Judith Butler, Gender Trouble — Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions (1990)

“… separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions.”

One of her most influential works, Butler’s theoretical perception of gender and the body is captivating by the single use of cultural inscription. A guide between the works of Sontag and Fellows / Razack seen much later, Butler’s approach must be led by two confounding questions: “Is there a political shape to “women,” as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view?” and “What circumscribes that site as “the female body?”

So, how does culture, inscript a body to formulate decisive language, practices, or rules which one should adhere to by their presentation? There is, of course, no statistical measure of the body’s personification of itself nor could a graph be formed highlighting an achievable number according to one’s gender presentation; gender is then, “neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived.” Yet, more specifically, Butler’s conclusion provides a context of cultural inscription of gender, which becomes necessary to the function of these comprehensive questions:

“Gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences”

The categories of ‘performance’ and ‘consequences’ are carefully divided into the internal and external environment of the body. We develop into a gender performance before conception, bound by limiting colors or designs on t-shirts, held down by feminine activities and masculine sports, forced to separate on opposite sides of the classroom as we slowly begin to view the other as ‘different.’ Regulatory, seasonal, each second, the body’s conception of itself must remain transfixed on the authoritarian power of external reciprocation of acceptance, of the binary which holds long hair to baggy clothes to crossed legs to whip cream on cold drinks meaningful, or rather necessary. To be more concise, Butler develops the “three dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance” which begin to fashion the principles of their theory.

Rather, gender’s movement alongside identity becomes metaphysical, and in the case of performance, it more specifically becomes an illusion. Their work surrounding the ‘Other’, or the Cartesian / Foucault dualistic construction of the soul, or rather systematically, the inscription and transgression onto the body, outlines its illusive significance on gender identity. A ‘disembodied consciousness’ Butler signifies,  a clear separation between the structuralist framework of mind/body and culture/society. Unshockingly, analysis of the skin develops alongside cultural coherence. As mentioned later on, Susan Sontag’s, Illness as a Metaphor, addresses the ill-defined metaphors that shape the sick through the expression of Cancer and Tuberculosis. Butler, follows Sontag’s approach in her work, arriving at the AIDS movement, defining the skin as, “[a] systemically signified by taboos and anticipated transgression.” Bodily fluids become the ‘transgressions,’ and the the cultural inscription derives from the existing hegemonic order, which creates the anti-, the homophobia, toward the ‘Other.’ Butler sums it up as,

“male homosexuality would, within such a hegemonic point of view, constitute a site of danger and pollution, prior to and regardless of the cultural presence of AIDS.”

So, what is Butler’s conclusion? While, one may have to read into some lines or redefine some new vocabulary, she makes it simple to the readers who have made it that far. It reads as such, “In other words, acts, and gestures, articulated and enacted desires created the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purpose of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” While it might seem redundant, the message aligns with many other theorists and intersectional works in literature, highlighting even some present ideas of Fellows and Razacks, whose theory known as ‘The Race to Innocence’ is mentioned later in this article. Gender is a regulator for people who follow it. A facet of feelings that cater toward feminine and masculine binaries internally, and of course, externally. There is no right or wrong assimilation of presentation toward physical appearance, attire, walks, language, and expression — it is all a performance anyway. Made up of fluid traits, internal gratification can be made from external perception.

While I could carry on about Butler and her revolutionary theories, I will wrap it up with one more quote that furthers the significance of her work:

“Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”

Fellows and Razack, The Race to Innocence — Confronting Hierarchial Relations Among Women (1998)

The Race to Innocence is a 19-page document confronting the hierarchal relationships between women when oppression is a point of conversation. Fellows and Razack, who developed their theory in 1998, express the notion of ‘competing marginalities,’ a facet of victimization, complicity, and erasure that emerges from the fear of our own eradication as women. Numerous talking points envelop the framework, layered yet exceptionally examined, so to be concise and literal when creating a specific narrative of my own, here is what Fellows and Razack developed in my own words:

