Monique Wittig--The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992)

In what Wittig characterizes as a materialist lesbian approach to heterosexuality, she “describe[s] heterosexuality not as an institution but as a political regime which rests on the submission and the appropriation of women,” a regime from which there is no escape (xiiv).  The only response to such an entrenched regime is nothing short of the political, philosophical, and symbol destruction of the categories of “men” and “women” (xiiv-xiv).  By defining “woman” in political terms, Wittig wishes to dissociate “‘women’ (the class within which we fight) and ‘woman,’ the myth” (15), and subsequently “suppress men as a class…[through] a political struggle” (15).  To Wittig, the primary failing of Marxism was its failure to see individual subjects historically situated: “It is we who must undertake the task of defining the individual subject in materialist terms” (19).  Further, in her indictment of (French) psychoanalytic theory, she importantly observes that in the midst of such theoretical work, “we forget the material (physical) violence that they directly do to the oppressed people” (25).  Wittig’s example of such violence (in her 1980 essay) is that of pornography, an analysis which has been addressed in much more complex ways than how she addresses it: to Wittig, all pornography demonstrates the oppression of women by men within a heterosexual economy.  However, it is within her discussion of pornography that she first uses the phrase “the straight mind,” which “develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time…[which has a] tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true to all societies, all epochs, all individuals” (27).

Important to my work is her discussion of the foundation of the marriage economy: “The compulsory reproduction of the ‘species’ by women is the system of exploitation on which heterosexuality is economically based” (6).  In her discussion of the necessity of problematizing any ideas of the categories of man and woman as natural, she states that “what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor: the ‘myth of woman,’ plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women” (11).  As the lesbian does not fit into the marriage economy, Wittig sees the lesbian as rejecting the role of women.  Borrowing a term from Prous, Wittig says, “The lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society….The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual…is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man” (13).

Also intriguing is her discussion of “feminine writing,” a French feminist concept of which Wittig is quite critical: “What is this ‘feminine’ in ‘feminine writing’?  It stands for Woman, thus merging a practice with a myth, the myth of Woman” (59).  But as she does with the categories of men, women, and lesbian, as well as Marxist, psychoanalytic, and linguistic perspectives, she is not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Rather, she identifies what is useful about each of these perspectives and fills her arsenal with their tools.

Judith Butler--Bodies that Matter (1993)

Ultimately, in this text Butler wishes to “think further about the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the crafting of matters sexual and political” (xii).  Specifically, she asks if there is a “way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender” (1), a question which is connected to my different question about the materiality of the body which is judged “ugly.”  Though she admits that even the materiality of the body is difficult to differentiate from its surroundings— “Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies ‘are’” (ix)—she still insists that there is such a thing as materiality of the body.  Further, this materiality has a demonstrable effect on the performance of gender.  Addressing criticisms that her previous work has been so focused on the performative aspects of gender, to the point of some questioning if there’s anything but constructions.  However, I like her observation that even constructions have a real effect, that “certain constructions appear constitutive, that is, have this character of being that ‘without which’ we could not think at all” (xi).

While Butler goes along with the general understanding that gender is culturally constructed[1] and sex is physiologically based, she makes the important point that sexual difference itself is also culturally constructed: “Sexual difference, however, is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices” (1).  Invoking Foucault, she observes that sex not only functions as a norm in society, but “is part of a regulatory process that produces the bodies it governs” (1).  She stresses the importance of reiteration in the process of sexual differentiation, and points out “that this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled” (2).[2] 

Butler defines materiality in terms of power,[3] as “an effect of power, as power’s most productive effect” (2).[4]  As “the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that regulatory norm,” so sex is “one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (2).  Butler is talking about abjection here, as intelligibility being necessary for acknowledgement by and interpellation in the system.  She delineates the following as being at stake in her discussion:

(1) the recasting of  the matter of bodies as the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects; (2) the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains; (3) the construal of “sex” no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies; (4) a rethinking of the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking “I,” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex; and (5) a linking of this process of “assuming” a sex with the question of identification,[5] and with the discursive means by which the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications. (2-3)

And in conclusion, this “exclusionary matrix…requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” (3).[6]

