The discomfort of the sexes

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The work Das Unbehagen der Geschlechts - published in 1990 under the English title Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity  - is the first book publication by the American philosopher Judith Butler (* 1956). She had a great influence on feminist philosophy and gender studies . The German translation by Kathrina Menke appeared in 1991, its title alludes to Sigmund Freud's work Das Unbehagen in der Kultur from 1930.

Basics

The original title Gender Trouble , by which the book is also known in the German-speaking world, summarizes the core of Butler's critical debates: the problems (trouble) that result from the attribution and reproduction of gender relations. The German loan word “ gender ” describes the socio-cultural or psychological side of a person's gender, the “social gender”. In the feminist philosophy of science is a category that is different from the biological sex (english sex  - no relation to sex ual ). This has the gender identity (gender identity) and the gender role of a person not the cause in connection (see Doing Gender ).

Based on Simone de Beauvoir's work The Other Sex from 1951 and the central statement contained therein: “You are not born a woman, you become one”, Butler explains that the “body gender ” (sex) is also constructed discursively . The division of people into the two categories “ male ” and “ female ” would therefore be a discursively formed construct that uses an alleged, natural-biological fact as a pretext to exercise domination and power .

With this, Butler developed an essential aspect of the feminist theories of philosophical postmodernism , which stood in opposition to classical feminism (compare also feminist postmodernism ). The separation between sex and gender shaped gender studies and large parts of the women's movement as well as the struggle for women's rights until the late 1990s . If, however, thinking in the gender categories man / woman forms the basis for sexist oppression, then it is precisely these mental images that need to be critically questioned and resolved ( deconstructed ). Because even if a dichotomy of the sexes is assumed ( binary ), it does not follow that "the construct 'men' belongs exclusively to the male body, nor that the category 'women' only means female bodies."

Butler's theories formulated in Gender Trouble relate to two basic theoretical concepts:

  1. On the one hand, Butler orientates himself on Michel Foucault's view of the post-structuralist discourse , according to which the discourse is the place of the constitution and construction of social reality . Building on his considerations “on becoming a subject as a process of submission in discursive structures permeated by power”, Butler asks questions about the relationship between subject , body and power.
  2. On the other hand, Butler refers to the speech act theory of the British philosopher John Austin , according to which the “ performative power of language” constructs identities. The gender categories “male / female” are also formed by the act of speaking and confirmed in constant repetition.

Butler develops the image of the “ normatively regulated and intelligible sexes”, which due to their complexity cannot be divided into two parts and can be traced back to a purely natural basis. Gender also includes identities, physical experiences and “materialities”, sexualities, discourses, politics, ideological aspects, power and history. Butler explains: "'Intelligible' gender identities are those that, in a certain sense, establish and maintain relationships of coherence and continuity between anatomical gender (sex) , gender identity (gender) , sexual practice and desire."

content

The book is divided into three chapters that critically examine the topic of gender categories in different areas of discourse theory:

  1. The subjects of gender / gender identity / desire considers the status of " woman " as the subject of feminism and questions the distinction between gender and sex. Heteronormativity and phallogocentrism are interpreted as power discourses. Butler uses the theses of the cultural theorist Luce Irigaray and the writer Monique Wittig to discuss questions about this .
  2. The prohibition, psychoanalysis and the production of the heterosexual matrix gives an overview of psychoanalytic , philosophical and feminist representations of the incest taboo . The critical examination of the writings of the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan , Joan Riviere and Sigmund Freud is based on the repressive hypothesis of Foucault, as he redefined it in his work Sexuality and Truth .
  3. Subversive body nudes deals with Julia Kristeva's theses on motherhood , Michel Foucault's remarks on the diaries of Herculine Barbin, and Monique Wittig's theoretical and fictional texts. In the last section, under the heading of physical inscriptions, performative subversions, the limitation of the body as a political construction is presented.

In a concluding consideration entitled From Parody to Politics , Butler suggests parodistic practices with which the infinite cultural performativity of gender division could be played out differently and whose power could be broken: “This is about acts that affect the categories of the body, of gender , gender identity and sexuality. "

Julia Kristeva's body politics

According to Julia Kristeva, motherhood and poetic language are subversive to the law of the father, since they reflect the semiotic as opposed to the symbolic of the law. Like Lacan , she describes that girls (female toddlers) experience a cord cut from their mother due to the prohibition of incest and that melancholy develops in the Freudian sense. This lost relationship can be made up again through later motherhood; the young mother becomes the same being as her mother. According to Kristeva, female homosexuality is also shaped by the melancholy loss of the mother relationship. Since it is not socially accepted, motherhood and poetic language ( intertextuality ) remain as subversive ways out.

