Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

order of this causality and understand this semiotic economy as a production of a prior discourse?
In the final chapter of Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality,
he cautions against using the category of sex as a fictitious unity . . and causal principle and argues that the fictitious category of sex facilitates a reversal of causal relations such that sex is understood to cause the structure and meaning of desire:
the notion of sex made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified.
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For Foucault, the body is not sexed in any significant sense prior to its determination within a discourse through which it becomes invested with an idea of natural or essential sex. The body gains meaning within discourse only in the context of power relations. Sexuality is an historically specific organization of power, discourse, bodies, and affectivity. As such, sexuality is understood by Foucault to produce
“sex” as an artificial concept which effectively extends and disguises the power relations responsible for its genesis.
Foucault’s framework suggests away to solve some of the epistemological and political difficulties that follow from Kristeva’s view of the female body.We can understand Kristeva’s assertion of a “prepater- nal causality as fundamentally inverted. Whereas Kristeva posits a maternal body prior to discourse that exerts its own causal force in the structure of drives, Foucault would doubtless argue that the discursive production of the maternal body as prediscursive is a tactic in the self- amplification and concealment of those specific power relations by which the trope of the maternal body is produced. In these terms, the maternal body would no longer be understood as the hidden ground of all signification, the tacit cause of all culture. It would be understood,
Subversive Bodily Acts
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rather, as an effect or consequence of a system of sexuality in which the female body is required to assume maternity as the essence of its self and the law of its desire.
If we accept Foucault’s framework, we are compelled to redes- cribe the maternal libidinal economy as a product of an historically specific organization of sexuality. Moreover, the discourse of sexuality,
itself suffused by power relations, becomes the true ground of the trope of the prediscursive maternal body. Kristeva’s formulation suffers a thoroughgoing reversal The Symbolic and the semiotic are no longer interpreted as those dimensions of language which follow upon the repression or manifestation of the maternal libidinal economy.This very economy is understood instead as a reification that both extends and conceals the institution of motherhood as compulsory for women.
Indeed, when the desires that maintain the institution of motherhood are transvaluated as pre-paternal and pre-cultural drives, then the institution gains a permanent legitimation in the invariant structures of the female body. Indeed, the clearly paternal law that sanctions and requires the female body to be characterized primarily in terms of its reproductive function is inscribed on that body as the law of its natural necessity. Kristeva, safeguarding that law of a biologically necessitated maternity as a subversive operation that preexists the paternal law itself, aids in the systematic production of its invisibility and, consequently, the illusion of its inevitability.
Because Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusively prohibitive con- ception of the paternal law, she is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal law generates certain desires in the form of natural drives. The female body that she seeks to express is itself a construct produced by the very law it is supposed to undermine. In noway do these criticisms of Kristeva’s conception of the paternal law necessarily invalidate her general position that culture or the Symbolic is predicated upon a repudiation of women’s bodies. I want to suggest,
however, that any theory that asserts that signification is predicated upon the denial or repression of a female principle ought to consider

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