Butler explains that “the forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of sex”; this identification “creates the valence of ‘abjection’ and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre” (3).  This seems to be a good explanation for the gothic nature of so much the ugly women in the work I’m looking at; the threat of ugliness is always there.  Butler goes on to say that “the mobilization of the categories of sex within political discourse will be haunted in some ways by the very instabilities that the categories effectively produce and foreclose” (4).  Again, there’s this idea of hauntedness and ghosts: I wonder if this might speak to Yeager’s thesis in Dirt and Desire, that the dirt and ugliness in southern literature marks a history of racial violence?  Incorporating Butler’s ideas here, perhaps ugliness in a similar way speaks to a history of gender and sexual insecurity and even violence?  Certainly, the racial aspect is coded in the very definitions of ugliness, as beauty is typically defined in terms of a white, upper-class idea.  As sex is used to regulate “which bodies matter,” as Butler articulates (4), so, too, beauty is used to regulate which personae matter.  Those who are marked as ugly, then, inhabit a different space—but it’s an important space worth investigating.

Butler refers to these spaces, these “excluded sites,” as ones which “come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation” (8).  So perhaps that’s why the 1930s and 1940s—with the fear of the “new woman” rampant—have so many ugly women in them, as the fear of “rearticulation” was wide-ranging.  As Butler says, “the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or deligitimated bodies fail to count as ‘bodies’” (15), and so what is counted as “ugly” so exposes the limits of acceptable bodies in the South.  Further, the South itself as a marginalized space—one which the rest of the country uses to confirm its own boundaries and identities—is so often the “ugly” side of the United States (accused of racism, racial violence, sexual deviancy) that perhaps some of the ugly women in the literature are simply reaffirming this idea?  Or perhaps it’s what Flannery O’Connor said, that those in the South can still identify a freak.  Given the emphasis on southern beauty,[7] are ugly women perhaps are deployed to act as a foil to southern beauty?  Or simply reflect the ugly nature of the South?  Southern literature itself so often tells the stories of those considered less than human (whether through the dark humor of Tobacco Road or more tragically in Barren Ground) that it’s already comfortable with a mode that presents what’s often considered uninhabitable zones. 

She begins by addressing the antagonism she observes between “post-structuralism” and :the body.”  Questioning the “material irreducibility of sex” as well as the idea that everything can be reduced to a text (and thus is rendered ultimately meaningless), Butler wishes to consider “the scenography and topography of construction.  This scenography is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that remains disarticulated if we presume constructedness and materiality as necessarily oppositional notions” (28).  Importantly, she goes on to consider the very category of “woman”: “the category of women does not become useless through deconstruction, but becomes one whose uses are no longer reified as ‘referents,’ and which stand a chance of being opened up, indeed, of coming to signify in ways that none of us can predict in advance” (29); in fact, she says it is possible to both use the term woman at the same time one is subjecting it to critique.

She then gives a rather extensive consideration to the “sex of materialism,” concluding with the observation that, “to invoke matter is to invoke a sedimented history of sexual hierarchy and sexual erasures which should surely be an object of feminist inquiry, but which would be quite problematic as a ground of feminist theory” (49).  From here, she moves on to examining the meaning of the phallus by both Freud and Lacan, considering the ways in which it has been both connected to and disconnected from the material site of the penis.  In her section on the “lesbian phallus,” Butler states that, “Insofar as any reference to a lesbian phallus appears to be a spectral representation of a masculine original, we might well question the spectral production of the putative ‘originality’ of the masculine” (63). 

In this section, she addresses the very question of what we should consider as constituting the very body itself.  She says, “psychic projection confers boundaries and, hence, unity on the body, so that the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material.  Bodily contours and morphology are not merely implicated in an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material but are that tension” (66).  In reaching a consideration of Lacan’s description of the recognition of bodily boundaries during the mirror stage, Butler explains how such bodily differentiation is connected to language development as well.  She then focuses more specifically on the emergence of sexed positions (or gender), particularly in Lacan’s system.  She importantly not only highlights the heterosexual bias implicit in Lacan’s description of interpellation into gender, but more importantly calls attention to the necessity of paying attention to the function of repudiation inherent in identity formation.  Admitting that repudiation is irreducibly a part of differentiation, Butler insists that “It will be a matter of tracing the ways in which identification is implicated in what it excludes, and to follow the lines of that implication for the map of future community that it might yield” (119).

