self from antiquity wherewith he reclaims a self-fashioning subject. This second volume of his history of sexuality has been understood as a new phase in Foucault’s work. But the notion of agency can be found in some of his earlier writings as well. For example, in his essay The subject
and power Foucault describes how “We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the
10 Jacques Bos, Het ongrijpbare zelf (Amsterdam 2013) 29.33.
11 Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: feminism, power and the body (New York 1991) 63. 12 Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault (New York 1991) 63.
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refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.”
Furthermore, he mentions that for power to be productive it is necessary that the one over whom power is exercised must be recognized and maintained as a person who acts.14 The subject that is shaped by power structures is still a subject that acts, and therefore has agency. It is even mentioned that the subjugated subject can refuse the subjectivity based on individuality that has been around for quite some time.
Foucault and the relation between body and self
The relation between body and self is a significant discussion in this thesis. It has a long history where body and mind have been connected or entirely separated. My position, after reading about feminist critique is that body and self are intertwined. This is an important basic
assumption for the next part of this chapter. A cartesian body and mind dualism is no part of this discourse. J. C. Chrisler and I. Johnston-Robledo made a clear statement in their introduction for the book Woman’s embodied self that encompasses the relation between body and self that is important for this thesis. “People learn about the world and themselves through their bodies; thus the body is the basis for subjectivity and self-expression.”15
The term embodiment originated in the work of Merleau-Ponty. He wrote about the lived body as a social agent. We cannot understand the world we live in, nor can we interact with each other or act on the environment around us, without our bodies.16 Foucault shared this view and he emphasized the fact that the body is seen, evaluated, and reacted to by others, and those others influence individual’s evaluations of their bodies and their selves.17
Histoire de la Sexualité I: La volonté de savoir is an inescapable source when we try to
say something about Foucault’s thinking on bodies and subjectivity. In this book, Foucault tries to answer the question why the history of sexuality up until then had been written as a history of oppression. He wants to pinpoint the apparatus of sexuality, to research sexuality as an
archaeological object and mechanism of domination18. Or as he described it himself: “the
purpose of the present study is to show how deployments of power are directly connected to the
14 Michel Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, Critical inquiry 8:4 (1982) 785, 789.
15 J.C. Chrisler, I. Johnston-Robledo, Woman’s embodied self: perspectives on identity and image (Washington
2018) 3.
16 Chrisler, Johnston-Robledo, Woman’s embodied self (Washington 2018) 8. 17 Ibidem 9.
18 Carol A. Pollis, ‘The apparatus of sexuality: Reflections on Foucault’s contributions to the study of sex in
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body”.19 Or, as Jana Sawicki explains it: “When Foucault speaks of power producing individuals,
he refers not only to the production of individualist rhetoric, but also to the production of forms of embodiment, of disciplined bodies. Both the body and soul are produced through disciplinary technologies.”20
The histoire investigates the fact that sexuality is spoken about, it wants to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions that prompt people to speak about it and how the utterances about sexuality are distributed. Which power/knowledge structure is at work? In short: it is about the way sex is put into discourse. Discourse is an important concept in Foucault’s thought. It describes the organized bodies of knowledge united with practice which produce and transmit power. Examples of these bodies are psychiatry, psychology, and the human sciences.21 Discourse analysis is strongly connected with the investigation of the language used within these bodies of knowledge.
Foucault wants to locate the forms of power, the mediums it uses and the discourses it infiltrates. He wants to unveil “the polymorphous techniques of power”. Foucault is not trying to formulate whether the discursive productions and effects of power lead to a formulation of the truth about sex or try to conceal that truth. He wants to bring out the “will to knowledge” that is both supporting and instrumentalizing the discourse and power mechanisms.22
He traces this will to knowledge back to the seventeenth century. This age is
characterized as an age of repression by Foucault, the age of the so-called bourgeois societies. Sex had been subjugated at the level of language through censorship.23 Areas of tact and discretion were established in the seventeenth century, this constituted a restrictive economy. From the eighteenth century onward, there was a rise in discourses concerned with sex. The largest part of these discourses was an institutional incitement to speak about it.24 The confession
of the flesh increased. Everything had to be told. 25
An apparatus emerged, this increased the quantity of discourse about sex immensely. The power mechanisms worked in such a way that a discourse about sex became inevitable. When
19 Michel Foucault, The will to knowledge, The history of sexuality 1 (Penguin 1990) 151. 20 Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: feminism, power and the body (New York 1991) 64
21 Carol A. Pollis, ‘The apparatus of sexuality: Reflections on Foucault’s contributions to the study of sex in
history’, The journal of sex research, 23:3 (1987) 402.
