This week we discussed Jemima Repo’s
excellent (truly excellent!) forthcoming essay “Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s
Gender Genealogy” (to be published in the journal of Feminist Theory).
The discussion began, as per usual, with
questions:
1) The discussion on pages 5 & 6
of the nature/culture distinction was interesting, but there is a question
about the scope of the claims. Is it the
case that “the biopolitical… control over sex” holds always? Or just sometimes?
2) On page 13 there is a claim that,
“For Foucault, pleasure is a capacity.” What
might this mean? Is this accurate? What’s at stake here?
3) On page 14 (also again around 18)
there is a claim that there is an “organic yet non-discursive body”? What’s at stake here? Why claim this? A little before there is an accusation that
Butler confuses “the non-discursive with pre-discursive” (13). Why does Repo need to claim this? What does that idea do that Butler can’t do? What’s at stake in Repo such that she has to
argue this?
4) On page 18, there is a contrast
between “the organization of desires” and “their [desires] unhappy, compulsory
self-destruction” (18). This is very
helpful. It registers a connection
between what some in our group like about the connection between Foucault and
Deleuze—order is a positive productive effusive activity (not necessarily ‘good’)—in
contrast to French Hegelian arguments about order as resting on contradiction.
5) Is the paper operating with a
dichotomy between two kinds of explanations?
What is the difference between “genealogy of gender ontology” and “genealogy
of gender”?
6) A few background questions on
Butler for the group:
What is the equivalent
in Butler of Foucault’s dispositif? (For if we don’t have one, then performance
seems over-individualized, rather than an acting-out of a set of social
conditions.)
What is the status
of Repo’s claims (throughout) that Butler seems to assume an invariant subject,
in the form of a Hegelian subject of desire that is bound to recognition? Is there a politics for Butler beyond the
politics of recognition?
Discussion proper proceeded.
Concerning (1), we discussed whether
or not Foucault collapsed (or avoided, or did not even acknowledge) the
distinction between nature and culture. If
Foucault avoided the nature/culture distinction did he avoid it in such a way
that he has to hold that nature and culture are always imbricated? Or just sometimes?
The
key thing, presumably, is the distinction between being “an effect of a
cultural system, but an apparatus of biopower”.
So there is a claim that “control over sex is… biopoltical” (6, 20). Is this always
the case? Or just sometimes? Presumably it is
always the case for us (we who live within a biopolitical dispositif) but it need not always be the case for all places and
all times. So even practices of gender
reperformance and gender resistance (e.g., drag) are instances of a utilization
and deployment of biopolitics.
Resistance is always internal to the form of power that takes.
We then shifted to question (5) and
the erst of the discussion remained there.
To recapitulate the question: What is at stake in the distinction
between a genealogy of X’s ontology and a genealogy of X itself? (In this case X=gender (though presumably it
matters what the content of the X is).)
What is at stake in the distinction
between sex as “mechanisms of intelligibility and performativity” (20)
attributed to Butler and an “apparatus of biopower in the administration of
life” (20) attributed to Foucault? What
would the scene of politics in each look like?
What forms of resistance are possible?
In the former politics is parody (of identity, discourse, etc.). In the latter (i.e., Repo’s Foucault) resistance
would have to look quite different. It
would have to be a (biopolitical? right?) resistance against biopolitics? But is this how Repo in the piece envisions
and figures resistance? Is this how the
discussion of Barbin functions? It seems like it is meant to function that
way insofar as this section of this essay is titled “Rereading Herculine Barbin Biopolitically”. We turned to that section in fine…
Barbin’s “body” and “pleasure”
became “ordered by power”. So
biopolitics is a type or mode of ordering?
That sounds right. Then there are
two moves that get made here, and we worried that they are being run together. The first
move is that a biopolitical ordering is beyond (or need not lie on) the
nature|culture distinction. The second move is that a biopolitical
ordering is beyond (or displaces) Butler’s analytic category of identity. Let’s take each in turn.
