Opengender

For radical feminism, the lesbian body represented not only an ontological basis for woman-identification, but also a source for a sexual practice which would not be overdetermined by the phallus as signifier for the very possibility of desire. But the all-conquering success of the critique of essentialism within queer discourse meant that lesbians could no longer so easily mobilise 'the body' as a purposely enigmatic trope — as had been the practice of lesbian feminisms in the 1970s and into the 1980s (see Ch. 3). In Foucauldian terms, on the contrary, the body is produced as an effect of the deployment of historically specific techniques of power. The body has nevertheless been re-invoked by feminists as constitutive ground of a post-Foucauldian feminism in a body-based 'strategic essentialism' which also attempts to address the issue of diversity.

In response to readings of her (1990) critique of 'identity' as counter-intuitive, and possibly anti-feminist, Butler (1993) set out to construct a 'body' of lesbianism which need not cite nature or ontology but which might serve as a reference for political struggle by and for lesbians. In her initial formulation, she had argued that the naturalisation of categories of identity originally narrativised as opposition, such as feminism, can effect further exclusions:

The feminist 'we' is always and only a phantasmic construction [...] which constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. . . The loss of gender norms [through revealing discursive apparata] would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilising substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: 'man' and 'woman.' (Butler, 1990: 142-145)

Butler has also widely accused of "subjectifying" power as an effect of this model (as have Foucauldian approaches in general). For Jeffreys, it is not only 'power' but its specific form of "heterosexuality" which has been hypostased here, with a resultant deletion of agency in the substantial form of male persons. Noting that "heterosexuality" frequently occupies the grammatical position of articulating subject in Butler's complex syntax, Jeffreys tartly commented that:

This is a "heterosexuality" with a postgraduate degree! A feminist analysis might generally ask in whose interests these regimes were set up and operate, a cui bono question might not seem out of place. Then men might pop into the picture. (Jeffreys, 1994: 99)

Butler responded to such criticism by arguing that it is because 'power' occupies the position of the subject, as producer of subjectivity itself as its own discursive object, that it is misunderstood to have been subjectivised. Power, or construction should be seen, instead, as a process of "reiteration by which both 'subjects' and 'acts' come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, but only a reiterative acting that is power in its persistence and instability" (Butler, 1993: 9). This formulation perpetually recirculates questions of origin: 'power' = acts which '(en)act' power. Ultimately, however, in order to enable a feminist discussion to continue to be pursued, Butler (1993) recommended the tactical deployment of a 'subject' of feminism — but one who must always be accompanied by an interrogative critique of her own positionality and of her exclusionary effects.

In Butler (1993) revision, 'performativity,' as discursive contestation, is nevertheless related to a temporal process of 'materialisation.' The medium of this relationship is the materiality of the body which is produced in regulatory practices which are concretised through repetitions over time. This construct of 'repetition' seems to recall psychoanalytic accounts of the reproduction and regulation of desire by ideological apparata such as that of cinema (see Baudry, 1974-5; 1976). It also seems close to the Marxist construct of 'reification,' now transplanted to a discursive setting, and extended from a misplaced concreteness of ideology realised in economic and social institutions to the whole scope of quotidian experience.

Butler suggested that the 'surfaces' which we take for reality or 'the world' are the materialised phenomena of a discursive 'power.' This power, however, is not to be taken as the subject of history. Discourse produces historically contingent modes of being as subjects of its formations. Nonetheless, resistant subjectivities are defined by exclusions effected through a process of abjection. Subjectivities produced in abjection struggle to shift the discursive boundaries which produce them as abject and, through this struggle, such contingent materialities (re)configure discourses. This process produces diverse and historically contingent modes of being.

"[S]ex" is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, "sex" is an ideal construct which has been forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize "sex" and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. (Butler, 1993: 2)

A 'pure' (sexed) body outside of discourse thus cannot be referred to without producing yet another discursively formative effect.

The very reiterations required in order to 'sediment' (reify) a materialised sexuality are, nonetheless, open to deconstruction through an incoherence in reiterations predicated on the instabilities of discursive constructs themselves. The domain of abjection, created as the 'outside' which guarantees the boundary of normative subjective identity, is occupied by 'dis-identifications' whose articulations are "crucial to the re-articulation of democratic contestation" (4). Boundaries between what is (socially) acceptable and what is not (socially) acceptable are renegotiated by taking up the space of 'the abject' and, from this position, mobilising a critique of the dominant. In this way, Butler posited an 'inside' and 'outside' of discursively produced 'reality' without appealing to nature or ontology. But Marxist and post-structuralist constructs such as 'reification' and 'counter-identification' thus appear to have shifted modality from a radical, or systemic, confrontation to a pluralistic, democratic, negotiation.