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[1] Her discussion about the nature of construction is quite useful, especially in terms of quelling criticisms about the prime mover in gender construction.  More importantly, I like her characterization of gender (and gendering) as a relational action: “gendering is, among other things, the differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being.  Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves” (7)

[2] Ugliness, perhaps, calls attention to itself in never quite meeting these ideals.  And reiteration only works to emphasize their failure to comply—like the sounds of corners of square pegs scraping against round holes.  As Butler notes, “it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that can mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law” (2).

[3] She later clarifies power, in Foucault’s original use of the term, as that which “orchestrates the formation and sustenance of subjects,” and construction as “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all”: “there is not power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability” (9).

[4] Throughout the text, Butler returns to the problem which grammar brings to discussions of power, as “power is not a subject which acts on bodies as its distinct objects.  The grammar which compels us to speak that way enforces a metaphysics of external relations, whereby power acts on bodies but is not understood to form them.  This is a view of power as an external relation that Foucault himself calls into question” (34)

[5] Perhaps this is related to the poor aunt in The Old Order, whose life was determined by her lack of a chin?

[6] Ugliness complicates this inside/outside binary.  Ugly people have a particular kind of subjecthood—in fact, that which makes us stare (as opposed to appearances which we try to ignore or don’t even see) gives the ugly person a certain kind of power, in that she can’t be ignored.  The kind of ugliness caused by indifference to appearance demonstrates another kind of freedom (as Barbara Ladd discusses).  And while perhaps the ugly are abject to a certain kind of system—Lily Daw, for example, being unsuitable for the marriage economy—this dismissal frees them for other things.  Because there are so many women in southern literature who live in this “zone of uninhabitability” (3) as Butler calls it, I think there must be some sort of interesting life going on there.  Maybe because traditional southern femininity is so often unable or unwilling to bestow subjecthood on women?

[7] See that annoying post-feminist Garden and Gun article.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick--Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

Along with Michel Foucault’s 1976 History of Sexuality (Volume 1) and Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble, Sedgwick’s 1990 Epistemology of the Closet is considered one of the key texts of queer theory.  Generally, the epistemology of the closet is the idea that thought itself is structured by homosexual/heterosexual definitions, which damages our ability to think.  The homo/hetero binary is a trope for knowledge itself. 

For Sedgwick, the study of sex is not coextensive with the study of gender, as sex is chromosomal and gender is constructed.  She draws distinctions between constructionist feminists (who see sex as biological and essential, and gender and gender inequality as culturally constructed), radical feminists (who see chromosomal sex, reproductive relationships, and sexual inequality as culturally constructed), and Foucauldians (who see chromosomal sex as biologically essential, sexuality as culturally constructed, and reproduction as both).  She discusses the realization in feminism that not all oppressions are congruent as a particularly important one, because it included the realization that a person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may in fact be enabled through others; for example, a woman who uses her married name shows her subordination as a woman and her privilege as a presumed heterosexual.

Sedgwick also addresses the ways in which the relationship between sex and gender can be compared to the relationship between race and class.  According to Sedgwick, they are related but should be mapped on different axes; Sex and gender, while related, are not coextensive.  The variety of sexuality has some links to gender, in that some sexual preference is gender-related, but there are many more dimensions to sexuality which have nothing to do with gender—power, positions, sexual acts.  However, gender is definitionally built sexuality in a way in which race and class do not have an analogue.

Gender is definitionally built into homosexuality (meaning attraction to the same gender), but sexuality represents an excess beyond gender and reproduction; therefore, there can be no concept of homosexuality without a prior notion of gender.  Also, the very study of gender often reveals a heterosexist bias, because by setting up gender as a binary it assumes a heterosexual norm.  It is unrealistic to expect a nuanced analysis of same-sex relations  through an optic calibrated to the coarser stigmata of gender difference.  Sedgwick posits instead constructing a study of homosexuality along the axis of sexuality instead of the axis of gender, so that there would be a much richer analysis and take into account many more dimensions of sexuality other than gender attraction.  It might also reveal different forms of oppression and assumptions about identity/power structures feminism takes for granted.  Finally, she observes that the heterosexual/homosexual binary has greater deconstructive potential as a dichotomy than male/female, in that sexual orientation has a “greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and representational doubleness.

