Undoing Gender – Upping the Anti 23/10/19, 10:16 PM

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Undoing
Gender ISSUE

REVIEWED BY ERIN GRAY / ISSUE 1 / 10/8/2009 1

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler develops upon her
earlier work in gender and queer theory. Butler, a
professor in Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and
Women’s Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, is best known for her groundbreaking book
Gender Trouble, in which she outlined her theory of
BROWSE
gender performativity and the construction of THE
sexuality. Since Gender Trouble appeared in 1990, JOURNAL
feminist, queer, and literary work in the humanities
has been heavily influenced by Butler’s nuanced Introductions
exposure of gender’s construction. Moving beyond a Letters to
binary frame in which gender is assumed to signify an the Editors
essential self, Butler exposes the categories of sex,
Editorials
desire and gender as effects of specific power
structures. Focusing more on linguistic action than on Interviews
a theatrical sense of performativity, Butler defines the Articles
latter as a stylized repetition of acts that produces the
effect of an internal, natural core on the surface of the Roundtables

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body. Because gender is often assumed to be an Book

extension of natural interiority, its sociality and public Reviews
function is often overlooked. Butler’s emphasis on the
simultaneity of improvisation/performance and
constraint underscores the paradoxical nature of
gendered identity construction. In Butler’s analysis,
this is apparent in gender parodies such as drag, which, Subscribe to
though parodic, is not necessarily subversive. Butler’s our low-traffic
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work has helped further expose the foundational
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categories of sex, desire and gender as effects of about UTA
specific power structures, thus moving beyond a news, events,
and new online
binary frame in which gender is assumed to signify an
content.
essential self.

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As in Bodies that Matter (1993), Undoing Gender takes Address
from Gender Trouble much of its conceptual and
type your email address
theoretical frameworks, but situates a critique of the
production of gender norms within a materially based
understanding of the complex relationship between
survival and social transformation. Where Gender
SIGN
Trouble largely focused on gender as a doing, here
UP
Butler is concerned with undoing, or unperforming,
hegemonic modes of gender and sexuality.

Gender is defined in Undoing Gender as a “practice of

improvisation within a scene of constraint,” one that is SEARCH

always within a social context, and never outside of

ideology. In her introduction, Butler writes that
Undoing Gender offers an understanding of how
“restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and
gendered life” might be undone. Butler stresses
throughout the book that this process of undoing is not
necessarily negative or positive, but is instead caught
up in the paradoxical tension between societal-
mediated survival and individual agency. Butler
reminds us that one does not author one’s gender, for

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its terms are always negotiated within collective social

contexts. In “Undiagnosing Gender,” for example, she
addresses the tension within transsexual communities
around the diagnosis of gender-identity disorder
(GID). The tension arises because, though the
diagnosis is an economic necessity in order for
transsexuals to gain access to funds for sex-change
operations, the diagnosis is inherently pathologizing
in its conflation of transsex with disorder. Many
people in trans communities view the diagnosis of GID
as an institutional barrier to transautonomy, as it
forces transsexuals to conform to the discursive power
of the medical and psychoanalytic communities.
Butler points out that the diagnosis, necessary under
capitalism for economic access to surgery, exacerbates
the tension between autonomy and community, as
transsexuals must submit to discourse in order to gain
autonomy at the level of the body. We are never, Butler
reminds us, able to remove ourselves from ideology,
and we must work with the dominant ideology’s tools
in order to subvert its material effects.

In Undoing Gender, Butler seems to be fighting off

critics’ accusations that Gender Trouble espoused a
humanist desire for gendered autonomy, as she argues
that individual bodily agency is conditional on its place
within a collective whole; “not only does one need the
social world to be a certain way in order to lay claim to
what is one’s own, but it turns out that what is one’s
own is always from the start dependent upon what is
not one’s own, the social conditions by which
autonomy is, strangely, dispossessed and undone”.

Desire, for Butler, is bound up with questions of power

and social normativity. Asking what gender wants,
Butler links desire with recognition in a Hegelian

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sense. It is through the experience of recognition, she

writes, that people are constituted as social beings.
Butler expands Hegel’s notion of recognition to point
out that, since the terms by which we are recognizable
are constituted socially, they are also alterable.

There is an implicit tension between desiring norms in

order to survive, and maintaining a critical distance
from them. For Butler, a critical relationship to norms
depends on a collective ability to articulate alternative,
oppositional “norms” that necessitate action. Doing,
stresses Butler, is tied to being; “if I have any agency, it
is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a
social world I never chose. That my agency is riven
with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means
only that paradox is the condition of its possibility”. It
is this paradox that Butler investigates throughout the
book, specifically in regards to the question of critical
social transformation. This transformation of norms,
Butler repeatedly reminds us, comes from within an
understanding of how one is constituted by them. If
Gender Trouble’s main concern was with exploring the
dynamics through which genders are constructed and
performed, Undoing Gender is concerned with the
question of survival based undoings, performative
resistance at the level of both ideology and the body,
and which is, importantly, always social and collective.

In examining how bodies are normalized and made

“human,” Butler explicitly concerns herself with the
question of autonomy. Choosing one’s own body means
navigating among norms, and individual agency is
bound up with societal critique and social
transformation. One’s personal gender is determined
to the extent that social norms support and enable acts
of claiming.