Grosz argued that Foucault's own focus on bodies and pleasures may reveal a subtextual assumption of a prediscursive body — or perhaps a lacuna in the discursive order of 'sexuality' (155). Foucault was extremely slippery about the relation of discourse to history and of discourse to the material body. If, however, "sex and sexuality are the results of the inscription of particular kinds of power, on what are these inscriptions articulated?" (Grosz, 1994: 155). Grosz delineated a 'strategic' body located across materiality and discourse:

In the face of social constructionism, the body's tangibility, its matter, its (quasi) nature may be invoked; but in opposition to essentialism, biologism, and naturalism, it is the body as cultural product that must be stressed. This indeterminable position enables it to be used as a particularly powerful strategic term to upset the frameworks by which these binary pairs are considered. (Grosz, 1994: 23-4)

This (quasi) nature thus appears as in some sense noumenal in that it is not reducible to discourse but neither is its 'reality' fully accessible to a consciousness produced in discourse. Such a strategy figures 'nature' and 'culture' as mutually productive and argues for an irreducibility of sexual difference which is marked by the body. Indeed it is this difference which enables the articulation of identity, not in difference from an originary plenitude but, on the contrary, an originary difference which is the condition of assignation of linguistic values in a Saussureian sense (although the Saussureian model itself denies any material referent to linguistic difference). Grosz saw a feminist solution to the problem of gendered hierarchy in "the generation of a new productivity between and of the two sexes" (Grosz, 1994: 210). This is not a solution likely to appeal widely to lesbians, however!

De Lauretis (1994) invoked foundational somatic drives to effect a 'bridge' between dislocated (universalised) somatic forces and (contingent) cultural/social forces. In Freudian constructs of gender identification, it is a symbolic abstraction of genital morphology rather than a biologically-determined (gender) difference in sexual 'instinct' by which the formation of gender identity is effected. Normative formations of gender/sexual identity have thus been predicated upon this genital morphology (11). De Lauretis argued that a variety of 'perversions' nevertheless presuppose "an organization dominated by the genital zone. This surely suggests that the norm should be sought elsewhere [...]" (de Lauretis: 11-12, citing Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973: 308). Accordingly, de Lauretis looked, instead, to 'discourse' for the articulation of 'the norm.'

Where Freud fixes the creation of the fetish to a single specific moment in the subject's developmental history [...] I would use his own notion of retroactivity to argue that the lesbian fetish is often constructed retroactively and by a kind of reverse discourse in which the subject makes use of the very categories, male/female and masculinity/femininity, by which sexuality is socially constructed and subjectively apprehended. (De Lauretis, 1994: 264)

This manoeuvre permits some historicisation and diversification of the conditions which produce the specificity of lesbian individuals, but appears to retain a dichotomy between 'psychic' and 'cultural' forces (as do psychoanalytic models themselves). De Lauretis seems to be eliding together a psychoanalytic account of 'culture' with a Foucauldian account of 'discourse:'

At the subjective, intrapsychic, and most concrete bodily level, this psychoanalytic view [Laplanche, 1976] corresponds to Foucault's historical view of sexuality as "an implantation of perversions" in the subject by the discursive and institutional practices (familiar and more broadly social) that constitute the technology of sex [...] For my study of perverse desire, although concerned more with intrapsychic than with institutional mechanisms, is premised on a conception of the sexual that is actually closer to Foucault than to Freud; namely, that individual sexual structuring is both an effect and a condition of the social construction of sexuality [...] (De Lauretis, 1994: 310)

But:

However, the fundamental role of fantasy in sexuality as the ground from which the socio-psycho-sexual subject is constituted through the semiosic process that assigns objects to instincts is certainly not limited to the subject of perverse desire [...] the importance of theorizing fantasy as the semiosic ground of sexuality lies in that fantasy itself, as sociopsychic process, exceeds its historically contingent configurations, the Oedipus included [...] [Freud] intimated and opened the critical path to understanding the semiosic nature of fantasy as that which links the subject to the social through sexuality. (De Lauretis, 1994: 308 – emphasis mine)

This is not, therefore, a discursive model since Foucauldian method would not recognise any such distinction. In a discursive account, the individual is not configured to the social through sexuality, but produced in the discursive formation of sexuality. De Lauretis' model does, perhaps, provide a 'ground' for resistant formations which seems rather less abstractly reactive (and counter-intuitive) than do many discursive articulations. It also permits the specification of gendered (as well as other modes of) oppositional identification in relating them to the contingency of cultural formations. The ontological status of society, history, or culture, seems very unclear, however. De Lauretis seems to use the terms 'society,' 'socio-history,' and 'discourse,' more or less interchangeably. What does seem clear is that 'history' figures here as external to the subject of 'sexuality' (for a 'bridge' is required between these interior and exterior spaces) and that it is fantasy which links universally experienced bodily impulses to the temporal and spatial contingencies of a 'history' which thus seems present in an externalisable (substantive) way. Such a separation is in fundamental contradiction with a Foucauldian method.

Whilst the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality describes the discursive practices and institutional mechanisms that implant sexuality in the social subject, Freudian psychoanalytic theory describes the subjective mechanisms through which the implantation takes, as it were, producing the subject as sexual subject. (De Lauretis, 1994: 309)

This might present a question as to which (or whose) account(s) of this 'history' should be treated as external to subjectivity — as substantive, or as 'the real.'