Undoing Gender

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 6 Summary: “Longing for Recognition”

Butler cites Jessica Benjamin’s elucidation of “recognition,” noting how recognition involves “intersubjectivity” above object relations. Recognition involves a tension between the desires for omnipotence and contact, which imbues recognition with the possibility of transformative communication or destruction.

Butler questions Benjamin’s assertion of a triadic relationship that deviates from the Oedipal conflict. In the triad of subject, other, and a “third term,” Butler wants to avoid reducing the “third term” to the phallus, which relies on heterosexist ideology. Though Butler likes Benjamin’s model, which argues against the heteronormativity of the triangulation of the Oedipal conflict, they wish to rethink this triangulation in view of the “ek-static” while reducing adherence to gender dimorphism. Expanding on Jean Hyppolite, Butler outlines how desire for the other can be read in different ways, including but not limited to the Oedipal desire for the object which the other desires and possesses. Through the “exchange” of women in the Oedipal conflict, Butler illustrates how heterosexuality provides a venue for queerness. A queer reimagining of this process allows for possibilities that Lacanians omit or label pathological by arguing for the “primacy” of the phallus. Imagining a triad of a bisexual woman, a man who refuses to be “topped,” and a man whom the woman “tops,” Butler shows how a queer perspective complicates an understanding of desire within triangulation. Exploring Brandon Teena as an example of a transgender individual, Butler explains how trans identities further complicate an understanding of desire.

Butler asserts that some destruction may be necessary in recognition, noting how desire for the other’s desire opens possibilities that require humility to confront. Butler doubts Benjamin’s assertion that “negation is destruction that is survived” (146), though aggression may not always be present. Citing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Butler notes that the self recognizes itself in the other, which is a process both of self-loss and self-knowledge. Butler acknowledges Benjamin’s critique of Butler’s ideas of “inclusion” and “exclusion,” culminating in the idea that the self “is” alterity. The self splits and is split, but Butler questions the implication of a “whole” self prior to splitting, noting how the “self” is always outside itself. Relations are only periodically dyadic, given the view of the other of the other, and the self is a “subject in a temporal chain of desire” (151).

Chapter 7 Summary: “Quandaries of the Incest Taboo”

Butler examines the incest taboo, grounded in the Oedipal conflict. Psychoanalysis struggles to define the trauma of incest as a memory or event. Because the incest taboo is attributed to gender differentiation, either incest is a “traumatic fantasy” necessary to develop sexual differentiation, or it is an abusive trauma not linked to development. Trauma theory complicates investigations into this paradigm by asserting that trauma is impossible to represent. The distinction between “event” and “wish” is challenging, and the need for historical veracity conflicts with the ethical imperative to acknowledge violation as abuse. In psychoanalysis, trauma obscures truth, a process that Butler calls the “epistemic violence” of violation. Butler clarifies that not all incest is a violation, as much of the discomfort with incest results from social shame. The incest taboo assumes a family structure, including a gendered hierarchy within that structure, and assumes different forms based on the specific nature of that structure. The incest taboo both relies on and perpetuates heteronormativity, rendering queer, non-monogamous identities unintelligible. Butler critiques the structuralist, psychoanalytic perspectives that either view heteronormativity as erasing queer lives or erasing the trauma of incestuous violation. Butler notes how the incest taboo resists questioning because it implies the exploitation of children who cannot consent to sexual activity.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Bodily Confessions”

Butler cites Foucault’s understanding of confession in the Christian church as a vestige of “pastoral power,” noting how the repression of sexuality is most undone by the desire for confession. Instead of priests, modern society uses psychologists. Foucault later shifted his view toward confession as a means of realizing the self through verbalization; the interpreter aids the confessor in transformation. The desire confessed by the analysand is compounded with the desire to express that desire to the analyst. Butler examines how the confessor both affirms a prior act or desire by verbalizing, but they also commit a new act in verbalizing the prior act. In sexuality, both the sexual act and speaking of the sexual act can be pleasurable, calling into question the role of language in sexuality.