Sedgwick notes in the 2008 preface to Epistemology of the Closet that it was written in light of the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick Supreme Court decision, which upheld a Georgia sodomy law; it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas.  She also notes that it is hard to convey now the emergency of the late 1980s of the AIDS crisis, which Epistemology was also a response to:

The history is important…for understanding some of the tonalities and cognitive structures of Epistemology of the Closet: how the punishing stress of loss, incomplete mourning, chronic dread, and social fracture, and the need for mobilizing powerful resources of resistance in the face of such horror, imprinted a characteristic stamp on much of the theory and activism of that time” (xv).

Sedgwick sees the closet as the “defining structure for gay oppression in this century” (71), which is connected to 20^th century surveillance (activist use of rhetoric of “police in the bedroom”).  She acknowledges her Foucauldian influence, specifically in the recognition of the connection between sexuality and knowledge:

after the late eighteenth century…knowledge and sex became conceptually inseparable from one another—so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge; ignorance, sexual ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort seems a force increasingly saturated with sexual impulsion. (71)

The following is a brief outline of the text:

Introduction: Axiomatic

·         The work argues that an understanding of Western culture must be incomplete and damaged to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition

• Heterosexual/Homosexual: has greater deconstructive potential as a dichotomy than male/female, in that sexual orientation has a “greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and representational doubleness” (34).

·         Will examine contradictions that seem internal to twentieth century understandings of homo/heterosexual definition (like, say, “sodomy”)

·         Important political implications—court defense of “gay panic” as a legitimate defense (when compared to someone claiming “race panic” or “gender panic”)

Axiom 2: The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; correspondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry.  But we can’t know in advance how they will be different.

·         Recognition that chromosomal sex, gender, and sexuality, while related, should be seen as separate axes of identity; analogous to the relationship between race and class.

• Chromosomal sex: “group of irreducible, biological differentiations between members of the species Homo sapiens who have XX and those who have XY chromosomes” (27).
• Gender: “the far more elaborated, more fully and rigidly dichotomized social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors—of male and female persons—in a cultural system for which ‘male/female’ functions as a primary and perhaps model binarism affecting the structure and meaning of many, many other binarism” (27-8).
• Sexuality: “the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately defined by them” (29).

·         Gender is only one dimension of sexual choice; the binarized focus on object-choice gender as the defining characteristic of sexual identity has been a recent one.

o   Posits that the “distinctly sexual nature of sexuality has to do with its excess over, or difference from, procreational sex”;  makes sexuality more the polar opposite chromosomal sex, rather than societally constructed gender as its polar opposite.

·         Any system with gender as its focus will have an inherent heterosexist bias, to the extent that female gender is constructed as a supplement or contrast to male identity; assumption of male/female roles in any kind of couple (or the assumption that sexuality implies couplehood/coupling) in this system.

·         Recognition that not all oppressions are congruent, but are differently structured; lessons learned from feminism’s interactions with issues of race and class are applicable here.

o   Importance of taking sexuality out of the realm of gender study/feminism, as there are many dimensions of sexuality which have nothing to do with gender.

Rest of Introduction

·         Similarly examines assumptions about what aspects of identity should be considered separately and together

o   lesbian vs. gay identity

o   meanings of different dimensions of sexuality

o   how the question of the very origin of sexual preference should be considered

o   dangers of the teleology of the Great Paradigm shift

o   question of canon-building (separate or integrated canon?)

o   questions of allo-identification vs. auto-identification—ultimately comes down to a general question of opening channels of visibility

Other Important Terms

(includes many binaries, which Sedgwick complicates or deconstructs)

• Minoritizing/universalizing
• Seeing the issue of homo/heterosexuality as the concern of a small, distinct, fixed homosexual minority, vs.
• Seeing it as an issue of continuing importance for people across a continuum of sexualities
• Liminal/Separate
• Same-sex object choice as a matter of liminality or transitivity between genders, vs.
• Same-sex object choice as reflecting an impulse of separation

**Sedgwick puts these two binaries into a matrix, which she uses to map contemporary understandings of homosexuality**

Axiom 1: People are different from each other.

