Gender Issues

After the women’s movement became more or less institutionalized in the late 1970s and early 1980s, new discourses arose over the concerns that feminism had failed to address. Chief among these was an evaluation of homosexuality within the newly created sphere of gender issues. Foucault establishes the groundwork for future criticism in this field by discussing the nature of sexuality within power structures. His ideologies are taken up by Judith Butler, who applies them to her specific situation as an “out of the closet” lesbian.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault advances the notion that homosexuality is not a set of behavioural patterns but instead as a discourse between itself and heterosexuality. The two are not mutually exclusive binaries, but are part of the same power structure. He argues that any power or authority exists simultaneously with its forms of repression and resistance. They do not operate as an exteriority to power, but are instead multiple points of rebellion within the power structure. Thus he argues that both discourse and silence are simultaneously supportive and subversive of power. Neither is this authority a centralized figure, but in a sense a spread of influence acting omnidirectionally: it is “exercised from innumerable points” (p. 184). Foucault consequently argues that repression has always existed, that the era of Victorian prudish sexuality is not an anomaly situated between periods of liberation. Forms of repression change with the times, with the changing technological structure, and with changing definitions of power-knowledge. He ends this extract by defining sexuality not as a force in and of itself, but as a historical construct determined by power-knowledge. In terms of relationships, a deployment of alliance and a deployment of sexuality have been merged in the form of the family in the modern West. The family unit was itself created as an economic entity, but sexuality emerged in the family which served to disrupt the alliance. It is at this point that “the young homosexual who rejects marriage or neglects his wife” (p. 192) emerges and joins the discourse of sexuality.

Set as a backdrop to Butler’s essay is her belief that gender is an ideological construction which is assumed; it is not a matter of genes, but of impersonation. Gender is merely a continuum which is the superstructure for the binaries of male and female. In this regard she refers somewhat to the Lacanian-Derridian concept of slippery signification. The signifier ‘Female’ does not strictly adhere to a signified feminine heterosexual identity, but indeed can refer to any pattern of sexuality along the continuum. She posits drag to exemplify this principle: “Drag is not ... an act of expropriation or appropriation that assumes that gender is the rightful property of sex, that ‘masculine’ belongs to ‘male’ and ‘feminine’ belongs to ‘female’” (p. 332). Alternately, she proposes that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (p. 333). One slips from one imitation to another as easily as from one signifier to another. Heterosexuality is an infinite repetition of imitation: it desires to be like the original. Yet by defining itself as the original, heterosexuality immediately describes homosexuality as a necessary. But the inclusion of homosexuality within heterosexuality (and of course, vice versa) does not suppose the derivation of the former from the latter. Butler remains very aware of the Derridian interplay between the binaries. It forces her to examine what it means to be ‘out of the closet’, as both out and in require each other for their own definition. Additionally, she refers to a Foucault’s notion of the mulitvalency of discourse: by coming out of the closet she alters the locus of what the closet symbolizes. Similarly, she describes gay and straight defining each other and even in some instances constituting each other: “the self from the start is radically implicated in the ‘Other’” (p. 336). This ‘Other’ derives from a sense of loss, and is the capacity for the self to realize its identity. She states that this sense of self-identity, specifically of sexual self-identity, emerges as a repetition of psychic compulsions; it is the performance which realizes this illusion of ‘sex’, but fails in its expression of a ‘natural sex’.