1. Communication. If they feel they are not validated in the damaging action, if their ideology is not listened to as thoroughly, there will be no shift in targeting other institutions that undermine women. The only equality that will then be reached is one where she feels adequately listened to.
2. One can use their subordination as a means for further domination if equality for themselves can be garnered. They wish to secure their own places in the margin with fear over risk of erasure, but it develops into an unproductive, systemic pattern.
3. Although, one may believe their claims are advancing any assertion for justice by addressing institutional subordination or oppression, distinguishing the self as separate, by claiming oneself as an antithesis, leads to further injustice for all.
4. Questioning past intellectual inquiry, we can begin to ask, “Why do we feel consistently innocent of one another’s oppression.” Multifariouness can be furthered when innocence is addressed.
5. Identity is only a contrived idea of difference, contrasting with its own root of ‘same,’ when speaking upon groups of subordination. The ‘baseline’ of race, gender, sexuality, language, etc. lack the same continuance of voice, and often face oppression from their own broad group of identification on the basis, that they no longer fit into the baseline. One is to hold the condition of ‘norm,’ a product that embodies the ability to not have to actively produce or sustain the domination.

The work is furthered, enveloped in historical social orders and Foucault’s examinations of the bourgeois in the nineteenth century, to produce the possible chain of events from prostitution 200 years prior to the social order of the working class. Fellows and Razacks’s procurement of ‘The Race to Innocence’ is necessarily repetitive, and whose broad statements maintain the conditions of social repression unapologetically: “We are able in this way to maintain our innocence and to consider that the systems that oppress us are unconnected from the ones in which we are privileged.”

Having read the theoretical document a few years back, my interest developed alongside new waves of feministic ventures and mind-numbing old literature whose chosen words for women needed staggering introductions of ill-defined sexual connotations, its approach was a way to work through intersections of race, class, gender, identity, and historical analysis leaving the devaluation of women from a patriarchy, to possibly, a matriarchal evolution whose intersections must first address race. Movements geared toward women are recent, confined to a mere century, whose typical allegiance aligns not with the women, but with the whiteness. Suffrage movements, charts, comparisons, and wages of the man who comes first, but the white women who follow — I spent many moments of my time trying to articulate ‘white feminism’ and its allegiance to race. Sitting in drafts discarded by the tens, the examination of Fellows and Razack’s work led me to my intersectional roots, with titles such as, ‘The Worst of White Feminism and The Glorification of the Sex Industry,’ and drawn-out notes on consent in a televised sex industry¹, the transactional space of money and sex², and what freedoms the women obtains when she is advertised for her bodily autonomy yet utilized for sexual exchange.

More importantly, the foundation of intersection within race aligns with Butler’s personification of the ‘Other’ from a social ontological perspective. As there will be differing definitions, Fellows and Razack begin to define theirs as:

“The containment of the Other is a making of the dominant self. To exclude Others from the membership in the human community, that is, to name, classify, and contain the Other through a number of representational and material practices, assures the material basis for domination while enabling the members of the dominant group to define themselves.”

To mention more names, I had recently picked up The Second Sex by Simon De Beauvoir in a charity shop, with only limited time to read the introduction. Unsurprisingly, her words related to hierarchal relations women encounter, so quickly I wish to share a becoming of the ‘Other’ in the context of man v women:

“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other”

I could have quoted her passage on Levi-Strauss, or Benda and his Rapport d’Uriel, but what else was this marginalization of the ‘Other’ than verbal manipulation, or by linguistic default, or even the confidence to assign labels? Beauvoir held it simply, man did become the Subject by the peculiar situation of not having to defend male identity — they were simply It. The sex that is women, through hormones or reproductive organs, must clarify the binarism and even defend the title of ‘Other,’ to be seen as an opposite — outlined more specifically when Simone offers a historical analysis of religion, culture, servitude, etc. being overshadowed by a possible weakness, a fault, which concludes that: “No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential.” And so, the dominant group becomes everything the ‘Other,’ or the ‘weaker’ is not, and at once the label is born.

Social order drove notions of respectability from feudalism to liberal democracies. History held domination, the assertion of membership in a culture and of personal identity to a systemic hierarchy, leaving the individual to either suffer under the conditions of exploitation or earn distinction in ‘respectability.’ Fellows and Razack are more polished with such words in their work, but what I wanted to end this deconstruction on was the last three pages of the work. Towards the end, their words which mirror the broad questions at the beginning of the work, are more refined and somehow entirely dependent on the last section to to reconstruct this theoretical argument from a historical glance. The quote goes as such:

“…However, is only made possible by her complicity in maintaining class, gender, and racial hierarchies that resulted in the economic and sexual exploitation of other women”

While, I could have factored in racial regression, skin and domestic workers, or sexual exploitation and the distinction of the middle-class family, the central argument reconstructed, wisely might I add, to an intersectional perspective while also maintaining a socio-economic and political standpoint was brilliant. They were broad, yet decisive in what it meant to be a woman yet still be subordinate by race, queerness, or economic stature. Unsurprisingly, the mention of ‘complicity’ above, never strayed from the central meaning of the text, which contributes to an understanding of intersectionality, entirely.