22 Michel Foucault, The will to knowledge, The history of sexuality 1 (Penguin 1990) 11-12. 23 Foucault, The will to knowledge, (Penguin 1990) 17
24 Ibidem 18. 25 Ibidem 19-20
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the eighteenth century loomed on the horizon there emerged a political, economic, and technical incentive to talk about sex. This did not shape a general theory about sexuality but appeared in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification of quantitative or causal studies.26 This new discourse on sex and bodies was based on rationality, instead of morality. Sexuality was something that could be managed, not only condemned or tolerated. Sex became a part of systems of utility.27
A new power mechanism that occurred in the 18th century was the emergence of
population as an economic and political problem. At the heart of this economic and political problem lies sexuality. Foucault called this power mechanism biopolitics. Biopolitics will be more thoroughly described later in this paragraph. Foucault characterized the nineteenth
century’s occupation with sexuality as follows: “throughout the nineteenth century, sex seems to have been incorporated in two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction, which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation.”
Foucault looked for a network of many strategies, not one overarching structure: “dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions”.28 Foucault describes sexuality as the conceptual,
experiential, and institutional apparatus that modernity has built around the body and its erotic pleasures. He states that it is only in the present era that sexuality is understood as an important essence of selfhood.29 This relation between self and sexuality (or self and body) can be grasped with the next quote from the History of sexuality I:
“.. we demand that sex speak the truth…, and we demand that it tells us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness. We tell it its truth by deciphering what it tells us about that truth; it tells us our own by delivering up that part of it that escaped us. From this interplay there has evolved over
26 Michel Foucault, The will to knowledge, The history of sexuality 1 (Penguin 1990) 23-24. 27 Foucault, The will to knowledge, (Penguin 1990) 24-25.
28 Colin Koopman, Genealogy as critique: Foucault and the problems of modernity (Bloomington 2013) 4. 29 H.G. Cocks, ‘Historiographical review. Modernity and the self in the history of sexuality’, The historical journal
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several centuries, a knowledge of the subject; a knowledge not so much of his form, but of what divides him, determines him perhaps, but above all causes him to be ignorant of himself.”30 Foucault does not understand sexuality as an inherent quality of the flesh that is controlled by society. Even less should it be understood as Freud’s idea of a biological drive that civilization tries to channel. According to Foucault it is a way of fashioning the self “in the experience of the flesh”, which is “constituted from and around certain forms of behaviour”.31 This behaviour is
moulded by historically specific systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge construct a norm. This norm is incorporated and therefore influences the experience of the body and the sense of self. There is nothing natural about it. Rather, like the whole world for Nietzsche (the great philosophical influence on Foucault), sexuality is “a sort of artwork”.32 The incorporated norm of sexuality plays a part in one’s understanding of oneself. The self, therefore, is, at least partially, constructed.
The discourse of sex asked questions about the causality in the subject, the unconscious of the subject, the truth of the subject et cetera.33 Subjectivity, or at least the idea of the subject, was intertwined with the will to knowledge surrounding sexuality. The idea of a subject, or a deep self, relates to one’s sexuality. Sexuality shaped the individual.
Individual sexuality was not the only research object for Foucault. He also described a focus on the species’ body. The body of the population was an important aspect in his thinking about sexuality. He formulated the concept of the biopolitics of the population; a series of interventions and regulatory control mechanisms that supervised the population.34 The power mechanism consisted of analysing birth-rates, age of marriage, legitimate and illegitimate births, the age when people started having sexual intercourse and how often this happened, ways of improving fertility or sterilize others, the use of contraceptives et cetera.35 This mechanism shaped many new forms of discourse on the subject in the eighteenth century.36
Biopower led towards a growing importance of the norm, this started to be more important than the juridical system of the law. The law operates more and more as a norm, the
30 Michel Foucault, The will to knowledge, The history of sexuality 1 (Penguin 1990) 69-70. 31 Thomas Laqueur, Making sex. Body and gender from the greeks to Freud (Harvard 1990) 13. 32 Laqueur, Making seks (Harvard 1990) 13.
33 Foucault, The will to knowledge (Penguin 1990) 69-70. 34 Ibidem 139.
35 Ibidem 25. 36 Ibidem 29.
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judicial institution becomes a part of other apparatuses (medical, administrative et cetera). “A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life.”37
In Histoire de la Sexualité I: La volonté de savoir, Foucault introduces biopolitics as well. Here, he describes it as a rationality of the state that operated separate from the sovereign. On other occasions it was described as the birth of statistics.38 The combination of power and
knowledge is essential in Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. In Society must be defended, a transcript of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1975-1976, Foucault also describes this power that concerns itself with man as a living creature.39 Life became the subject of political
strategies.40 With biopolitics, Foucault shows a discontinuity within political practice. Therewith he proved to his public that power is no ahistorical category, but a variable. The many
perspectives Foucault handles in his thinking about power do not lead towards a general theory on power. The theoretical moments are connected to his historical examples.41 Foucault needs history for his critique.