Butler explores confession through Sophocles’s Antigone, noting how Antigone’s confession binds her to Creon, mirroring his desire for public recognition and depending on his authority for her rebellion. Antigone’s confession repeats the rebellion of her brother, asserts a sovereignty modeled after Creon’s, and completes her initial crime through a new crime of asserting the prior crime. Butler cites Sigmund Freud’s observation that some people commit misdeeds to justify a preexisting sense of guilt; Friedrich Nietzsche calls such people “pale criminals.” Freud tied this guilt to the Oedipal conflict, citing the murder of the father and sex with the mother as the two “great criminal intentions” (169). Antigone is literally the daughter of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta, and Sophocles conflates Antigone’s desire for death with her sexual desire, implicitly for her brothers. Antigone’s confession appears to resolve a preexisting guilt, which Butler argues necessitates the analyst’s willingness to help relieve guilt.

Butler examines how the content of the analysand’s confession might be better understood or undermined by the analyst looking into the context of that content, including tone and consequence. Transference, through speech, is an act of the body, and sexual confessions compound the body as both the actor of the speech and of the sex act. Confession becomes a mutual exchange, in which the self must separate, in part, from itself, and neither participant can predict the outcome of the conversation.

Chapters 6-8 Analysis

Butler’s tone is critical in the discussion in Chapter 6, which focuses on the Oedipal conflict and how it influences the dyad/triad process of recognition and desire. The triangulation of desire in recognition between two subjects (dyad) forms a triad is a process taken too seriously by Lacanians, as Butler argues, and this is Butler’s target in exploring how desire and the development of sexuality and gender operate. Further developing the theme of Gender Performativity and the Social Construction of Identity, Butler uses examples such as the bisexual woman who has an affair with two different men to show how different triads can produce interesting results for gender and sexuality. They therefore cement their critique by presenting popular or prevailing theories and subverting them with new examples.

Fundamentally, Butler’s argument on the Oedipal conflict centers on how the Oedipal conflict is either overstated in psychology or overly restrictive in its applications. Butler asks a series of questions, including: “Were we right to see the relation as a binary when the reference to the tertiary is what permitted us to see the homosexual aims that run through heterosexual relationality?” (144). In such questions, Butler is intentionally taking the apparatus of heteronormativity to show how it does not successfully or consistently refute the possibility of non-heterosexuality. As such, the argument of recognition, while used to support heteronormative claims in the past, is reexamined and reconfigured to become more inclusive of the actual sexual, gendered identities found in reality. This resignification also opens the door to future theorists of gender and sexuality.

The Oedipal conflict is a significant motif in this section, and it carries into Chapter 7. The application of the motif here underscores The Experiences and Exclusion of Marginalized People as Butler highlights how theoretical ideas become exclusionary practices embedded within society. Butler explores the incest taboo as both a necessary moral instrument and a potential social and psychological hindrance. They note that these conflated values make it difficult “to distinguish between incest as a traumatic fantasy […] and incest as a trauma that ought clearly to be marked as abusive practice” (154). Psychoanalysts accept the frequent failure of the fantasy of incest in the development of the Oedipal conflict, referring to queer development as “the array of perversion and fetishism that populates regular human sexuality” (158). Such language is often used to deride queer people, which furthers Butler’s argument in Chapter 6 regarding the need for a reexamination of the Oedipal conflict.

“Bodily Confessions” follows a unique essay structure relative to the other essays in the text, as it discusses the implications of confessions. First, Butler responds to Foucault, but the essay then becomes a critical reading of Antigone by Sophocles. Foucault’s initial understanding of confession relies on power dynamics, explained through the way Christian priests use confession with their parishioners as “the means by which that person is administered and controlled” (161). However, Butler embraces Foucault’s shift to viewing confessions as transformative, relying on the discussion of recognition from Chapter 6. Instead of control, Butler sees the confession as revelatory for both the analysand and the analyst. Butler’s reading of Antigone is relevant to the collection because it provides an extended application of their theory to a text. Rather than simply stating theory, Butler uses the theory in its development to elucidate Antigone through her confession. Butler’s critical reading of a classical text highlights how narratives trickle, pervasively, through society and can therefore be used to examine how societies construct identity.