Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

ity, it seems, of a volitional or optional heterosexuality yet, even if heterosexuality is presented as obligatory or presumptive, it does not follow that all heterosexual acts are radically determined. Further,
Wittig’s radical disjunction between straight and gay replicates the kind of disjunctive binarism that she herself characterizes as the divisive philosophical gesture of the straight mind.
My own conviction is that the radical disjunction posited by Wittig between heterosexuality and homosexuality is simply not true, that there are structures of psychic homosexuality within heterosexual relations, and structures of psychic heterosexuality within gay and lesbian sexuality and relationships. Further, there are other power/discourse centers that construct and structure both gay and straight sexuality;
heterosexuality is not the only compulsory display of power that informs sexuality. The ideal of a coherent heterosexuality that Wittig describes as the norm and standard of the heterosexual contract is an impossible ideal, a fetish as she herself points out. A psychoanalytic elaboration might contend that this impossibility is exposed in virtue of the complexity and resistance of an unconscious sexuality that is not always already heterosexual. In this sense, heterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals heterosexuality itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into heterosexuality as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative gay/lesbian perspective.
Clearly, the norm of compulsory heterosexuality does operate with the force and violence that Wittig describes, but my own position is that this is not the only way that it operates. For Wittig, the strategies for political resistance to normative heterosexuality are fairly direct.
Only the array of embodied persons who are not engaged in a heterosexual relationship within the confines of the family which takes reproduction to be the end or telos of sexuality are, in effect, actively contesting the categories of sex or, at least, not in compliance with the
Subversive Bodily Acts
155

normative presuppositions and purposes of that set of categories.To be lesbian or gay is, for Wittig, no longer to know one’s sex, to be engaged in a confusion and proliferation of categories that make sex an impossible category of identity. As emancipatory as this sounds, Wittig’s proposal overrides those discourses within gay and lesbian culture that proliferate specifically gay sexual identities by appropriating and redeploying the categories of sex. The terms queens, butches, femmes, girls,
even the parodic reappropriation of dyke, queer, and fag redeploy and destabilize the categories of sex and the originally derogatory categories for homosexual identity. All of these terms might be understood as symptomatic of the straight mind modes of identifying with the oppressor’s version of the identity of the oppressed. On the other hand, lesbian has surely been partially reclaimed from it historical meanings, and parodic categories serve the purposes of denaturalizing sex itself. When the neighborhood gay restaurant closes for vacation,
the owners putout a sign, explaining that shes overworked and needs a rest This very gay appropriation of the feminine works to multiply possible sites of application of the term, to reveal the arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified, and to destabilize and mobilize the sign. Is this a colonizing appropriation of the feminine My sense is no. That accusation assumes that the feminine belongs to women, an assumption surely suspect.
Within lesbian contexts, the identification with masculinity that appears as butch identity is not a simple assimilation of lesbianism back into the terms of heterosexuality. As one lesbian femme explained, she likes her boys to be girls, meaning that being a girl contextualizes and resignifies masculinity in a butch identity. As a result, that masculinity, if that it can be called, is always brought into relief against a culturally intelligible female body It is precisely this dissonant juxtaposition and the sexual tension that its transgression generates that constitute the object of desire. In other words, the object and clearly,
there is not just one of lesbian-femme desire is neither some decon- textualized female body nor a discrete yet superimposed masculine

Download 0.76 Mb.

Share with your friends: