Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

of that subject and his or her speech. In her view, there are historically contingent structures characterized as heterosexual and compulsory that distribute the rights of full and authoritative speech to males and deny them to females. But this socially constituted asymmetry disguises and violates a pre-social ontology of unified and equal persons.
The task for women,Wittig argues, is to assume the position of the authoritative, speaking subject—which is in some sense their ontolog- ically grounded “right”—and to overthrow both the category of sex and the system of compulsory heterosexuality that is its origin.
Language, for Wittig, is a set of acts, repeated overtime, that produce reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as facts Collectively considered, the repeated practice of naming sexual difference has created this appearance of natural division.The naming of sex is an act of domination and compulsion, an institutionalized performative that both creates and legislates social reality by requiring the discursive/
perceptual construction of bodies in accord with principles of sexual difference. Hence, Wittig concludes, we are compelled in our bodies and our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us . . men and women are political categories, and not natural facts.”
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“Sex,” the category, compels sex the social configuration of bodies, through what Wittig calls a coerced contract. Hence, the category of sex is a name that enslaves. Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body but these sheaves are not easily discarded. She continues stamping it and violently shaping it.”
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Wittig argues that the
“straight mind evident in the discourses of the human sciences,
“oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men because they take for granted that what founds society, any society, is hetero- sexuality.”
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Discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression—that is, take for granted the speaking subject’s own impossibility or unintelligibility. This presumptive heterosexuality, she argues, functions within discourse to communicate a threat:
Subversive Bodily Acts
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“‘you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be.’”
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Women, lesbians, and gay men, she argues, cannot assume the position of the speaking subject within the linguistic system of compulsory heterosexuality. To speak within the system is to be deprived of the possibility of speech;
hence, to speak at all in that context is a performative contradiction,
the linguistic assertion of a self that cannot be within the language that asserts it.
The power Wittig accords to this system of language is enormous.
Concepts, categories, and abstractions, she argues, can effect a physical and material violence against the bodies they claim to organize and interpret There is nothing abstract about the power that sciences and theories have to act materially and actually upon our bodies and minds,
even if the discourse that produces it is abstract. It is one of the forms of domination, its very expression, as Marx said. I would say, rather,
one of its exercises. All of the oppressed know this power and have had to deal with it.”
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The power of language to work on bodies is both the cause of sexual oppression and the way beyond that oppression.
Language works neither magically nor inexorably there is a plasticity of the real to language language has a plastic action upon the real.”
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Language assumes and alters its power to act upon the real through locutionary acts, which, repeated, become entrenched practices and,
ultimately, institutions. The asymmetrical structure of language that identifies the subject who speaks for and as the universal with the male and identifies the female speaker as particular and interested is in no sense intrinsic to particular languages or to language itself.These asymmetrical positions cannot be understood to follow from the nature of men or women, for, as Beauvoir established, no such nature exists:
“One must understand that men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act,
perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics.”
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