Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

whether that femaleness is really external to the cultural norms by which it is repressed. In other words, on my reading, the repression of the feminine does not require that the agency of repression and the object of repression be ontologically distinct. Indeed, repression maybe understood to produce the object that it comes to deny. That production may well bean elaboration of the agency of repression itself.
As Foucault makes clear, the culturally contradictory enterprise of the mechanism of repression is prohibitive and generative at once and makes the problematic of liberation especially acute.The female body that is freed from the shackles of the paternal law may well prove to be yet another incarnation of that law, posing as subversive but operating in the service of that law’s self-amplification and proliferation. In order to avoid the emancipation of the oppressor in the name of the oppressed, it is necessary to take into account the full complexity and subtlety of the law and to cure ourselves of the illusion of a true body beyond the law. If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its natural past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.
i i . Foucault, He rc u line, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity Foucaults genealogical critique has provided away to criticize those
Lacanian and neo-Lacanian theories that cast culturally marginal forms of sexuality as culturally unintelligible. Writing within the terms of a disillusionment with the notion of a liberatory Eros, Foucault understands sexuality as saturated with power and offers a critical view of theories that lay claim to asexuality before or after the law. When we consider, however, those textual occasions on which Foucault criticizes the categories of sex and the power regime of sexuality, it is clear that his own theory maintains an unacknowledged emancipatory ideal that
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proves increasingly difficult to maintain, even within the strictures of his own critical apparatus.
Foucault’s theory of sexuality offered in The History of Sexuality,
Volume Ii is in someways contradicted by his short but significant introduction to the journals he published of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth- century French hermaphrodite. Herculine was assigned the sex of
“female” at birth. In her early twenties, after a series of confessions to doctors and priests, she was legally compelled to change her sex to
“male.” The journals that Foucault claims to have found are published in this collection, along with the medical and legal documents that discuss the basis on which the designation of her true sex was decided.
A satiric short story by the German writer, Oscar Panizza, is also included. Foucault supplies an introduction to the English translation of the text in which he questions whether the notion of a true sex is necessary. At first, this question appears to be continuous with the critical genealogy of the category of sex he offers toward the conclusion of the first volume of The History of Sexuality.
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However, the journals and their introduction offer an occasion to consider Foucault’s reading of Herculine against his theory of sexuality in The History of
Sexuality,Volume Ii Although he argues in The History of Sexuality that sexuality is coextensive with power, he fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both construct and condemn Herculine’s sexuality. Indeed, he appears to romanticize her world of pleasures as the
“happy limbo of a non-identity” (xiii, a world that exceeds the categories of sex and of identity.The reemergence of a discourse on sexual difference and the categories of sex within Herculine’s own autobiographical writings will lead to an alternative reading of Herculine against Foucault’s romanticized appropriation and refusal of her text.
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the univocal construct of sex (one is one’s sex and, therefore, not the other) is (a) produced in the service of the social regulation and control of sexuality and (b) conceals and artificially unifies a variety of disparate and unrelated sexual functions and then (c) postures within

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