Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

anomalous body as the cause of her desire, her trouble, her affairs and confession, we might read this body, here fully textualized, as a sign of an irresolvable ambivalence produced by the juridical discourse on univocal sex. In the place of univocity, we fail to discover multiplicity, as Foucault would have us do instead, we confront a fatal ambivalence, produced by the prohibitive law, which for all its effects of happy dispersal nevertheless culminates in Herculine’s suicide.
If one follows Herculine’s narrative self-exposition, itself a kind of confessional production of the self, it seems that her sexual disposition is one of ambivalence from the outset, that her sexuality recapitulates the ambivalent structure of its production, construed in part as the institutional injunction to pursue the love of the various “sisters”
and mothers of the extended convent family and the absolute prohibition against carrying that love too far. Foucault inadvertently suggests that Herculine’s happy limbo of a non-identity” was made possible by an historically specific formation of sexuality, namely, her sequestered existence among the almost exclusive company of women This strange happiness as he describes it, was at once
“obligatory and forbidden within the confines of convent conventions. His clear suggestion here is that this homosexual environment,
structured as it is by an eroticized taboo, was one in which this happy limbo of a non-identity” is subtly promoted. Foucault then swiftly retracts the suggestion of Herculine as participating in a practice of female homosexual conventions, insisting that “non-identity” rather than a variety of female identities is at play. For Herculine to occupy the discursive position of the female homosexual would be for
Foucault to engage the category of sex—precisely what Foucault wants Herculine’s narrative to persuade us to reject.
But perhaps Foucault does want to have it both ways indeed, he wants implicitly to suggest that nonidentity is what is produced in homosexual contexts—namely, that homosexuality is instrumental to the overthrow of the category of sex. Note in Foucault’s following description of Herculine’s pleasures how the category of sex is at once
Subversive Bodily Acts
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invoked and refused The school and the convent foster the tender pleasures that sexual nonidentity discovers and provokes when it goes astray in the midst of all those bodies that are similar to one another”
(xiv). Here Foucault assumes that the likenesses of these bodies condition the happy limbo of their nonidentity, a difficult formulation to accept both logically and historically, but also as an adequate description of Herculine. Is it the awareness of their likeness that conditions the sexual play of the young women in the convent, or is it, rather, the eroticized presence of the law forbidding homosexuality that produces these transgressive pleasures in the compulsory mode of a confessional Herculine maintains her own discourse of sexual difference even within this ostensibly homosexual contexts he notes and enjoys her difference from the young women she desires, and yet this difference is not a simple reproduction of the heterosexual matrix for desire.
S/he knows that her position in that exchange is transgressive, that she is a usurper of a masculine prerogative, ass he puts it, and that she contests that privilege even ass he replicates it.
The language of usurpation suggests a participation in the very categories from which she feels inevitably distanced, suggesting also the denaturalized and fluid possibilities of such categories once they are no longer linked causally or expressively to the presumed fixity of sex.
Herculine’s anatomy does not fall outside the categories of sex, but confuses and redistributes the constitutive elements of those categories indeed, the free play of attributes has the effect of exposing the illusory character of sex as an abiding substantive substrate to which these various attributes are presumed to adhere. Moreover,
Herculine’s sexuality constitutes a set of gender transgressions which challenge the very distinction between heterosexual and lesbian erotic exchange, underscoring the points of their ambiguous convergence and redistribution.
But it seems we are compelled to ask, is there not, even at the level of a discursively constituted sexual ambiguity, some questions of “sex”
and, indeed, of its relation to power that set limits on the free play of

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