First,
Biopolitics is a type of ordering (a “biopolitical territorialisation”; Deleuze
(for better or worse!)) that doesn’t analytically draw on, or require, the
nature|culture distinction. Barbin was
inscribed by (drawn up by?) biopolitics and we can analyze that without
reference to the nature|culture binary. The
best way to put this point: sex is an effect of a process involving the workings
of biopower. And we can make this point
without getting embroiled in debates about whether sex is “cultural” or “natural”,
which are debates that Repo seems to want to avoid. In other words, this is what is involved in
avoiding the “genealogy of gender ontology”.
Is the point of this paper, then, a deflationism about the nature versus
culture wars?
Second,
does this first move warrant a displacement of identity as a category of
analysis? The paper opens with a
critique of Butler’s identity-analysis.
But is it sufficient to move beyond an analytics of identity to
methodologically dispense with the nature|culture binary? Is there something at stake in that binary
that supports or furthers identity-analysis?
The move from the first to the second seems to be wrapped up already in phrases like “the cultural
construction of identity”. But is
getting beyond “cultural constructionism” to already move beyond “identity”? Why?
Many thanks to everyone in the group for kindly taking the time to read my text so carefully and for discussing it in such detail. I was very happy to have the chance to read about your discussion and I’d like to respond to three questions in particular: about nature/culture, identity, and resistance. I am working on revising my thesis where I conduct a genealogy of gender as an apparatus of biopower, which more concretely shows how ideas like nature/culture and identity are genealogically and politically problematic.
ReplyDeleteFirst, do I distance myself from the nature/culture distinction? Yes. First, as I argue in the article, I find that it is a theoretically redundant conceptual pair for a genealogy of gender – we simply don’t need it. It does not have much added value for a Foucauldian genealogy – nature/culture can’t tell us anything that the analysis of power doesn’t (but who knows, it may be useful again someday, or in another context). Rather, like gender, I would suggest that nature/culture is itself a rationality that can be subjected to genealogical critique: it emerged in the early twentieth century and was very important for behaviourists (Haraway’s “Simians…” covers some of this ground), who created theories about how human behaviour was socially and culturally learned, whilst making assumptions about how social order was maintained. So, there is a major problem with using the nature/culture pair for an analysis of apparatuses of power, because the debate itself can be seen as an apparatus of power.
Identity. I suppose identity theory is by now a vast terrain of its own, which only makes me think more that it is an apparatus and question of power (“What IS identity? How is it constituted?” etc.) and when it comes to sex, sexuality, and gender, identity as we speak of it today is much ingrained in the nature/culture binary. The idea of gender identity, for example, was invented by psychiatrist Robert Stoller as presented in his book “Sex and Gender” (1968), where it was picked up by second-wave feminists. Gender identity specifically referred to the sense of one’s self as male or female. Stoller introduced the term to describe the discrepancy between psychological and biological sex in transsexuals. The psychological gender identity of a person was culturally constructed, but became fixed at a very young age and was thereafter unchangable. By and large the same definition still holds: gender identity as a one’s sense of self that is “true”, albeit emerges as a result of socialisation. For psychiatrists and also activists, the fact that it is cultural does not make it any less “true” than behaviours or aspects of personality assumed to be determined by biology. In this sense, then, the idea of identity also has a genealogy that derives from discourses of psychiatric truth. The contemporary idea that one possesses a sense of self, where the self has some kind of order behind it (e.g. sexual), always ultimately refers back to this apparatus. Foucault has a similar critique of identity for example in the Power/Knowledge texts, especially in his critique of the gay liberation movement. While Butler’s theory goes far to challenge it, it is never able to move beyond it because she never subjects the ideas of culture and identity to genealogical inquiry.
Resistance. Indeed I do not address the question of resistance in the piece, but by large I would agree with the above discussion: If gender is a biopolitical apparatus, resistance to it must, in some manner, mount a challenge to biopower. It would not be enough to merely challenge norms of sexual difference, but the strategies of power that underpin those norms as mechanisms of control. For example, gender has become such a normalised and governmentalised term that it seems worthwhile considering taking up some new concepts with which to mount such a critique.
Thanks again for generously sharing your thoughts and I wish you all a lovely springtime!