Undoing Gender (9 page)

Although there are, as Lacanians will remind us, only and always contestations of the symbolic, they fail to exercise any final force to undermine the symbolic itself or to force a radical reconfiguration of its terms.

The authority of the theory exposes its own tautological defense within the fact that the symbolic survives every and any contestation of its authority. It is not only a theory, that is, that insists upon masculine and feminine as symbolic positions which are finally beyond all contestation and which set the limit to contestation as such, but one that relies on the very authority it describes to shore up the authority of its own descriptive claims.

To separate the symbolic from the social sphere facilitates the distinction between the Law and variable laws. In the place of a critical practice that anticipates no final authority, and which opens up an anxiety-producing field of gendered possibilities, the symbolic emerges to put an end to such anxiety. If there is a Law that we cannot displace, but which we seek through imaginary means to displace again and again, then we know in advance that our efforts at change will be put in check, and our struggle against the authoritative account of gender will be thwarted, and we will submit to an unassailable authority. There are those who believe that to think that the symbolic itself might be changed by human practice is pure voluntarism. But is it?

One can certainly concede that desire is radically conditioned without claiming that it is radically determined, and one can acknowledge that there are structures that make desire possible without claiming that those structures are timeless and recalcitrant, impervious to a reiterative replay and displacement. To contest symbolic authority is not necessarily a return to the “ego” or classical liberal notions of freedom, rather to do so is to insist that the norm in its necessary temporality is opened to a displacement and subversion from within.

The symbolic is understood as the sphere that regulates the assumption of sex, where sex is understood as a differential set of positions, masculine and feminine. Thus, the concept of gender, derived as it is from sociological discourse, is foreign to the discourse on sexual difference that emerges from the Lacanian and post-Lacanian framework. Lacan was clearly influenced by Lévi-Strauss’s
The Elementary
Structures of Kinship
, first published in 1947, approximately six years before Lacan uses the term.
¹⁰
In the Lévi-Straussian model, the position of man and woman is what makes possible certain forms of sexual exchange. In this sense, gender operates to secure certain forms of reproductive sexual ties and to prohibit other forms. One’s gender, in this view, is an index of the proscribed and prescribed sexual relations by which a subject is socially regulated and produced.

According to Lévi-Strauss the rules that govern sexual exchange and which, accordingly, produce viable subject positions on the basis of that regulation of sexuality are distinct from the individuals who abide by those rules and occupy such positions. That human actions are regulated by such laws but do not have the power to transform the substance and aim of their laws appears to be the consequence of a conception of law that is indifferent to the content that it regulates.

How does a shift from thinking about gender as regulated by symbolic laws to a conception of gender as regulated by social norms contest this indifference of the law to what it regulates? And how does such a shift open up the possibility of a more radical contestation of the law itself?

If gender is a norm, it is not the same as a model that individuals seek to approximate. On the contrary, it is a form of social power that produces the intelligible field of subjects, and an apparatus by which the gender binary is instituted. As a norm that appears independent of the practices that it governs, its ideality is the reinstituted effect of those very practices. This suggests not only that the relation between practices and the idealizations under which they work is contingent, but that the very idealization can be brought into question and crisis, potentially undergoing deidealization and divestiture.

The distance between gender and its naturalized instantiations is precisely the distance between a norm and its incorporations. I suggested above that the norm is analytically independent of its incorporations, but I want to emphasize that this is only an intellectual heuristic, one that helps to guarantee the perpetuation of the norm itself as a timeless and inalterable ideal. In fact, the norm only persists as a norm to the extent that it is acted out in social practice and reidealized and reinstituted in and through the daily social rituals of bodily life. The norm has no independent ontological status, yet it cannot be easily reduced to its instantiations; it is itself (re)produced through its embodiment, through the acts that strive to approximate it, through the idealizations reproduced in and by those acts.

Foucault brought the discourse of the norm into currency by arguing in
The History of Sexuality
(vol. 1), that the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the norm as a means of social regulation which is not identical with the operations of law. Influenced by Foucault, the sociologist, François Ewald, has expanded upon this remark in several essays.
¹¹
Ewald argues that the action of the norm is at the expense of the juridical system of the law, and that although normalization entails an increase in legislation, it is not necessarily opposed to it, but remains independent of it in some significant ways (“Norms” 138).

Foucault notes that the norm often appears in legal form, that the normative comes to the fore most typically in constitutions, legal codes, and the constant and clamorous activity of the legislature (Foucault, “Right of Death and Power Over Life”). Foucault further claims that a norm belongs to the arts of judgment, and that although a norm is clearly related to power, it is characterized less by the use of force or violence than by, as Ewald puts it, “an implicit logic that allows power to reflect upon its own strategies and clearly define its objects. This logic is at once the force that enables us to imagine life and the living as objects of power and the power that can take ‘life’ in hand, creating the sphere of the bio-political” (“Norms” 138).

For Ewald, this raises at least two questions, whether, for instance, modernity participates in the logic of the norm and what the relation between norms and the law would be.
¹²
Although the norm is sometimes used as synonymous with “the rule,” it is clear that norms are also what give rules a certain local coherence. Ewald claims that the beginning of the nineteenth century inaugurates a radical change in the relationship between the rule and the norm (“Norms” 140), and that the norm emerges conceptually not only as
a particular variety of rules
, but also as
a way of producing them
, and as
a principle of valorization
.

