In my last post, here, I pointed out a way in which one futurist suppresses a tacit commitment to objective morality. This suppression is a common theme of posthumanist discourse, because anti-essentialist ethics often tries to have its cake and eat it, too, by declaring all essences to be socially constructed, and yet trying to derive ethics from traces of authenticity / flourishing talk more at home in Aristotelian virtue ethics. A more immediately relatable example of this can be found with the closely associated anti-essentialism of Judith Butler’s seminal work on feminist and queer theory, Gender Trouble, which promotes a thoroughgoing anti-essentialism about gender and sex.
Adapting the approach of Michel Foucault that treats discourses of knowledge as fields of power, Butler makes a number of characteristic theoretical moves that have become central to contemporary gender and queer theory.
Firstly, she rejects the distinction made by second-wave feminists between socially constructed gender and biological sex, arguing that the gendered subject is the product of social forces all the way down.
Secondly, Butler rejects the liberal-humanist notion of an essential self, arguing instead that the subject is only ever implied in the performance of a gender identity that is made possible by the conventions governing all that can be said. Just as you can only make a promise if there are social conventions governing the conditions and obligations of a promise, in the same way we are limited to performance of gender identities, and thus identities per se, that are governed and enabled by the rules of gender expression in our society.
Thirdly, and importantly, these norms of gender performance always contain the conditions of their own disruption – ways to make gender trouble – in their tendency to marginalise identities as abnormal or aberrant. Thus, even though there is no authentic subject capable of resisting the power of discourse to define the subject, the constitution of some as a challenge to phallogocentric, hetero-normative forces of dominance has the consequence that it remains possible to perform resistant identities who take action to reform the discourse towards a greater openness to diverse gender identities.
It is assumed in Butler’s discussion the gender and sexual conformity of hetero-sexism is oppressive to those whose identity is not performed that way, and this is presumably based on the experiences of many who feel oppressed by the dominant discourses of gender and sexuality, including the dominant feminist discourse, especially at the time of the text’s original publication amid 1990s postfeminism.
Everything Butler says about the performance of gender and the construction of the self by discourses of power could be applied equally to the performance of an oppressed identity. If sex/gender is the result of discourse producing bodies as the passive subjects of knowledge, concealing normative demands behind the objective register of medicine and science, then the same must be true of the constitution of the oppressed subject. There can be, after all, no suffering subject prior to the performance of suffering. There can be no victim of power prior to the performance of a victimised identity. Applying consistent reasoning, these performances, too, are regulated by discourse.
If that is the case, then it prompts the question as to why we should be driven by the oppression of those who perform diverse gender and sexual identities to agitate for the opening up of our categories of gender and sex identity, when such marginalised individuals also perform identities of oppression. Hypothetically, it would be equally viable to reform the socio-political discourse towards the elimination of the possibility of performing oppressed identities, valorising the libidinal sacrifice of the marginalised for their role in naturalising hetero-sexist norms rather than supporting the proliferation of gender identities.
The fact that Butler does not allow space for this option suggests that there is, after all, a tacit, objective morality in play, here, that renders the non-arbitrariness of her decision between at least two directions for social reform explicable. There is a suppressed commitment to the transcendent morality of granting to individuals the unfettered expression of their diverse gender and sexual identities.
Such a transcendent moral place upon which to stand, were it to be acknowledged, would require some grounding, i.e. some truthmaker for moral claims that can withstand the “why care about normative reasons?” retort. This tends towards arguments made previously on this blog that anti-essentialism plus ethics are the right combination, but they are unachievable without a robust theism to properly ground the moral and normative truths.
Further, any adequate truthmaker, like that, would preclude Butler’s claim (along the way) that the persistence of a person over time is a matter of their performed identity, because it would entail objective facts as to who the moral subjects are who should be held to account for immoral conduct. This does not mean that there must be an objective fact of the matter as to who each person is, in terms of their essence or the telos of being that person or that kind of person, but it does require that numerical identity over time remains objective, e.g. there would be a discourse-independent fact of the matter as to whether or not you are the same guy who murdered your wife two years ago.
Theocentric Posthumanism 