Butler criticizes Kristeva for assuming a womanhood that lies before the law and is suppressed by it. The terms, however, are already shaped by the law, which defines the framework for the discourse. So what should be a subversive cultural act with Kristeva is only a consolidation of the power of discourse, presented by prevailing norms. The law suppresses female self-determination, but at the same time generates it by establishing femininity - in the sense of “different from masculinity” - at all. Butler wants to go beyond this definition of two sexes. It would be important to cure oneself from the “illusion of a true body beyond the law.” Instead of looking for something pre-existing, suppressed, which is ultimately only a manifestation of the law, it sees subversion only possible “as one that is dependent on the conditions of the Law, d. H. of the possibilities that emerge as soon as the law turns against itself and unexpectedly creates permutations of itself. ”The liberation of the culturally constructed body occurs“ neither for its 'natural' past nor for its 'original' desires, but for one open future of cultural possibilities. "

The disintegration of Monique Wittig

Monique Wittig's basic thesis is that the division into two genders is to be rejected not only, as with Simone de Beauvoir , for the social sex (gender) , but also for the biological (sex) . The terms “woman” and “man” are an expression of an imposed heterosexuality . For this reason, the biological body is not male or female, but this becomes secondary, through the gendered designation. In this sense, Wittig states that a lesbian person is not a woman because she breaks or undermines the woman category and can therefore no longer be categorized accordingly. Wittig intends to completely change language in order to be able to think beyond gender categories. If the biological body is divided into male and female, for example by naming its sexual characteristics, it is not unified, according to Wittig, but fragmented, because it is thus erogenously fixed, split up and reduced to these parts. The sexually divided body is "a sign of fragmentation, limitation and domination."

Wittig sees language as an instrument of power for the male class. The speaking subject is always a male. Women, lesbians, gays and others cannot take a speaker position in this system. Language builds its domination through constant repetition of “ locutionary acts ” ( Austin ), which lead to the institutionalization of gender segregation and domination. For Wittig, however, apparently based on Jacques Lacan , only women are assigned a gender, while men “participate in this system as universal persons.” According to Simone de Beauvoir, women are trapped in a female “circle of immanence” : "Men and women are political categories and not natural facts." According to this, there would be no such thing as "feminine nature", rather it is socially constructed which is intuitively viewed as natural. Wittig sees the way out of this system of rule in the malleability of language: women should take on and take over the male subject position. This possession means the practical collapse of the category of sex (compare postgenderism ). As soon as a woman says “I”, she becomes, according to Wittig, “a total - i. H. gender indeterminate (ungendered) , universal, whole subject ”.

Butler sees two levels of reality or two orders of ontology in Wittig's theory : the socially constituted assumption of reality from a fundamental constitution of being and a pre-social ontology of unified and equal persons. She therefore classifies Wittig's political project in the “context of the traditional discourse of ontotheology ”, since Wittig sees language as universal and “being as being not divided”. According to Wittig, speaking requires “a seamless identity of all things”. It is in contrast to Jacques Derrida , for whom all terms are based on an operational différance .

Feminism without a subject

Butler's criticism of feminism is based on the question of whether feminist theory can do without the subject categorized as “woman” . At the same time, she criticizes the concept of the subject, which goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche on the one hand , and Sigmund Freud on the other , and was then formulated by postmodern philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault. The classical or metaphysical subject denotes a fixed entity that is in contrast to the outside world, to the objects. Thus, subjects outside of their own identity become “others” and ultimately objects. This establishment of identity has a number of consequences, including the separation of the world into binary forms such as I-you, culture-nature or even man-woman. This is where Butler's criticism of feminism comes in, because when women are addressed as a "we", as a social class that needs to be strengthened, the metaphysical tradition of identity is inscribed.

The subject and thus also its gender fixation is constituted in the discourse of the performative act , that is, through constant repetitive practices. For Butler, behind this there is a social, but not a subjective power, or, to put it another way, it is - following a word from Nietzsche - an “act without a perpetrator.” In order to break out of it, one must “those gender norms that allow repetition itself enable [...] to move through a radical duplication of gender identity ”. Butler sees such postponing duplication, among other things, in the parody of gender identity, in the roles of drag queens or in the lesbian butch and femme relationships, which do not simply repeat the male and female roles but parody them parodistically. Since identity and gender are constituted performatively, Butler needs to change this definition through performance:

"The cultural configurations of gender and gender identity could multiply (...) by confusing the gender binary."

- Judith Butler : The Discomfort of the Sexes (1991, p. 218)

reception

Shortly after its publication in 1990, the book received a great deal of attention and was considered highly controversial in both gender studies and the feminist public. It was also widely received in German-speaking countries, where it came out a year later, and responded largely with skepticism and rejection.

In the feminist discussion, the deconstructivist conception of the subject and its radicalism met with criticism. Butler was accused of disembodiment, the lack of consideration of the real materiality of the body and the negation of concrete sensual experiences of femininity and masculinity . The medical historian Barbara Duden turned against this neglect of the materiality of gender and body in her 1993 publication Die Frau ohne Unterleib .