Biopolitics as a concept soon started to live a life of its own. Nowadays it is used in many different fields of research and hosts many different definitions. Its literal meaning seems
evident: politics that concerns itself with life (bios), but it is crucial to keep in mind that defining biopolitics is no value-free activity.42
Sexuality was an object that had to deal with both power techniques that focussed on the individual body and biopolitics. This was the place where body and population met. Sexuality had to deal with both the disciplining of the individual body by anatomo-politics and the later biopolitics of the population.43 The alliance between these two apparatuses concerned with sexuality commenced in the nineteenth century. Sexuality developed into a political issue and was subjected to measures, economic intervention and ideological campaigns that voiced the
37 Michel Foucault, The will to knowledge, The history of sexuality 1 (Penguin 1990) 144.
38 Henk Oosterling, De opstand van het lichaam, over verzet en zelfervaring bij Foucault en Bataille (Amsterdam
1989) Geraadpleegd op 8-10-2017: https://www.henkoosterling.nl/opstand.html
39 Michel Foucault, “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76 (2004) 239-240. 40 Foucault’s use of biopolitics is not very consistent, its meaning differed in his texts and speeches. “Filled with doubts and second thoughts, Foucault’s writings on biopolitics involve shifts, feints, changes in focus and direction- perhaps even, as Foucault’s most ungenerous critic has put it, “deceptions.” Campbell, Sitze, Biopolitics (Durham
2013) 7.
41 Oosterling, De opstand van het lichaam (Amsterdam 1989).
42 Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics, an advanced introduction (New York, London 2011) 3. 43 Lemke, Biopolitics (New York, London 2011) 39.
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standards of morality. A norm emerged, and society became a normalizing community.44
Biopolitics obviously relate to bodies, but do they also influence the subject or self? With its focus on reproduction one might say that biopolitics invade the personal sphere and therewith the conception of the self. It is a power mechanism that mingles with one of the most personal aspects of human life. Foucault’s work hardly addresses the possibility of a connection between biopolitical power and the self. The anatomo-politics of the individual body seem evidently connected with someone’s idea of oneself. Even though biopolitics concerns the population as a whole, it can still be understood as an intrusion of the individual body as well. An intrusion through normalization. And therefore, influencing the subjectivity of its citizens. In an almost unconscious way the micro powers, that operate on the body, produce a self-regulating subject.45 This leads to a self that is influenced by political and social forces. While reading Foucault we let go of the idea of a metaphysical I. On the contrary, we end up with a contingent self that is constructed by customs, practices and institutions. But not a self without agency.46
As mentioned earlier in this paragraph, the norm has a strong influence on the body. The body becomes contingent and historical because of the incorporation of the norm. Another example of the contingency of bodies can be found in the introduction that Foucault wrote for the memoires of Herculine Barbin, a hermaphrodite from the nineteenth century. It was not the truth about her being, but the fact that she was being looked at through a particular mode of
knowledge that sealed her fate. Or as Judith Butler stated: “it is not her anatomy, but the ways in
which that anatomy is invested that causes the problem”47 It is not our body as such, but the way we think about bodies that might shape our subjectivity. Bodies carry certain meanings and norms in certain societies. The ways in which our bodies mean something for our idea of self, might be found in these regimens of truth instead of in our bodies itself.
Foucault’s history
“Foucault’s theories do not tell us what to do, but rather how some of our ways of thinking and doing are historically linked to particular forms of power and social control. His theories serve
44 Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics, an advanced introduction (New York, London 2011) 39.
45 Shatema Threadcraft, ‘Embodiment’ in: Lisa Dish, Mary Hawkesworth ed. The Oxford handbook of feminist theory (Oxford 2015) 12.
46 James D. Marshall, ‘Critical theory of the self: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Foucault’, Studies in philosophy and education 22 (2001).
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less to explain than to criticize and raise questions. His histories of theory are designed to reveal their contingency and thereby free us from them.”48
As stated already Foucault’s main goal is not about formulating a grand theory, he actually wants to show the fragmentation and contingency. His historical method is therefore wary of grand narratives. Foucault regarded historicism as a poor method. He rejected totalizing theories like psychoanalysis and Marxism and while doing so critiqued liberal, Marxist and Freudian inspired analyses of power.49
Foucault believed that continuist histories legitimated the present, whereas his goal was to critique the present. He expands traditional history by looking at paths that were not taken, possibilities that were not actualized and events that do not fit the schema.50 This does not mean that Foucault practices a so-called ‘What-if-history’. He wants to “insurrect subjugated
knowledges”. He wants to hear the voices of the ones that do not have a place in traditional political history. “Subjugated knowledges refer not only to historical contents that are obscured within functionalist histories but also to those forms of experience that fall below the level of scientificity. The latter include the low-ranking knowledge of the psychiatric patient, the hysteric, the midwife, the housewife, and the mother to name a few. Because these disqualified knowledges arise out of the experience of oppression, resurrecting them serves a critical
function.”51
In revealing these subjugated knowledges, experience is an essential notion. In the quote above experience is mentioned as the historical object that can help historians to investigate those histories that were no part of the historical field before. Foucault is interested in what way experience is constituted. What makes an experience possible (or impossible)? And which power structures are playing a part in this experience? Foucault believes history is the science
wherewith we can answer such questions about experiences or provide new experiences.52
By writing about these historical objects, Foucault hopes to be able to analyse the power mechanisms that were distinctive for a certain period of time. His method for unveiling these
48 Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: feminism, power and the body (New York 1991) 47.
