"A great deal of feminist theory and literature has nevertheless assumed that there is a 'doer' behind the deed. Without an agent, it is argued, there can be no agency and hence no potential to initiate a transformation of relations of domination within society." (Gender Trouble)
The feminist problems which, at least, on the level of theory, torment me the most, always come down to the question of free-will. It was when I wrote the blog Performative women that I confronted the issue of "political lesbianism" ; it's not a subversion of the patriarchy to think heterosexual women have no agency outside of men's desires if desire for women still equates to agency. I was reading Irigaray's Speculum of the Other woman, too, where I noticed men have access to an agentive "acting" while women's actions are relegated to some sort of superficial performance. Reading Gender Trouble by Judith Butler now led me back to this thread on performativity. Another problem of free-will addressed by Butler -- a frustrating one when I first read about it in some Substack post criticizing Andrea Dworkin -- was the determinism of culturally constructed gender identity almost equivalent to biological essentialism:
"When the relevant 'culture' that 'constructs' gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny."
Pragmatically, this cultural model demonstrates the contingency of gender to a certain time and place so it may be denaturalized. However, by having something "before" gender, this "before" that psychoanalysis tried and failed to discover,1 there will be "a presocial ontology of persons who freely constent to be governed" which ultimately justifies the social contract of culture. I think about the popular invocation of historical evidence of "matriarchy" preceding patriarchy when Butler writes about this. The conditions under matriarchy are exactly what would have led to and necessitated a patriarchal "revolution" in the end (this is the issue with any retvrn to the past). In my blog, What is "Identity politics", I also wrote about the example of Christian nostalgia for paganism and how the pagan "before" only works to reinforce Christian dominance today.2
I want to provide more nuance to what I said about Todd McGowan's premise, "identity depends on nonidentity," in that blog (or mangle the premise with misunderstanding and create something new out of it) through what I read in Gender Trouble. I tried to compare "nonidentity" to Julia Kristeva's "impurity" from "Semiotics of Biblical Abomination"; however, impurity implies a "before," before separation, before purification. Kristeva identifies (ironically) the psychoanalytic pre-Oedipal mother as impure, as the unspeakable outside the symbolic order. For Butler, as long as there is an identity depending on nonidentity, or a purity depending on impurity, than that nonidentity also depends on identity, impurity depends on purity, and "before" depends on "after":
"The repressive law … acts not merely as a negative or exclusionary code, but as a sanction and, most pertinently, as a law of discourse, distinguishing the speakable from the unspeakable (delimiting and constructing the domain of the unspeakable), the legitimate from the illegitimate."
Identity generates nonidentity. Kristeva is making the same mistake that she observes herself in the Christian contradiction in which one is born evil but also responsible for evil; the law imposes separation (gender), but there remains an agent before that law. In fact, if it is the dominating law which constructs our idea of the lawless "agent" in the first place, then we could see it as patriarchal Christianity structuring the feminist ideal of "freedom" like the mind/body dualism of the soul. Referring to Foucault's ideas of the soul as an inscription on the body rather than inside the body, Butler reiterates:
"'Inner' and 'outer' makes sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. and this stability, this coherence, is determined in large parts by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, 'inner' and 'outer' constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject."
The soul, or the agent, existed before its exterior body, or its exterior law, and its eternal quality will necessarily escape its temporarily contingent master. There is a blank individual who existed before gender, before culture, and so gender is only temporary and the blank individual must eventually return. Yet, it is the "outside" which determines the line between inside/outside. The interior soul, the agent, the repressed, the impure, the nonidentity, isn't a subversion of the exterior body, the law, the pure, or identity -- it is created by the outside itself.
The law's generation rather than prohibition of the repressed is nothing Deleuze & Guattari (and Foucault) weren't already saying almost two decades before the publication of Gender Trouble. But, like I criticized in Right-wing women: ideology or desire?, a feminist context was necessary, and that's what Butler delivered. As much as capitalism displaces its own limits through movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, patriarchy determines the borders of of its own "inside" and "outside" so any possible subversion always serves itself:
"The culturally contradictory enterprise of the mechanism of repression is prohibitive and generative at once and makes the problematic of 'liberation' especially acute. The female law that is freed from the shackles of the paternal law may well prove to be yet another incarnation of that law."
"… the law's uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will -- out of fidelity -- defeat themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected, have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis."
Biological essentialism will never save women, but neither will a model of agency which must transcend culture to change culture. An essential, non-gendered "before" may offer what appears like a stable, clear and safe vision for feminism. Recognizing the creative nature of the law, otherwise, would let us abandon those patriarchal constructs of "originals," of authenticity and Ideas, to create something new and playful, something Butler already sees in the "parody of the idea of the natural and the original" in drag.