Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

sexual categories In other words, how free is that play, whether conceived as a prediscursive libidinal multiplicity or as a discursively constituted multiplicity Foucault’s original objection to the category of sex is that it imposes the artifice of unity and univocity on a set of onto- logically disparate sexual functions and elements. In an almost
Rousseauian move, Foucault constructs the binary of an artificial cultural law that reduces and distorts what we might well understand as a
natural heterogeneity. Herculine herself refers to her sexuality as
“this incessant struggle of nature against reason (A cursory examination of these disparate elements however, suggests their thorough medicalization as functions sensations even drives Hence, the heterogeneity to which Foucault appeals is itself constituted by the very medical discourse that he positions as the repressive juridical law. But what is this heterogeneity that Foucault seems to prize, and what purpose does it serve?
If Foucault contends that sexual nonidentity is promoted in homosexual contexts, he would seem to identify heterosexual contexts as precisely those in which identity is constituted. We know already that he understands the category of sex and of identity generally to be the effect and instrument of a regulatory sexual regime, but it is less clear whether that regulation is reproductive or heterosexual, or something else. Does that regulation of sexuality produce male and female identities within asymmetrical binary relation If homosexuality produces sexual nonidentity, then homosexuality itself no longer relies on identities being like one another indeed, homosexuality could no longer be described as such. But if homosexuality is meant to designate the place of an unnameable libidinal heterogeneity, perhaps we can ask whether this is, instead, a love that either cannot or dare not speak its name In other words, Foucault, who gave only one interview on homosexuality and has always resisted the confessional moment in his own work, nevertheless presents Herculine’s confession to us in an unabashedly didactic mode. Is this a displaced confession that presumes a continuity or parallel between his life and hers?
Subversive Bodily Acts
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On the cover of the French edition, he remarks that Plutarch understood illustrious persons to constitute parallel lives which in some sense travel infinite lines that eventually meet in eternity. He remarks that there are some lives that veer off the track of infinity and threaten to disappear into an obscurity that can never be recovered—lives that do not follow the straight path, as it were, into an eternal community of greatness, but deviate and threaten to become fully irrecoverable.
“That would be the inverse of Plutarch he writes, lives at parallel points that nothing can bring back together (my translation. Here the textual reference is most clearly to the separation of Herculine, the adopted male name (though with a curiously feminine ending, and
Alexina, the name that designated Herculine in the female mode. But it is also a reference to Herculine and Sarah er lover, who are quite literally separated and whose paths quite obviously diverge. But perhaps
Herculine is in some sense also parallel to Foucault, parallel precisely in the sense in which divergent lifelines, which are in no sense “straight,”
might well be. Indeed, perhaps Herculine and Foucault are parallel, not in any literal sense, but in their very contestation of the literal as such,
especially as it applies to the categories of sex.
Foucault’s suggestion in the preface that there are bodies which are in some sense similar to each other disregards the hermaphroditic distinctness of Herculine’s body, as well ash er own presentation of herself as very much unlike the women she desires. Indeed, after some manner of sexual exchange, Herculine engages the language of appropriation and triumph, avowing Sara as her eternal property when she remarks, From that moment on, Sara belonged tome. So why would Foucault resist the very text that he wants to use in order to make such a claim In the one interview Foucault gave on homosexuality, James O’Higgins, the interviewer, remarks that there is a growing tendency in American intellectual circles, particularly among radical feminists, to distinguish between male and female homosexuality a position, he argues, that claims that very different things happen physically in the two sorts of encounters and that les-

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