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Butler also looks at the various ways in which humans

are normalized as human. She importantly points to
the connections between these types of gender
discrimination, gender violence, and the harsh
normalizing mode of the promotion of gay and lesbian
marriage: “the critical question… becomes, how might
the world be reorganized so that this conflict can be
ameliorated?”. In the case of gay and lesbian marriage,
for example, she writes that gay and lesbian kinship
forms are not recognized as kinship unless they mimic
a heterosexual familial structure. This normative
family form is predicated upon recognition from the
state, a site for the articulation of the fantasy of
normativity, legitimation, and anonymity. Like GID
and surgery on intersexed babies, gay and lesbian
marriage diagnoses and institutes gender norms, but
norms which are necessary in order for many people to
survive.

In detailing the paradox of autonomy, Butler writes

that, until society is radically altered, freedom will
continue to require unfreedom, and autonomy
subjection. She does not however, offer an explanation
of how the paradox of autonomy, or, more precisely,
the relationship between gender normalization and
gender self-fashioning, may be resolved within a wider
process of social transformation. This is, obviously, out
of the stated scope of Butler’s text, but something
which needs to be articulated between gender and
queer theory, and connected to anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist theory and practice.

Butler has been criticized for replacing so-called “real”

politics with symbolic politics, leaving little room for
large scale social change. Professor Martha Nussbaum,
in an article in The New Republic, accuses Butler of

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“hip quietism” and a pessimistic, amoral, anarchic

disavowal of the law and social normativity. Her view
of politics, according to Nussbaum, is oddly
pessimistic in its poststructuralist belief that there is
no agent prior to social forces that produce the self.
Though Butler repeatedly stresses agency and the
need for resistance, Nussbaum questions where this
ability comes from if autonomy may only be sought by
parodying dominant discourses and practices; “there
is a void, then, at the heart of Butler’s notion of
politics. This void can look liberating, because the
reader fills it implicitly with a normative theory of
human equality or dignity. But then we have to
articulate those norms – and this Butler refuses to do.”

Nussbaum’s critique was published in response to

Gender Trouble and Excitable Speech, and focuses
largely on Butler’s “difficult,” academic writing style.
Though Butler, who was trained in philosophy at Yale,
may be inaccessible to those who have no previous
experience in the work of the theorists she references,
Undoing Gender is an arguably easier read than some
of her earlier work. While this may merely be the
result of my having marginal experience with Butler’s
ideas, there is still something to be said for Butler’s
tenacious emphasis on subversion, even while she
recognizes how difficult that subversion may be. And it
is not as though Butler has no experience in activism;
she has worked in AIDS activism within queer
communities, and is an outspoken, and harshly
criticized, anti-Zionist Jew.

Gender is a project of cultural survival, a strategy, and,

as stated earlier, acts of gender create the idea of
gender. The relevance of theory for activism has been
contentious in both the academy and on the street,

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with many radical theorists, from Marx to bell hooks,

pointing out the need to theorize oppositional
consciousness and action. Theoretical practice helps
destabilize the binary on which dominant modes of
thought have worked to create marked rifts between
how we define ourselves in relation to others. Butler’s
emphasis on survival and on the relationship between
the tactile and the discursive, emphasizes how neo-
liberal rhetoric plays itself out on the real bodies of the
disenfranchised.

Butler’s emphasis on the extent to which our bodies

have a public dimension reminds us that struggling for
autonomy requires a struggle for a conception of the
self within a community; “to live is to live a life
politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in
the act of assuming responsibility for a collective
future”. Emotions such as desire, mourning, and rage
allow people to relate to others, as they enact an
undoing of the self, and allow for an apprehension of
the social dimensions of embodied life. Grief and rage,
therefore, have implications for activism, as they allow
people to return to a source of vulnerability, to a
collective responsibility for our physical lives.

Butler therefore, steps away from the largely

inaccessible tone of Gender Trouble in order to explore
the complex relationship between social power and
the embodiment of gender norms, as well as the terms
through which agency and survival may be articulated.
Focusing on the relationship between feminist and
queer politics and radical democratic theory, Undoing
Gender is influenced by how “New Gender Politics”
(social movements concerned with transgender,
transsexuality, intersex, feminist, and queer politics)
may work together to construct a future of resistance.

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Undoing Gender is thus indispensable not only for

feminist, queer and transsexed investigations of
philosophical and practical social change, but is useful
for wider anti-imperialist work as well. It is precisely
our task, as anti-heterosexist activists, to articulate the
relationship between the radical ideologies we embody
and how we perform gender and grassroots politics.
Butler’s philosophical musings on subjectivity, and the
conditions required by current social relations for one
to be considered a living, human subject, have
implications for our collective struggles against capital
and empire, and, as well as asking how we may
subversively undo gender, we can also ask how all
oppressive structures may be undone. As Butler
contends, queer politics are about resisting
assimilation, and remaking reality at the level of the
body: “to intervene in the name of transformation
means precisely to disrupt what has become settled
knowledge and knowable reality and to use …one’s
unreality to make an otherwise impossible or illegible
claim”. Desire is itself a transformative activity, and it
is our task, as radicals, to perform our resistance, our
desire for change, and to demand the impossible.

Erin Gray is a student, writer, and activist in Toronto.

She organizes with GRAIN (Grassroots Anti-Imperialist
Network) at York University, and will be completing an
MA on the politics of the avant-garde in the coming year.

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