Questions I Still Have for Judith Butler

     I found Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender infinitely easier to understand and relate to than her earlier work Gender Trouble. However, there is a still a bit of vagueness, and, in my opinion, contradiction which leads me to pose a few questions about the practical reality of what she is proposing, or, perhaps more fittingly, what she is proposing at all.

What are the everyday issues people face who are not considered real or human?

     This experience is obviously infinitely varied and dependent on culture, but what violence does the queer community suffer aside from actual physical violence, which Butler posits reinforces the discourse excluding such individuals from humanity, creating a vicious circularity. Such communities’ denial of rights and the economic exploitation that results from this lack of recognition leads to an insidious trauma which, though certainly a form of violence, is not as thoroughly explored.

Is it wrong for people to compromise the purity of ideals in order to seek power (economic and otherwise) in a thoroughly heterosexual world?

      Butler admonishes gay marriage being made the main focus of queer human rights efforts of our time, stating that to install it as a “model for sexual legitimacy is precisely to constrain the sociality of the body in acceptable ways”(26).  She asserts privileging marriage asserts those that partake in relationships outside the parameters of longevity and monogamy do not have “real” desire and connections, proposing a drastic rethinking of our kinship structures. In my opinion, her dismissal of the focus on gay marriage is problematic for many reasons. First of all, I’m unconvinced it is fair to assert in this day and age that marriage represents monogamy or longevity-at least in Western culture- , as the divorce rate hovers around 50% and 75% of those who get divorces remarry at least one time(Divorce Rate , www.divorce.com). Moreover, even if marriage symbolically stands for such values, marriage represents an area of access to economic equality queer folks have henceforth been denied. Is pursuing gay marriage not a potential practice of seeking autonomy in an imperfect world one did not choose? It also seems possible that gaining access to marriage would allow queer populations to influence the definition of the institution, and possibly change its meaning or displace its importance.  Since, in our age, marriage and the privileges which accompany it are simply one branch of heterosexual power systems which define space, time, and how these entities are interpreted and organized by the general public, gaining access to, and thus some level of influence over, this system could potentially provide a foothold into displacing or destabalizing some of the broader heterosexual systems of power. Though queer desire, in all its variations, is not fully recognized or legitimized through the drive for marriage rights, this process seems to provide an opportunity to attain eventual recognition. If ideals should not be compromised on some level, or for some period of time, in working toward a better future, how exactly does the realty of the everyday lives of people become more livable? Will changes in our economic systems and societal order result from a grand and pure change in who is considered human without any theoretical compromise? Can such a transition occur without changes on the level of the everyday preceding it?

Does maintaining theoretical purity, in a way, lead to the sacrifice of bodies?

       The gay marriage example, which is one of the few concrete examples of political realities Butler explores, poses the question how undercutting the importance of seeking a place within or access to heterosexual systems of power leads to the sacrifice of bodies on some level. If queer populations cannot remake the society they did not choose, then seeking power within this imperfect society seems to be a vital exercise, one that should accompany and augment efforts to make norms more inclusive for all. In speaking about the politics of intersex birth, and more specifically the proposition that children should not be assigned genders in efforts to restore natural sexual difference, Butler states that queer theory would not “oppose all gender assignment,” as it is a “perfectly reasonable assumption” that children “do not need to take on the burden of being heroes for a movement without first assenting to the role”(Butler 8).  Should the queer community, which, in large part, seems to support the agenda of seeking marriage rights, a goal whose tangibility has been affirmed in recent legislative progress, sacrifice this focus in order to pursue a brand of politics which endorses a more dramatic restructuring of heterosexual power systems? What would this brand of politics look like, and is it possible an exclusive focus on such agendas would lead to the sacrifice of current dehumanized population’s quality of life, or potential quality of life, which could be gained by securing access to rights within a heterosexual power system.  It seems unfair to posit the deaths of queer folks because they do not have access to their partner’s health insurance benefits in light of marriage laws are any less tragic than other forms of violence, and are in need of redress less than other forms of violence.

Can the expansion of the umbrella of human occur without increasing economic equality and a diffusion of power?

                In creating a parallel between the human experience of grief, a process she describes as “agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance,” and the fundamental alteration of the notion of who is human, Butler asserts that we cannot know what the results of this process will entail in advance.  Nevertheless, in deeming the effort to reconstitute the human as “the demand to establish more inclusive conditions for viable life,” Butler suggests this effort will inevitably result in more people being considered human and thus being able to accrue the advantages that accompany such stature.  It seems this is, indeed, something of which we can be certain. Considering economic systems, and more generally power systems, are built on the exploitation of the nonhuman other, such inclusiveness will inevitably lead to an increasing dispersion of power and resources. Under this framework, can the accrual of economic privileges and power be construed as conducive to the expansion of who is considered human?

The conclusion I suppose I am trying to make is that agency of some kind can be garnered from changing the realities of the everyday without the fundamental (and global) alteration of norms and classifications. A lack of power and influence within inhospitable societal systems, a symptom of a rigid and inclusive conception of humanity, is one effect of intolerance which makes life unlivable. Nevertheless, though such conditions can be viewed as a derivative of the more totalizing discursive injustice which manifests through power systems, localized efforts to make life more livable which are not necessarily a theoretically pure representation of ideals championing the complete destabilization of prevailing norms should not and cannot be dismissed as secondary. Gaining footholds in heterosexual systems of power may be a very valuable resource for, or step towards, attempting to change and destabilize norms, and the results of these efforts promise immediacy that the process of global exchange to reformulate norms, which Butler positions as a key to the expansion of livable lives, may not hold.   Though I believe full equality for groups deemed inhuman or less than human will require an overturn of power systems and the norms which drive these structures, I do not think all progress must retain this exclusive focus.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. "Undoing Gender." Routledge New York and London. 2004.
Print.

"Divorce Rate." divorce.com. n.p. n.d. Web. 22 November 2011.