Recognition and Language: Gender isn't Dead

Judith Butler's Undoing Gender  goes a long way towards finally making some step towards building a form of praxis in the relation between genders that different texts engaging queer theory we've read thus far have fallen short of. Butler's Gender Trouble begins an attempt to unpack the notions of gender and in what way gender is created, however, this text doesn't do much to engage physically or practically how these representations of desire occur. In readings for another class, I came across another reading that helps to recognize this even further. Reading Butler's notions of desire constituting gender, and gender constituting categories, and categories ensconcing norms along with Axel Honneth's identity-recognition theory establishes a firm ground on which a platform of social reform in the name of queer theory can actually be enacted.

Butler states that to exist outside of the norm of discourse is to have an unlivable life. She talks about discourse's capability to reduce humanity in a person in a couple different ways. First, we get the notion that certain terms can withhold recognition for someone by terming them something that is normatively viewed as less than human. An example of this to me would be to say that, normatively, men should be attracted to women. Therefore, to use a term for a man who isn't attracted to women ("gay") is to reduce their recognition as a person. Conversely, recognition can be deprived through a negation in terms of identity. In the same example, one might say that the man attracted to other men isn't "straight," and is therefore not normative, which makes him (as Butler puts it) sub-human. This puts these terms within the realm of an established category, rather than allowing them to constitute one. This discourse presumes a superstructure of category that fallaciously embraces the norms of a single category as being category-transcendent.

To Butler, undoing recognition makes life unlivable. As she describes it, people often strive towards a certain gender, a certain category, because of a desire towards what that entails. It is an act of self-acceptance, an claim towards the right to acceptance by others within that category and also a claim towards recognition as belonging to said category or gender by people outside of it. The problem then, is a problem of categories. There is simply no discourse available currently (in that there are people being forced to compromise and live unlivable lives marked by shame and pathology) that allows for recognition of appropriate categories. This is essential, because it is Butler's claim towards gender, in my approximation, that normative discourse shouldn't be privileged as a transcendent property. It is only within an accepted category, an accepted gender, that norms should be appropriate. To enforce norms and the discourse of terming those norms on a different category implies a claim towards superiority that is both pernicious and ideological.

With this established, it becomes important for me to see how this recognition is built in the first place. Now that it isn't being withheld, where the hell does it come from? This can be answered chiefly by the identity-recognition theory of a German critical social theorist named Axel Honneth. Honneth's theory developed from part of the tradition of philosophy, which he learned from his mentor Habermas, known as the liguistic turn. Abbreviated extremely, this progression goes like this: Ancient Greek philosophy of "the good," Medieval philosophy and the religious view of God's will, then Descartes's subjective turn (Cogito ergo sum) which puts man not god as the primary source of metaphysics. The linguistic turn is the embrace of language and social practices as rationality and the source of ontology. This theory is sort of the end of metaphysics. Honneth takes the idea that language as a social practice is the most important view of society and adds to it. I look at it this way, and this is how it connects to Butler: language is created by a society,  one is (in modernity) born in to that language. Expression through this language to another subject allows for acceptance of another subject, and reciprocally reveals the self as subject, too.

Foucault, Derrida and most post-structuralists here say that this means language constricts the subject, thus taking away agency (autonomy) in the same way that Freud might have said that subjects lose autonomy when they are being driven to action by unconscious libidinal forces. In reading Honneth's theory and now Butler's, I finally have proof for what I'd thought for a long time, which is that Derrida and Foucault's idea that there is no agency any more is (and pardon my strong expression) fucking ridiculous. Here's why: for Butler, stating that one has a desire towards claiming a gender (a category) is a means of expressing a self-direction and a self-awareness (autonomy). In addition this is supported by Honneth's corollary to the linguistic determination of identity. People need other people to recognize them as subjects to be a subject. This is done through communication. However, languages (besides Latin for example) are NOT dead, and are constantly evolving, implying a means of expression and communication that is available only through relations with other subjects, which allows language to differentiate and expand to be able to express experiences. This leaves us not with the Cartesian subjectivism, but with a necessary intersubjectivism. Agency is created and expressed only in conjunction with and mediated through social relations. The living language allows for living thought which can discursively expand to encompass new meanings. Specifically new meanings of categories and normativity. That post just got a lot longer than I intended, my bad.