Another deficiency was seen in the lack of empirical social analysis and the failure to locate the concept historically. In contrast to Foucault, who historicized the terms sex and sexuality, Butler would generalize them and thus destroy the gain of Foucault's perspective. Because the historical contrast makes it clear that the system of bisexuality "is to be understood as a core element of the normative power that has been asserting itself since the 18th century" (Hilge Landweer 1993).

The feminist controversy over gender trouble is extensively documented in a collection of essays from 1993 entitled The Dispute about Difference: Feminism and Postmodernism in the Present . It contains positions and reviews by scientists Seyla Benhabib , Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser . In the German-speaking reception, this collection has been discussed as a continuation of Butler's theses and a positioning of “ feminist postmodernism ”.

Butler takes up these criticisms in her book, Body of Weight: The Discursive Limits of Gender (original Bodies that Matter ) , published in 1993 in the USA and 1995 in Germany, and examines the connection between materiality and discursiveness of the sex body; this even more intensely with the 2004 in the USA and 2009 in Germany published The Power of Gender Norms and the Limits of the Human (original Undoing Gender ).

In 2020, the cultural theorist Ines Kappert calls Judith Butler “probably the most famous living philosopher in the world” in the taz, 30 years after the publication of Gender Trouble . The writing also worked “as a breeding ground” for the recognition of the need for a “third option” of gender (compare diverse , non-binary ). Kappert sums up the effects on feminism : “First and foremost, feminism fights for equality of all genders and therefore for a culture of nonviolence. Happy Birthday, Gender Trouble! "

See also

literature

Expenditure:

  • Judith Butler : Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New York et al. a. 1990, ISBN 0-415-90042-5 (English).
    • German: The discomfort of the sexes. From the American by Kathrina Menke. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-518-11722-X .

Secondary literature:

Web links

Individual evidence

  • ( B:) Judith Butler: The discomfort of the sexes. From the American by Kathrina Menke. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-518-11722-X .
  1. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 23.
  2. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 38.
  3. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 10.
  4. ↑ a b Judith Butler 1991, p. 11.
  5. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, pp. 123/124.
  6. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 141.
  7. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, pp. 141/142.
  8. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 142.
  9. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 171.
  10. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 168.
  11. ↑ Monique Wittig : One is not born a woman. In: Feminist Issues. 1981; quoted from Judith Butler 1991, p. 172.
  12. ^ Monique Wittig: The Mark of Gender. In: Feminist Issues. 1985; quoted from Judith Butler 1991, p. 174.
  13. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 171.
  14. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 175.
  15. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 211.
  16. ↑ Judith Butler 1991, p. 217.
  • Other documents:
  1. ↑ Simone de Beauvoir : The opposite sex: Customs and sex of women. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1951, p. 334.
  2. ↑ Eva von Redecker: On the topicality of Judith Butler. Introduction to their work. Wiesbaden 2011, p. 47 ( page preview in the Google book search); compare also: Michel Foucault: What is criticism? Merve, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-88396-093-4 , p. 12 ff.
  3. ↑ Hannelore Bublitz : Judith Butler for an introduction. 3. Edition. Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88506-678-1 , p. 17.
  4. ↑ Hannelore Bublitz: Judith Butler for an introduction. 3. Edition. Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88506-678-1 , p. 21.
  5. ^ Paula-Irene Villa : Judith Butler: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Campus, Frankfurt / M. 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39432-9 , p. 59 ( page preview in the Google book search).
  6. ↑ Herculine Barbin (1838–1868) was a hermaphrodite living in France; Foucault published his diaries in 1978 in an annotated version, published in English in 1980: Herculine Barbin, Michel Foucault: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite. Pantheon Books, New York 1980, ISBN 0-394-73862-4 .
  7. ^ Paula-Irene Villa: Judith Butler: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Campus, Frankfurt / M. 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39432-9 , p. 11 ( page preview in the Google book search).
  8. ↑ Barbara Duden: The woman without a lower body. To Judith Butler's disembodiment. In: Feminist Studies. Volume 11, 1993, pp. 24-33.
  9. ↑ Hannelore Bublitz: Judith Butler for an introduction. 3. Edition. Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88506-678-1 , p. 136.
  10. ↑ Hilge Landweer: Critique and Defense of the Gender Category. In: Feminist Studies. Volume 11, 1993, p. 41.
  11. ↑ Hannelore Bublitz: Judith Butler for an introduction. 3. Edition. Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88506-678-1 , p. 163, footnote 87.
  12. ^ Paula-Irene Villa: Judith Butler: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Campus, Frankfurt / M. 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39432-9 , p. 80 ( page preview in the Google book search).
  13. ↑ Ines Kappert : 30 years of Judith Butler's “Gender Trouble”: Questioning certainties. In: taz.de . February 28, 2020, accessed February 29, 2020.