Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

belong to the masculine domain. One might well object that Wittig has assimilated masculine values or, indeed, that she is “male-identified,”
but the very notion of identification reemerges in the context of this literary production as immeasurably more complex than the uncritical use of that term suggests. The violence and struggle in her text is, significantly, recontextualized, no longer sustaining the same meanings that it has in oppressive contexts. It is neither a simple turning of the tables in which women now wage violence against men, nor a simple
internalization of masculine norms such that women now wage violence against themselves.The violence of the text has the identity and coherence of the category of sex as its target, a lifeless construct, a construct out to deaden the body. Because that category is the naturalized construct that makes the institution of normative heterosexuality seem inevitable, Wittig’s textual violence is enacted against that institution,
and not primarily for its heterosexuality, but for its compulsoriness.
Note as well that the category of sex and the naturalized institution of heterosexuality are constructs, socially instituted and socially regulated fantasies or fetishes not natural categories, but political ones (categories that prove that recourse to the natural in such contexts is always political. Hence, the body which is torn apart, the wars waged among women, are textual violences, the deconstruction of constructs that are always already a kind of violence against the body’s possibilities.
But here we might ask:What is left when the body rendered coherent through the category of sex is disaggregated, rendered chaotic Can this body be remembered, be put back together again Are there possibilities of agency that do not require the coherent reassembling of this construct Wittig’s text not only deconstructs sex and offers away to disintegrate the false unity designated by sex, but enacts as well a kind of diffuse corporeal agency generated from a number of different centers of power. Indeed, the source of personal and political agency comes not from within the individual, but in and through the complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever- shifting, indeed, where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated, and
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recirculated only within the context of a dynamic field of cultural relations. To be a woman is, then, for Wittig as well as for Beauvoir, to
become a woman, but because this process is in no sense fixed, it is possible to become a being whom neither man nor woman truly describes.
This is not the figure of the androgyne nor some hypothetical third gender nor is it a transcendence of the binary. Instead, it is an internal subversion in which the binary is both presupposed and proliferated to the point where it no longer makes sense.The force of Wittig’s fiction,
its linguistic challenge, is to offer an experience beyond the categories of identity, an erotic struggle to create new categories from the ruins of the old, new ways of being a body within the cultural field, and whole new languages of description.
In response to Beauvoir’s notion one is not born a woman, but,
rather, becomes one,”Wittig claims that instead of becoming a woman,
one (anyone) can become a lesbian. By refusing the category of women, Wittig’s lesbian-feminism appears to cutoff any kind of solidarity with heterosexual women and implicitly to assume that lesbianism is the logically or politically necessary consequence of feminism.
This kind of separatist prescriptivism is surely no longer viable. But even if it were politically desirable, what criteria would be used to decide the question of sexual “identity”?
If to become a lesbian is an act, a leave-taking of heterosexuality, a self-naming that contests the compulsory meanings of heterosexuality s women and men, what is to keep the name of lesbian from becoming an equally compulsory category What qualifies as a lesbian Does anyone know If a lesbian refutes the radical disjunction between heterosexual and homosexual economies that Wittig promotes, is that lesbian no longer a lesbian And if it is an act that founds the identity as a performative accomplishment of sexuality, are there certain kinds of acts that qualify over others as foundational? Can one do the act with a
“straight mind Can one understand lesbian sexuality not only as a contestation of the category of sex of women of natural bodies,”
but also of “lesbian”?

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