49 Carol A. Pollis, ‘The apparatus of sexuality: Reflections on Foucault’s contributions to the study of sex in
history’, The journal of sex research, 23:3 (1987) 404.
50 Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault (New York 1991) 57. 51 Ibidem 57.
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mechanisms of power is particularistic. Foucault starts with a particular practice in the present. A practice with an assumed value or truth of which he is sceptical. He then traces its lines of
descent in Nietzschean fashion.53 He writes an ontology of the present.54
Foucault’s project, in his middle works, can be summarized as a genealogy of modern morals.55 Foucault wrote history from a contemporary perspective in order to critically
investigate practices and categories, to make them seem less self-evident and necessary.56 Foucault writes his genealogical history to critique the subject of the present. He therefore calls his historical endeavours ‘Histories of the present”. He poses a philosophical challenge to history, not to challenge the past, but to interrogate the rationality of the present.57
Foucault’s goal has also been described as the ‘history of truth’. This genealogy of what is considered as “true” consisted of two correlated steps. Firstly, he questioned universals, this can be found in History of Madness. It shows how the classification of the mad as mentally ill is a historical and contingent development derived from certain social practices. The History of
sexuality is a part of this same period. The next step follows from the first: if the epistemological
categories like madness or sexuality are no longer self-evident or “true”, we have to investigate the “system of acceptability” as well.58 Foucault described it as follows: “The genealogist finds
that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms”59
Genealogy is a method Foucault derived from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the philosopher that used history to reveal, but also change, the present. He made genealogy a well-known method. Both Nietzsche and Foucault use stylistic means, like hyperboles, to awaken the critical potential in their readers. To convey to their readers the critical outtake on those things of which they describe the historical background.60 For this type of history, we must look into the places that were classically not considered as a part of history: sentiments, love, conscience and
53 Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: feminism, power and the body (New York 1991) 58.
54 René Gabriëls, Eva de Valk, ‘Geschiedenis en ervaring, inleiding bij het themanummer’, Krisis 1 (2010) 6. 55 Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault (New York 1991) 61.
56 Ibidem 101.
57 C. Gordon quoted in Pollis, The journal of sex research, 23:3 (1987) 407.
58 Thomas Lemke, ‘Critique and experience in Foucault’, Theory, culture & society 28:4 (2011) 31.
59 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ in: D. F. Bouchard ed. Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays (Ithaca (New York 1977) 142.
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instincts.61 (Themes that have also been investigated in gender history.) Koopman claims in his
Genealogy as critique that genealogies are concerned with a sort of ‘hidden’ problems. The
issues of genealogy are found below the surfaces of our lives. It is about things that condition human beings.62 It is all about a focus on the “in depth problems that swirl around the heart of who we are”.63
According to Foucault we want historians to prove our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions. We want historians to write away the randomness of events by presenting proof of the necessity of the present. “But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference.”64 Genealogy reveals the
contingency and complexity of our continuous historical construction.65 Genealogy therefore records the singularity of events. Genealogy operates as critical history of the present. 66 From the present it traces its way back to the emergence of this present, an emergence that is not inevitable at all, but rather a matter of chance.
The best example of Foucault’s genealogical work is, according to Koopman, the History
of sexuality I. It presents sexuality “not as a history but historically emerged where we might
least expect it”.67 Sexuality exists in an accumulation of intersecting processes wherein practices of knowing and strategies of power are equally important.68 Foucault described his historical endeavour as follows: “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation.”69
In his History of sexuality I, Foucault summarized his method by speaking of a history of discourses.70 Looking back upon the first volume of his history of sexuality, Foucault described his genealogy as follows: “…with this genealogy the idea was to investigate how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics of which their sexual behaviour was doubtless the occasion, but certainly not the exclusive
61 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ in: D. F. Bouchard ed. Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays (Ithaca (New York 1977) 139-140.
62 Colin Koopman, Genealogy as critique: Foucault and the problems of modernity (Bloomington 2013) 1 63 Koopman, Genealogy as critique (Bloomington 2013) 2.
64 Foucault, Language, counter-memory (Ithaca (New York 1977) 155. 65 Koopman, Genealogy as critique (Bloomington 2013) 19.
66 Ibidem 24. 67 Ibidem 2. 68 Ibidem 2-3.
69 Foucault, Language, counter-memory, practice (Ithaca 1977) 162.
17 domain.”71
Foucault’s description of sexuality as a product of (and hence specific to) modernity met with critique. It touches upon a broader problem of history: is there a form of selfhood or
subjectivity that is distinctive for modernity? This led to a debate between essentialist and social constructionist views. The dispute was transcended with the emergence of an idea of identity that evolved around diversity. “Instead of suggesting either that there is one kind of sexuality
throughout time [essentialist], or, to the contrary, arguing that it is a specific modern construct [social constructionist], historians have instead begun to speak of diverging modernities which are productive of correspondingly diverse identities and selves.”72 Modernity became a localized
and partial process. One could even say that there are only individual sites of modernity.73 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick showed a way out of the essentialist-constructionist dichotomy. She wrote that one model of sexuality and/or identity not simply vanishes when another is invented. There is no such thing as a chronology of modes of identity.74 Halperin took this idea further with a visualization of sexuality as a sort of palimpsest that shows readable traces of ways in which the body and its pleasures were understood and experienced in the past.75 He believes that various models shaped sexuality, each of these models has been more or less present in Western history, but they never fully replaced one another.76
This idea of Halperin reminded me of a part of the 1977 text Nietzsche, genealogy,
history by Foucault. Here, Foucault makes an interesting analysis concerning history and the
body. He claims that ‘descent’ is connected with the body.77 The body, and its physical
surroundings, are part of the domain of the Nietzschean term Herkunft. The body carries the traces of former experiences and is the place of desires, failings and errors. Foucault describes the body as “an inscribed surface of events, the locus of a dissociated self, and a volume in perpetual disintegration.” Genealogy can be understood as an analysis of descent and should focus on the body and history. “Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the
71 Michel Foucault, The use of pleasure, the history of sexuality 2 (Penguin 1992) 5.
72 H.G. Cocks, ‘Historiographical review. Modernity and the self in the history of sexuality’, The historical journal
49:4 (2006) 1213.
73 Cocks, The historical journal 49:4 (2006) 1213. 74 Ibidem 1213.
75 Ibidem 1214. 76 Ibidem 1222.
77 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ in: D. F. Bouchard ed. Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays (Ithaca (New York 1977) 147.
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process of history’s destruction of the body.”78 In this fragment the body carries history in a
similar way as Halperin’s palimpsest. It is inscribed with history. This also captures the singularity and the randomness Foucault finds so crucial for writing a critical history.
78 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ in: D. F. Bouchard ed. Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays (Ithaca (New York 1977) 148.
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2. Judith Butler, body, self and history
Judith Butler is an important author in gender studies. She is inspired by Foucault’s work, but takes his thinking further. This chapter will give a taste of Butler’s ideas on bodies, history and the subject, the three main themes in this thesis. It will provide a short overview of her gender theory. Her deconstructivism reveals how power and discourse play their part in the construction of gender, subjectivity and even the material body. But, can Butler help us to historicize these concepts? And can her work help historians with capturing the meanings that were connected to these three phenomena in the past?
For this thesis it is significant to investigate whether Butler has ideas about history as well. Since many gender historians, dutifully drop her name in their prefaces or introductions it seems essential to look into what Butler actually says about history. Is her work mostly an inspiration, or can we really integrate her ideas in the historical field? Is there already some sort of historicity in Butler’s work itself? Does she, inspired by Foucault, also write a genealogy of some sort?
The chapter continues with a comparison of Foucault’s and Butler’s work. Does Butler really apply Foucault’s thinking or is she mainly inspired by some of his concepts and, so to speak, takes it from there? The final part revolves around the notions of historicity or
historiography in her work. Does Butler utter some ideas on the writing of history, and if she does: What are those?
Gender
“The purpose here more generally is to trace the way in which gender fables establish and circulate the misnomer of natural facts.”79
According to Butler, feminist critique needs to incorporate the idea that the subject of feminism is constructed by structures of power that feminists use to achieve emancipation. The word “women” for example. Butler’s problem with the term “women” is that it tends to describe a shared identity. Butler does not believe that gender has ever been coherent or consistent, it always intersects with other attributes like ethnicity, race, class, regionality. Gender is not a term on its own, it is always connected with political and cultural intersections.80
79 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) XXIV. 80 Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) 4-5.
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Butler addresses a controversy over the meaning of construction when deconstructing gender. It is connected to the philosophical debate between free will and determinism. Does construction suggest a certain law or overarching power that generates gender differences? She sees a certain determinism where bodies are understood as passive recipients of this law. In this case culture, not biology, becomes destiny.