Susan Sontag’s, Illness as Metaphor (1978)

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

Sontag’s descriptions never falter and her statement above captures the refined movement of her text. A common generalization, a homage to her later metaphors and discrepancies society hones toward TB and Cancer, she moves to particulars, developing such comparisons between the ‘sick’ and the ‘well,’ a necessary skill that matures Sontag’s theory: victim-blaming is central to sickness and the language used, the metaphors expressed in medicine or society, even void conversations, re-define those suffering with sickness until their experience becomes navigated by a domination of metaphorical ignorance…

“First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things”

The patient suffering from Tuberculosis is, “more beautiful and more soulful,” the person dying of Cancer is “robbed of all capacities of self-transcendence, humiliated by fear and agony.” In an elaborate fashion, Sontag doesn’t need specific dialogue or an outline of the theoretical structure toward beliefs, her metaphors are pointedly bold, willing the text to become theoretical by not only analysis but her own confidence. She knew medicine not because of academic knowledge, but become she knew disease; she knew literature, and therefore she knew suffering. Sontag’s brazen claims were not lacking, nor did they shy away from broad assertions; she saw a metaphor in romanticism or a comparison to the soul and knew that language was an appropriate response, to what Judith Butler comes to define as cultural inscription.

“Health becomes banal, even vulgar”

Pursuing language surrounding Cancer, Sontag’s perception shocked me with her brilliant comparisons contrived between the patient and terminology used in warfare — a rich analysis of the ruination the disease causes upon the body and the speech we have developed as ‘controlling metaphors:”

“Thus, cancer cells do not simply multiply they are invasive. Cancer cells ‘colonize’ from the original tumor to far sites in the body, first setting up tiny outposts… Chemotherapy is chemical warfare, using poisons. Treatments aim to ‘kill’ cancer cells… There is everything but the body count”

It only makes sense for phrases like “the war on cancer” to be coined, that it was a problem which needed to be defeated, a solution solved through associations (American Cancer Society) or by the media as it develops a sense of ‘literalness and authority” toward society. Cancer becomes the “Other,” a “mutation” on a tumor, or an “alien-like” sci-fi tale, which causes an “atrophy or blockage of bodily functions.” It was different than TB and its consumption. It did not inspire romantics and their poems, or idealized beliefs surrounding health when one is skinny enough to cough up blood. It was destruction, past the centering of the soul (like TB), toward the body itself as a target. It became an “Other” by default, on its refusal to consume energy and target the self.

Not only inventive in her work, I wanted to touch on her sharp comparisons between TB and Cancer. From the first chapter, Sontag made sure to outline Cancer’s position as an outliner in medicine. “Ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses,” etc. A notable polarity to TB, connections between spiritualizing a redemptive death (moral corruption!) or boldened by moral and psychological judgments, the commentary that follows Tuberculosis has differed each century. You were mysterious, wealthy, romantic, healthy, a dropout and a wanderer, one who is creative and sad, attractive, held the distinction for breeding, passionate and strangely sexual, the list can continue filled with the conditioning of the illness on society. I have found that TB’s reputation was shaped from a cultural standpoint, in the same condition Botox, health treatments, laser hair removal, sex toys, coffee, cigarettes, and close relationships with your mother: It is what society made it at that time. It is reconstructed on the revision of health, sex, relationships, and gender which are inscripted and redefined by each decade, until like TB, an accurate depiction is simply not possible. It moves with human nature until you have forgotten one is suffering at all.

Naturally, I wanted to write more. I suppose anything theoretical holds the right content to spur the desire for my own words, yet as I have not left the idea of this draft yet, the title is all I can afford. It only makes sense to include existentialism into the mix: Romance As A Disease: Sontag’s ‘Illness As A Metaphor’ and Albert Camus, the Stranger, Reconstructs Romanticism Through Tuberculosis (And Cancer.)

Digested quite briefly here, I do wish to end with a necessary message Sontag discreetly writes within the work, which not only articulates the premise of her text, but holds a social truth of language and fear of the unknown.

“Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill”