Recherche
Is there perhaps a specific gender pain that provokes such fantasies of a sexual practice that would transcend gender difference altogether, in which the marks of masculinity and femininity would no longer be legible ? Would this not be a sexual practice paradigmatically fetishistic, trying not to know what it knows, but knowing it all the same ?
The critical potential of « drag » centrally concerns a critique of a prevailing truth-regime of « sex, » one that I take to be pervasively heterosexist : the distinction between the « inside » truth of femininity, considered as psychic disposition or ego-core, and the « outside » truth, considered as appearance or presentation, produces a contradictory formation of gender in which no fixed « truth » can be established. Gender is neither a purely psychic truth, conceived as « internal » and « hidden, » nor is it reducible to a surface appearance ; on the contrary, its undecidability is to be traced as the play between psyche and appearance (where the latter domain includes what appears in words). Further, this will be a « play » regulated by heterosexist constraints though not, for that reason, fully reducible to them.
In no sense can it be concluded that the part of gender that is performed is therefore the « truth » of gender ; performance as bounded « act » is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s « will » or « choice » ; further, what is « performed » works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.
The rejection of an expressive model of drag which holds that some interior truth is exteriorized in performance needs, however, to be referred to a psychoanalytic consideration on the relationship between how gender appears and what gender signifies. Psychoanalysis insists that the opacity of the unconscious sets limits to the exteriorization of the psyche. It also argues, rightly I think, that what is exteriorized or performed can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier and from the domain of corporeal legibility.
How precisely do repudiated identifications, identifications that do not « show, » circumscribe and materialize the identifications that do ? Here it seems useful to rethink the notion of gender-as-drag in terms of the analysis of gender melancholia. Given the iconographic figure of the melancholic drag queen, one might consider whether and how these terms work together. Here, one might ask also after the disavowal that occasions performance and that performance might be said to enact, where performance engages « acting out » in the psychoanalytic sense. If melancholia in Freud’s sense is the effect of an ungrieved loss (a sustaining of the lost object/Other as a psychic figure with the consequence of heightened identification with that Other, self-beratement, and the acting out of unresolved anger and love), it may be that performance, understood as « acting out, » is significantly related to the problem of unacknowledged loss. Where there is an ungrieved loss in drag performance (and I am sure that such a generalization cannot be universalized), perhaps it is a loss that is refused and incorporated in the performed identification, one that reiterates a gendered idealization and its radical uninhabitability. This is neither a territorialization of the feminine by the masculine nor an « envy » of the masculine by the feminine, nor a sign of the essential plasticity of gender. What it does suggest is that gender performance allegorizes a loss it cannot grieve, allegorizes the incorporative fantasy of melancholia whereby an object is phantasmatically taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go.
The analysis above is a risky one because it suggests that for a « man » performing femininity or for a « woman » performing masculinity (the latter is always, in effect, to perform a little less, given that femininity is often cast as the spectacular gender) there is an attachment to and a loss and refusal of the figure of femininity by the man, or the figure of masculinity by the woman. Thus, it is important to underscore that drag is an effort to negotiate cross-gendered identification, but that cross-gendered identification is not the exemplary paradigm for thinking about homosexuality, although it may be one. In this sense, drag allegorizes some set of melancholic incorporative fantasies that stabilize gender. Not only are a vast number of drag performers straight, but it would be a mistake to think that homosexuality is best explained through the performativity that is drag. What does seem useful in this analysis, however, is that drag exposes or allegorizes the mundane psychic and performative practices by which heterosexualized genders form themselves through the renunciation of the possibility of homosexuality, a foreclosure that produces a field of heterosexual objects at the same time that it produces a domain of those whom it would be impossible to love. Drag thus allegorizes heterosexual melancholy, the melancholy by which a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love ; a feminine gender is formed (taken on, assumed) through the incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love, an exclusion never grieved, but « preserved » through the heightening of feminine identification itself. In this sense, the « truest » lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman, and the « truest » gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man.
What drag exposes, however, is the « normal » constitution of gender presentation in which the gender performed is in many ways constituted by a set of disavowed attachments or identifications that constitute a different domain of the « unperformable. » Indeed, it may well be that what constitutes the sexually unperformable is performed instead as gender identification. To the extent that homosexual attachments remain unacknowledged within normative heterosexuality, they are not merely constituted as desires that emerge and subsequently become prohibited. Rather, these are desires that are proscribed from the start. And when they do emerge on the far side of the censor, they may well carry that mark of impossibility with them, performing, as it were, as the impossible within the possible. As such, they will not be attachments that can be openly grieved. This is, then, less the refusal to grieve (a formulation that accents the choice involved) than a preemption of grief performed by the absence of cultural conventions for avowing the loss of homosexual love. And it is this absence that produces a culture of heterosexual melancholy, one that can be read in the hyperbolic identifications by which mundane heterosexual masculinity and femininity confirm themselves. The straight man becomes (mimes, cites, appropriates, assumes the status of) the man he « never » loved and « never » grieved ; the straight woman becomes the woman she « never » loved and « never » grieved. It is in this sense, then, that what is most apparently performed as gender is the sign and symptom of a pervasive disavowal.
How, if at all, is the notion of discursive resignification linked to the notion of gender parody or impersonation ? First, what is meant by understanding gender as an impersonation ? Does this mean that one puts on a mask or persona, that there is a « one » who precedes that « putting on, » who is something other than its gender from the start ? Or does this miming, this impersonating precede and form the « one, » operating as its formative precondition rather than its dispensable artifice ?
The construal of gender-as-drag according to the first model appears to be the effect of a number of circumstances. One of them I brought on myself by citing drag as an example of performativity, a move that was taken then, by some, to be exemplary of performativity. If drag is performative, that does not mean that all performativity is to be understood as drag. The publication of Gender Trouble coincided with a number of publications that did assert that « clothes make the woman, » but I never did think that gender was like clothes, or that clothes make the woman. Added to these, however, are the political needs of an emergent queer movement in which the publicization of theatrical agency has become quite central.
The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate. Moreover, this embodying is a repeated process. And one might construe repetition as precisely that which undermines the conceit of voluntarist mastery designated by the subject in language.
As Paris Is Burning made clear, drag is not unproblematically subversive. It serves a subversive function to the extent that it reflects the mundane impersonations by which heterosexually ideal genders are performed and naturalized and undermines their power by virtue of effecting that exposure. But there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion. Heterosexuality can augment its hegemony through its denaturalization, as when we see denaturalizing parodies that reidealize heterosexual norms without calling them into question.
On other occasions, though, the transferability of a gender ideal or gender norm calls into question the abjecting power that it sustains. For an occupation or reterritorialization of a term that has been used to abject a population can become the site of resistance, the possibility of an enabling social and political resignification. And this has happened to a certain extent with the notion of « queer. » The contemporary redeployment enacts a prohibition and a degradation against itself, spawning a different order of values, a political affirmation from and through the very term which in a prior usage had as its final aim the eradication of precisely such an affirmation.
It may seem, however, that there is a difference between the embodying or performing of gender norms and the performative use of discourse. Are these two different senses of « performativity, » or do they converge as modes of citationality in which the compulsory character of certain social imperatives becomes subject to a more promising deregulation ? Gender norms operate by requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of femininity and masculinity, ones that are almost always related to the idealization of the heterosexual bond. In this sense, the initiatory performative, « It’s a girl ! » anticipates the eventual arrival of the sanction, « I pronounce you man and wife. » Hence, also, the peculiar pleasure of the cartoon strip in which the infant is first interpellated into discourse with « It’s a lesbian ! » Far from an essentialist joke, the queer appropriation of the performative mimes and exposes both the binding power of the heterosexualizing law and its expropriability.
To the extent that the naming of the « girl » is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain « girling » is compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm. This is a « girl, » however, who is compelled to « cite » the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. Indeed, there is no « one » who takes on a gender norm. On the contrary, this citation of the gender norm is necessary in order to qualify as a « one, » to become viable as a « one, » where subject-formation is dependent on the prior operation of legitimating gender norms.
It is in terms of a norm that compels a certain « citation » in order for a viable subject to be produced that the notion of gender performativity calls to be rethought. And precisely in relation to such a compulsory citationality that the theatricality of gender is also to be explained. Theatricality need not be conflated with self-display or self-creation. Within queer politics, indeed, within the very signification that is « queer, » we read a resignifying practice in which the desanctioning power of the name « queer » is reversed to sanction a contestation of the terms of sexual legitimacy. Paradoxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is « queered » into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses. The hyperbolic gesture is crucial to the exposure of the homophobic « law » that can no longer control the terms of its own abjecting strategies.
One might be tempted to say that identity categories are insufficient because every subject position is the site of converging relations of power that are not univocal. But such a formulation underestimates the radical challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply. For there is no self-identical subject who houses or bears these relations, no site at which such relations converge. This converging and interarticulation is the contemporary fate of the subject. In other words, the subject as a self-identical entity is no more.
It is in this sense that the temporary totalization performed by identity categories is a necessary error. And if identity is a necessary error, then the assertion of « queer » will be necessary as a term of affiliation, but it will not fully describe those it purports to represent. As a result, it will be necessary to affirm the contingency of the term : to let it be vanquished by those who are excluded by the term but who justifiably expect representation by it, to let it take on meanings that cannot now be anticipated by a younger generation whose political vocabulary may well carry a very different set of investments.
As much as it is necessary to assert political demands through recourse to identity categories, and to lay claim to the power to name oneself and determine the conditions under which that name is used, it is also impossible to sustain that kind of mastery over the trajectory of those categories within discourse. This is not an argument against using identity categories, but it is a reminder of the risk that attends every such use. The expectation of self-determination that self-naming arouses is paradoxically contested by the historicity of the name itself : by the history of the usages that one never controlled, but that constrain the very usage that now emblematizes autonomy ; by the future efforts to deploy the term against the grain of the current ones, and that will exceed the control of those who seek to set the course of the terms in the present.
If the term « queer » is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes. This also means that it will doubtless have to be yielded in favor of terms that do that political work more effectively. Such a yielding may well become necessary in order to accommodate—without domesticating—democratizing contestations that have and will redraw the contours of the movement in ways that can never be fully anticipated in advance.
Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only, to repeat an earlier phrase, a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an « act, » singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power. Hence, the judge who authorizes and installs the situation he names invariably cites the law that he applies, and it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or conferring power. And though it may appear that the binding power of his words is derived from the force of his will or from a prior authority, the opposite is more true : it is through the citation of the law that the figure of the judge’s « will » is produced and that the « priority » of textual authority is established. Indeed, it is through the invocation of convention that the speech act of the judge derives its binding power ; that binding power is to be found neither in the subject of the judge nor in his will, but in the citational legacy by which a contemporary « act » emerges in the context of a chain of binding conventions.
Where there is an « I » who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that « I » and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will. Thus there is no « I » who stands behind discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse. On the contrary, the « I » only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusserian term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the « I » ; it is the transitive invocation of the « I. » Indeed, I can only say « I » to the extent that I have frst been addressed, and that address has mobilized my place in speech ; paradoxically, the discursive condition of social recognition precedes and conditions the formation of the subject : recognition is not conferred on a subject, but forms that subject. Further, the impossibility of a full recognition, that is, of ever fully inhabiting the name by which one’s social identity is inaugurated and mobilized, implies the instability and incompleteness of subject-formation. The « I » is thus a citation of the place of the « I » in speech, where that place has a certain priority and anonymity with respect to the life it animates : it is the historically revisable possibility of a name that precedes and exceeds me, but without which I cannot speak.