Reading De Beauvoir Butler indicates another ‘construction’. De Beauvoir presents gender as ‘constructed’ but her famous formulation, “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient”, implies an agent that takes on some gender (and could therefore also take on another). “Can construction be reduced to a form of choice?”, Butler asks. According to Butler there is nothing in De Beauvoir’s text that necessarily depicts the fact that a female body should become a ‘woman’. De Beauvoir understands the body as a situation, the body has always been interpreted by cultural meaning, and therefore does not have a pre-existing (prediscursive) sex. Sex has been gender all along.81
“But the body is itself a construction, as are the myriad “bodies” that constitute the domain of gendered subjects.”82 Butler urges her reader to not only understand gender as a
construct, bodies are constructed as well. Gendered bodies are a style of the flesh, never self-styled, they too have a history. Those histories limit the possibilities of the style. Butler describes gender as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clear disciplinary consequences. “…the collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions.”83
Butler states that gender is neither a noun nor a set of free-floating signifiers. She believes that gender is performatively produced. Gender is performative in the way that it constitutes the identity it professes to be. Gender is always a doing according to Judith Butler. But it is
important to keep in mind that the doing is not done by some sort of pre-existing subject. Following Nietzsche, Butler claims that “the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed”.84 The
deed is everything: “There is no gender behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.”85
81 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) 11. 82 Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) 12.
83 Ibidem 190. 84 Ibidem 34. 85 Ibidem 34.
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Performativity is an essential idea in Butler’s conception of gender. This is a repetitive ritual which is effective through a naturalization in the context of a body. The action of gender requires a performance that is repeated.86 Performativity plays a central role in Butler’s claim that gender, which was understood as an internal given, is actually a manufactured idea. It comes into being through a continuing set of acts assumed through the gendered stylization of the body. Something that we conceived as being internal is presented by Butler as an external feature, one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts. Her most extreme formulation of gender is: “a hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures”.87 Through this enactment, gender
manages to appear as interiorly fixed.88
Identification is portrayed in Butler’s work as an enacted fantasy or incorporation. Acts, gestures and desire seem to produce an internal core, but are actually inflicted upon the exterior of the body, on the surface. These acts are performative, the apparent ‘essences’ that they ‘perform’ are therefore mere fabrications. This would mean that the gendered body has not got an ontology of its own, only its acts constitute its reality. Interiority turns out to be an effect of a social and public discourse.89
Butler uncovers gender’s normalizing work with the following quote: “In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.”90 Butler shows how performativity
is a power that constructs the phenomena it regulates.91 The structure of this argument reminds of Foucault’s productive powers.
The fact that gender is constructed does not necessarily mean that it is not real.
“Constructs are thus “real” to the extent that they are fictive phenomena that gain power within discourse.” For example, works of literature can disempower discourse. Locutionary acts that seek recourse to the universality of language and the unity of being.92
In Bodies that matter Butler poses several questions that are related to gender. If gender
86 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) 191. 87 Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) XV-XVI.
88 Ibidem 95. 89 Ibidem 185. 90 Ibidem 185-186.
91 Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of “sex” (London, New York 1993) xii-xiii. 92 Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) 162.
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constructs the subject, instead of the idea that gender is something which the subject decides on, this raises a new discussion. If the decisiveness is not in hands of the subject, how can gender practices be sites of critical agency? Where is agency if gender is decisive of the subject?93 Butler wonders how we should understand the constructive ways of gender norms without claiming such a thing like cultural determinism. How should we conceive the repetition that produces and stabilizes the effects of gender? And even more, the materiality of sex? Butler states that gender produces a natural sex. She calls this “the production of sex as the radically unconstructed”.94 The natural assets ascribed to sex are in fact a cultural construct.
If we want to avoid cultural determinism, there has to be some agency. This might be found in the concept of performativity. Can this repetition be the site of critique of the gender norms as well?95 Maybe by repeating something else? For Butler, gender is performance. Something that is done instead of something that one is or has. Because gender is “a culturally sanctioned doing”, the possibility of undoing resides within the means wherewith gender is produced. Resistance for Butler is not outside or prior to the ‘heteronormative signifying systems’ but in the rethinking of the possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself.96
Bodies
Butler’s Gender trouble provides her readers with a taste of her doubts around natural, sexed or real bodies. “Is the body or the sexed body the firm foundation on which gender and systems of compulsory sexuality operate?” Or is even the body itself shaped by these political forces? The sex/gender binary suggests an ‘original’ body that prevails gender signification. This body seems a passive medium that is inscribed. Is the body “a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?”97 The choice of the word inscribed reminds of Foucault’s idea of the body
as an inscribed surface of events.
According to Butler the real body is a culturally constructed phantasy.98 The ‘natural’ is a
similar creation of culture. There are cultural categories that naturalize and preserve the idea of
93 Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of “sex” (London, New York 1993) ix. 94 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) 10. 95 Judith Butler, Bodies that matter (London, New York 1993) ix.
96 Anita Brady, Tony Shirato, Understanding Judith Butler (London 2010) 49. 97 Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) 177.
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bodies that fit the norm. The strange bodies therefore present an opportunity to see past these cultural conventions. Sexual categorizations are constructed and might therefore be constructed differently in the future through performativity.99 Butler’s deconstruction enables her to hope for another construction in the near future, a more inclusive construction. This reminds of Foucault; the site of the ‘negative’ connection with the norm (construction in Foucault and performativity in Butler), can also be the source of positive change. The very fact that all is constructed and subjected to power structure is, surprisingly enough, the source of agency.
