Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

the Oedipal complex instantiates and executes the cultural taboo against incest and results in discrete gender identification and a corollary heterosexual disposition. In this essay, Rubin further maintains that before the transformation of a biological male or female into a gendered manor woman, each child contains all of the sexual possibilities available to human expression (The effort to locate and describe asexuality before the law as a primary bisexuality or as an ideal and unconstrained polymorphous- ness implies that the law is antecedent to sexuality. As a restriction of an originary fullness, the law prohibits some set of prepunitive sexual possibilities and the sanctioning of others. But if we apply the
Foucaultian critique of the repressive hypothesis to the incest taboo,
that paradigmatic law of repression, then it would appear that the law produces both sanctioned heterosexuality and transgressive homosexuality. Both are indeed effects, temporally and ontologically later than the law itself, and the illusion of asexuality before the law is itself the creation of that law.
Rubin’s essay remains committed to a distinction between sex and gender which assumes the discrete and prior ontological reality of a
“sex” which is done over in the name of the law, that is, transformed subsequently into “gender.”This narrative of gender acquisition requires a certain temporal ordering of events which assumes that the narrator is in some position to know both what is before and after the law. And yet the narration takes place within a language which, strictly speaking,
is after the law, the consequence of the law, and so proceeds from a belated and retrospective point of view. If this language is structured by the law, and the law is exemplified, indeed, enacted in the language,
then the description, the narration, not only cannot know what is outside itself—that is, prior to the law—but its description of that “before”
will always be in the service of the after In other words, not only does the narration claim access to a before from which it is definitionally
(by virtue of its linguisticality) precluded, but the description of the
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before takes place within the terms of the after and, hence, becomes an attenuation of the law itself into the site of its absence.
Although Rubin claims that the unlimited universe of sexual possibilities exists for the pre-Oedipal child, she does not subscribe to a primary bisexuality. Indeed, bisexuality is the consequence of child- rearing practices in which parents of both sexes are present and presently occupied with childcare and in which the repudiation of femininity no longer serves as a precondition of gender identity for both men and women (When Rubin calls fora revolution in kinship she envisions the eradication of the exchange of women, the traces of which are evident not only in the contemporary institutionalization of heterosexuality, but in the residual psychic norms (the institutionalization of the psyche) which sanction and construct sexuality and gender identity in heterosexual terms. With the loosening of the compulsory character of heterosexuality and the simultaneous emergence of bisexual and homosexual cultural possibilities for behavior and identity, Rubin envisions the overthrow of gender itself (Inasmuch as gender is the cultural transformation of a biological poly- sexuality into a culturally mandated heterosexuality and inasmuch as that heterosexuality deploys discrete and hierarchized gender identities to accomplish its aim, then the breakdown of the compulsory character of heterosexuality would imply, for Rubin, the corollary breakdown of gender itself. Whether or not gender can be fully eradicated and in what sense its breakdown is culturally imaginable remain intriguing but unclarified implications of her analysis.
Rubin’s argument rests on the possibility that the law can be effectively overthrown and that the cultural interpretation of differently sexed bodies can proceed, ideally, without reference to gender disparity. That systems of compulsory heterosexuality may alter, and indeed have changed, and that the exchange of women, in whatever residual form, need not always determine heterosexual exchange, seems clear;
in this sense, Rubin recognizes the misogynist implications of Lévi-

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