·         Page long list of how even the same sexual preferences can have very different meanings to people; even the very idea of sexual identity takes different priorities in the formation of different people’s identities.

·         It’s more important to ask how certain categorizations work and what relations they are creating, rather than what they mean.

Axiom 2: The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; correspondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry.  But we can’t know in advance how they will be different.

·         Recognition that chromosomal sex, gender, and sexuality, while related, should be seen as separate axes of identity; analogous to the relationship between race and class.

• Chromosomal sex: “group of irreducible, biological differentiations between members of the species Homo sapiens who have XX and those who have XY chromosomes” (27).
• Gender: “the far more elaborated, more fully and rigidly dichotomized social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors—of male and female persons—in a cultural system for which ‘male/female’ functions as a primary and perhaps model binarism affecting the structure and meaning of many, many other binarism” (27-8).
• Sexuality: “the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately defined by them” (29).

·         Gender is only one dimension of sexual choice; the binarized focus on object-choice gender as the defining characteristic of sexual identity has been a recent one.

o   Posits that the “distinctly sexual nature of sexuality has to do with its excess over, or difference from, procreational sex”;  makes sexuality more the polar opposite chromosomal sex, rather than societally constructed gender as its polar opposite.

·         Any system with gender as its focus will have an inherent heterosexist bias, to the extent that female gender is constructed as a supplement or contrast to male identity; assumption of male/female roles in any kind of couple (or the assumption that sexuality implies couplehood/coupling) in this system.

·         Recognition that not all oppressions are congruent, but are differently structured; lessons learned from feminism’s interactions with issues of race and class are applicable here.

o   Importance of taking sexuality out of the realm of gender study/feminism, as there are many dimensions of sexuality which have nothing to do with gender.

Axiom 3: There can’t be an a priori decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay male identities together.  Or separately.

·         Importance of seeing a gay studies as separate, albeit informed by, feminist theory

·         Related to the matrix of minoritizing/universalizing and liminality/separation

·         For those who see lesbianism as the highest form of a “woman-identified woman” (from the 1970 Radicalesbian declaration), this would fall under the separatist view, which would consider lesbian experience as completely different from that of homosexual men.  Different from those who would be more open to the idea of liminal sexuality, who feel solidarity through mutual oppression in a heterosexist society, would see more similarities in experience.

Axiom 4: The immemorial, seemingly ritualized debates on nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nurture and nature.

·         At this point, questions about causes of homosexuality are often counter-productive, and often result in a pathologizing stance (ie, if we know what causes it, we’ll know how to fix it)

Axiom 5: The historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.

·         Especially those who interpret this as a teleological theory of sexual identity.

·         Reflected in the “sex wars” of the 1980s, which exposed contradictory understandings of the very constructed nature of lesbian and gay male identity, how to a certain degree they have been constructed in relation to each other (mannish lesbian and effeminate gay man)

Axiom 6: The relation of gay studies to debates on the literary canon is, and had best be, tortuous.

·         Early 1990s questions about canon-formation are evident here; acknowledgments of the limits of the current canon, the creation of minicanons, and their ultimate influence on the greater canon.

·         Lessons from feminism: both recovery of missing texts as well as re-examination/consideration of canonized texts through lens of “gay studies.”

Axiom 7: The paths of allo-identification are likely to be strange and recalcitrant.  So are the paths of auto-identification.

·         Her own role relative to studying homosexuality (in her 2008 preface, she acknowledges that when she has had sex with another person, it has been with a man; she also acknowledges what she calls a persistent perspectivism throughout the text, a constant awareness of who’s asking and who wants to know)

·         Overall goal of opening channels of visibility

Future Implications

·         Importance of taking sexuality out of the realm of gender study/feminism, as there are many dimensions of sexuality which have nothing to do with genderàqueer theory

• Separation of gender, chromosomal sex, and sexuality was key to further complications of sexual identity raised by transsexual/transgender identities
• The recognition of the closet as an identity of performance—connection to Butler’s focus on the performativity of gender.
• Evolution of “closet”—Sedgwick herself later announced coming out of the “fat” closet; demonstrates connection between knowledges and sexuality.