In French, the term
normalité
appears in 1834,
normatif
in 1868, and in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, we get the normative sciences (which, I gather, gets carried forward in the name of the division at the contemporary American Political Science Association meetings called “normative political theory”); the term “normalization” appears in 1920. For Foucault as well as Ewald, it corresponds to the normalizing operation of bureaucratic and disciplinary powers.

According to Ewald, the norm transforms constraints into a mechanism, and thus marks the movement by which, in Foucaultian terms, juridical power becomes productive; it transforms the negative restraints of the juridical into the more positive controls of normalization; thus the norm performs this transformative function. The norm thus marks and effects the shift from thinking power as juridical constraint to thinking power as (a) an organized set of constraints, and (b) as a regulatory mechanism.

Norms and the Problem of Abstraction

This then returns us to the question not only of how discourse might be said to produce a subject (something everywhere assumed in cultural studies but rarely investigated in its own right), but, more precisely, what in discourse effects that production. When Foucault claims that discipline “produces” individuals, he means not only that disciplinary discourse
manages
and
makes use of them
but that it also
actively constitutes them
.

The norm is a measurement and a means of producing a common standard, to become an instance of the norm is not fully to exhaust the norm, but, rather, to become subjected to an abstraction of commonality. Although Foucault and Ewald tend to concentrate their analyses of this process in the nineteenth century and twentieth century, Mary Poovey in
Making a Social Body
dates the history of abstraction in the social sphere to the late eighteenth century. In Britain, she maintains, “The last decades of the eighteenth century witnessed the first modern efforts to represent all or significant parts of the population of Britain as aggregates and to delineate a social sphere distinct from the political and economic domains” (8). What characterizes this social domain, in her view, is the entrance of quantitative measurement: “Such comparisons and measurement, of course, produce some phenomena as normative, ostensibly because they are numerous, because they represent an average, or because they constitute an ideal towards which all other phenomena move” (9).

Ewald seeks a narrower definition of the norm in order to understand its capacity to regulate all social phenomena as well as the internal limits it faces in any such regulation (“Power” 170–71). He writes: what precisely is the norm? It is the measure which simultaneously individualizes, makes ceaseless individualization possible and creates comparability. The norm makes it possible to locate spaces, indefinitely, which become more and more discrete, minute, and at the same time makes sure that these spaces never enclose anyone in such a way as to create a nature for them, since these individualizing spaces
are never more than the expression of a relationship
, of a relationship which has to be seen indefinitely in the context of others. What is a norm? A principle of comparison, of comparability, a common measure, which is instituted in the pure reference of one group to itself, when the group has no relationship other than to itself, without external reference and without verticality. (“Norms” 173, my emphasis) According to Ewald, Foucault adds this to the thinking of normalization: “normative individualization is not exterior. The abnormal does not have a nature which is different from that of the normal. The norm, or normative space, knows no outside. The norm integrates anything which might attempt to go beyond it—nothing, nobody, whatever difference it might display, can ever claim to be exterior, or claim to possess an otherness which would actually make it other” (“Norms” 173).

Such a view suggests that any opposition to the norm is already contained within the norm, and is crucial to its own functioning.

Indeed, at this point in our analysis, it appears that moving from a Lacanian notion of symbolic position to a more Foucaultian conception of “social norm” does not augment the chances for an effective displacement or resignification of the norm itself.

In the work of Pierre Macheray, however, one begins to see that norms are not independent and self-subsisting entities or abstractions but must be understood as forms of action. In “Towards a Natural History of Norms,” Macheray makes clear that the kind of causality that norms exercise is not transitive, but immanent, and he seeks recourse to Spinoza and Foucault to make his claim: To think in terms of the immanence of the norm is indeed to refrain from considering the action of the norm in a restrictive manner, seeing it as a form of “repression” formulated in terms of interdiction exercised against a given subject in advance of the performance of this action, thus implying that this subject could, on his own, liberate himself or be liberated from this sort of control: the history of madness, just like that of sexuality, shows that such “liberation,” far from suppressing the action of norms, on the contrary reinforces it. But one might also wonder if it is enough to denounce the illusions of this anti-repressive discourse in order to escape from them: does one not run the risk of reproducing them on another level, where they cease to be naive but where, though of a more learned nature, they still remain out of step in relation to the context at which they seem to be aiming? (185) By maintaining that the norm only subsists in and through its actions, Macheray effectively locates action as the site of social intervention: “From this point of view it is no longer possible to think of the norm itself in advance of the consequences of its action, as being in some way behind them and independent of them;
the norm has to be considered such as it
acts precisely in its effects
in such a way, not so as to limit the reality by means of simple conditioning, but in order to confer upon it the maxi-mum amount of reality of which it is capable” (186, my emphasis).

I mentioned above that the norm cannot be reduced to any of its instances, but I would add: neither can the norm be fully extricated from its instantiations. The norm is not exterior to its field of application. Not only is the norm responsible for producing its field of application, according to Macheray (187), but
the norm produces itself in the production
of that field.
The norm is actively conferring reality; indeed, only by virtue of its repeated power to confer reality is the norm constituted as a norm.

Gender Norms

According to the notion or norms elaborated above, we might say that the field of reality produced by gender norms constitutes the background for the surface appearance of gender in its idealized dimensions.

But how are we to understand the historical formation of such ideals, their persistence through time, and their site as a complex convergence of social meanings that do not immediately appear to be about gender?