Butler’s later work Bodies that matter illuminates more on her ideas about bodies. The main principle in this work is the idea that ‘the body’ is shaped by power mechanisms and discourse. For example, sex is, like gender, a cultural norm that interferes with bodies.100 This influence on the body’s materiality means rephrasing material bodies as products of power.101 Firstly, this entails that the body must be understood as the effect of a dynamic power. Secondly: The repetition of discourses, performances et cetera make bodies visible and recognizable as a coherent set of forms, categories and meanings. Thirdly, this recognition of the body is the first step that leads to the production of the subject. Furthermore, the association of bodily exemplars with authorized meanings, narratives and values works as a Foucauldian norm: it disciplines subjects, and finally the process of becoming or not becoming a subject that fits within this norm depends not just on what is allowed, but also on what is denied.102
When Butler defines the body as a construction, she does not want to portray it as artificial or false. She wants to show her readers that the body only makes sense, can only be understood, through a variety of descriptive regimes. She portrays it as follows: Bodies only appear through the language we have to describe them. In this description bodies are, as a matter of fact, constructed.103
Butler wants us to read bodies as constructs, this calls for a rethinking of the meaning of construction itself. When construction is a constitutive element, we have to look into the question of abject bodies. Construction produces a domain of intelligible bodies, and therefore produces bodies that are unintelligible bodies, unthinkable, abject, unliveable bodies as well. These bodies
99 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) 149.
100 Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of “sex” (London, New York 1993) xii-xiii 101 Butler, Bodies that matter (London, New York 1993) xii-xiii.
102 Anita Brady, Tony Shirato, Understanding Judith Butler (London 2010) 12-13. 103 Brady, Shirato, Butler (London 2010) 38.
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are not even in opposition, because opposition needs intelligibility.104
Butler claims that sexual difference is shaped by discursive practices. Sexual differences are always connected with discursive boundaries. This does not directly mean that discourse causes sexual difference. She continues that the category sex is normative. It is a Foucauldian regulatory ideal, which means that ‘sex’ not only functions as a norm, it also has a regulatory capacity that produces the kind of bodies it governs.105 This regulatory force is a productive power, it “demarcates, circulates, differentiates, the bodies it controls”.106 Sex is therefore not a
fact or a static condition, it is a process where norms materialize ‘sex’. This materialization is accomplished through a compulsory repetition of the norms.107 The materiality of the body is produced by the norms of ‘sex’ in a performative manner. Same as gender, sex is performed. We cannot think a material body apart from the materialization of the norm. The norm, for example sex, makes the body intelligible in the cultural domain. It provides the body with meaning.108
There is no end to this process of materialization. Bodies never totally fit the role by which their materialization is supported. But this has a positive side to it. Especially unfinished bodies, or the possibility of rematerialization can be the base for critique. A critique of the regulatory law, the possibility of other embodiments is the possibility of rearticulating the hegemonic law.109 This is where agency can be found in a theory of constructionism. The subject
The authors of Understanding Judith Butler describe how Butler sees the formation of the body as a culturally intelligible site that comes to have the status of a subject.110 Bodies are invested with meaning and abide certain norms. The incorporation of these norms has a disciplining effect on the subject. It is the basis of constructing a subjectivity that will or will not fit in.111 A critical
questioning of these norms seems vital to devaluate the border between belonging or not belonging. In this context, Butler poses an important question in her book Gender Trouble. She wonders what might happen to the subject and the stable gender categories once the regime of
104 Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of “sex” (London, New York 1993) x. 105 Butler, Bodies that matter (London, New York 1993) xi.
106 Ibidem xi-xii 107 Ibidem xii. 108 Ibidem xii-xiii. 109 Ibidem xii.
110 Anita Brady, Tony Shirato, Understanding Judith Butler (London 2010) 1-2. 111 Brady, Shirato, Butler (London 2010) 12-13.
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heterosexuality is exposed as that which produces and materializes these ontological categories. She emphasises that power operates in the production of the binary frames. It produces the dichotomy between male and female, but also between subject and the other.112
Moreover, sex is a cultural norm that interferes in the materialization of the body. The adaptation of this bodily norm is not something that happens to the subject. Moreover, the subject is shaped by this process of adapting a sex. This process is intertwined with identification. The heterosexual norm provides some sexual identities but rejects other identifications. It therewith creates an in-group and an out- group. Abject beings are being constructed.113 The subject is shaped by this process of adapting a sex. In Bodies that matter Butler once more describes how having a sex relates to identification.
