Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse

All direct quotes.  In Feminism/Postmodernism ed Linda Nicholson.

We refer not only to women as a social category - as a felt sense of self, a subjective identity.  Women's … historical situation … requires a common identity … in their embodied resistance to abstract and objectifying modes of thought and experience.  … What… characterises the world of women (is that it) is marginalised, distorted, or negated within various masculinist practices.  Is there… a set of values … that can be associated with women as a group.  When the category represents a set of values it becomes normative in character, and exclusionary in principle.  This excludes various women.  The category reflects the restricted location of its theoreticians,…  and fails to recognise intersection…. This leads to… feminists … either redefining and expanding the category of women … or challenging the place of the category as part of a feminist normative discourse.  … Gayatri Spivak has argued for … operational essentialism, … women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political programme … for strategic purposes.


Is there an alterative … for feminist theory that does not require the rendering visible of a female subject who fails to represent …. the array of embodied beings culturally positioned as women?  … Psychoanalysis is… a patriarchal culture as a trans historical and cross cultural force.  It conforms to the feminist demand for a theory which can explain women's subordination across specific cultures and different historical movements.  … The paternal law is a masculine prerogative within the terms of culture.  Luce Irigaray maintains .. the autonomous subject is a masculine cultural prerogative from which women have been excluded.  The subject is always already masculine, that it bespeaks a refusal of dependency required of male acculturation, and that 'autonomy' is founded on repression of its early … helplessness … - a repudiation of the feminine.  The construct of the subject that necessitates relations of hierarchy, exclusion and domination.  There is no subject without an Other.

Carol Gilligan and others have called for a reintegration of conventional feminine virtues, such as care and relational attitude, a reintegration of the human personality. The integration of nurturance and dependency into the masculine sphere and the … assimilation of autonomy in the the feminine sphere suggests a normative model of a unified self which tends toward the androgynous solution.

The failure to historicise the account of … sexual difference institutes that difference as the reified foundation of al intelligible culture, with the result that the paternal law becomes the invariant condition of intelligibility, and the variety of contestations, not only can never undo that law but … required the abiding efficacy of that law in order to maintain any meaning at all.

Standards of narrative coherence must be radically revised …. in order for gender coherence to be understood as the regulatory fiction it is.