The subject that emerges because of oppression becomes a bearer of this repressive law.114 Butler describes in Bodies that matter how subjects are formed by an exclusionary matrix. Such a subject-formation inevitably leads to the production of a domain of abject beings, those who are ‘not yet subjects’.115 These abject beings are not something we should pity, Butler
sees them as the breeding ground for resistance against the norm. They can provide practices that do not coincide with the norm that materializes sexual difference. This might open a possibility for queer and feminist politics.116
Butler’s constructed subject sparked a debate. Butler already addresses one of the main critiques: if the subject is constructed, who is constructing the subject? Butler warns us to be wary of grammar: “For if gender is constructed, it is not necessarily constructed by an “I” or a “we” who stands before that construction in any spatial or temporal sense of
“before”….Subjected to gender, but not subjectivated by gender, the “I” neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves.”117
The debate between essentialism and constructivism misses the point of deconstruction, according to Butler. Deconstruction is not only about ‘everything is constructed by discourse’. That would downplay it to a discursive monism or linguisticism, and this is not Butler’s goal.
112 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) XXX. 113 Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of “sex” (London, New York 1993) xiii 114 Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) 107.
115 Butler, Bodies that matter (London, New York 1993) xiii. 116 Ibidem xiv-xv.
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She stresses the constitutive force of exclusion; the construction of a subject is connected with exclusions and erasures. This outside might be constructed by discourse, pushed aside by the norms. But this outside is not absolute, it has its own ontology and is therefore a constitutive outside that exists in relation to discourse.118
Construction is not an act that happens once, we should not understand constructivism as a deterministic asset without any room for human agency. The paradox of subjectivation is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms.119
A lot of Butler’s thinking on subjectivity is revolving around political subjectivity. She describes how the subject of women is no longer thought of in stable or acknowledged terms. Overall the belief in ‘the Subject’ diminished and is therefore no longer the site for political representation. In agreement with Foucault, Butler claims that the subject is constructed by power. The subject is an essential concept for (feminist) politics. Juridical subjects are produced through exclusionary practices that do not “show” once the juridical structure of politics has been established. Foucault already showed how juridical powers construed the subject they allegedly represent.120
This political subject is prone to legitimating and segregating practices. These procedures are hidden and naturalized by the juridical political power. (Political) power produces what it claims to represent and therefore has a dual function. It is simultaneously a juridical – and a productive power. “In effect, the law produces and then conceals the notion of “a subject before the law” in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law’s own regulatory hegemony.”121 Butler began her Gender
Trouble with the question whether the feminist ‘subject’ exists. She wonders if the feminist
politics could do without such an idea of ‘subject’ because the feminist ‘we’ is nothing more than a phantasmatic construction.122 The subject is a construct; therefore the feminist subject is a
construct as well. But what kind of agency does that leave the feminist struggle? “The question of agency is reformulated as a question of how signification and
118 Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of “sex” (London, New York 1993) xvii. 119 Butler, Bodies that matter (London, New York 1993) xviii. xxiii.
120 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) 2. 121 Judith Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) 3.
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resignification work.” 123 The ‘I’ only exists through a signifying practice that wants to
camouflage its own workings and naturalize its effects.124 Through repetition of the rules the subject takes shape. Agency only means the possibility to introduce a variation into this repetition.125 It is important to Butler that we take note of the idea that construction is not necessarily opposed to agency. This means discarding the binary between free will and
determinism. Butler reconceptualises identity as an effect, something that is produced. And this brings about possibilities of agency that are missed by positions that believe that identity categories are fixed and foundational.126
Feminism should not presume the subject it hopes to represent and liberate.
Deconstructing the subject does not mean the deconstruction of political action. Butler shows how deconstruction shows that the very terms of identity are political.127 An example of this can be found in her Contingent foundations (Butler’s chapter in The feminist history reader). In this article Butler claims that the very assumption of agency in the subject is in itself an act of political power, because subjects are constituted through exclusion.128
This constituted subject does not necessarily entail that it is also a determined subject. To deconstruct the subject is not to negate or discard the concept. Deconstruction means that the term ‘the subject’ is not strictly connected to a certain meaning. Deconstruction opens up a term for a recycling or redeployment, and therefore agency.129
According to Brady and Shirato, the relation between subjectivity and identity is not quite clear in Butler’s work. In Bodies that matter, she stresses that a subject does not assume a bodily norm (a sex), but it is rather the process of adapting a sex that constructs the subject. Butler connects this process with identification, and with the heterosexual norm that encourages certain identifications and excludes others. Identification, in this context, seems to be happening after the becoming of a subject. Identification means a form of agency.130 In Understanding Judith
Butler the following question is posed: “to what extend can we make space for this notion of
123 Judith Butler, Gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity (London 1990) 197. 124 Butler, Gender trouble (London 1990) 197-198.
125 Ibidem 198. 126 Ibidem 201. 127 Ibidem 203.
128 Judith Butler, ‘Contingent foundations: feminism and the question of postmodernism’ in Sue Morgan ed. Feminist history reader (Abingdon 2006) 197.
129 Butler, Feminist history reader (Abbingdon 2006) 199.
