Ori gi nal Ar ti cl e

AFTER J UDI TH BUTLER:

I DENTI TI ES, WHO NEEDS THEM?
Lynne Segal
University of London, London, UK
Correspondence: Lynne Segal, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London,
30 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DP, UK.
E-mail: l.segal@bbk.ac.uk
Abstract
After Butler, identities and belongings, whether gendered or of any other hue, can never be
securely pinned down. They must be seen as fundamentally contingent, stabilized only
through the performative acts that attempt, unsteadily, to fix them as integral markings of
our existence. Nevertheless, identity concepts remain pivotal to our ways of perceiving the
world, positioning ourselves and asserting differing forms of agency within it. In this article,
I discuss the ways in which Butler has herself shifted her analysis of subjectivities, even coming
to embrace forms of identity for political ends, although, of course, never less than critically.
Keywords
Judith Butler; gender; subjectivity; recognition; identities; agency
Subjectivity (2008) 25, 381394. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.26
I ntroducti on
G
ender, Sex and Subjectivity (After Judith Butler) was the title
I was asked to address at a recent colloquium in London, mid-
2007. Why after? Butler is so much with us, among us, at least
in the places that nowadays matter most to me, it is hard to know how to pin
down that developmental preposition after, let alone that live Butler, we
are presumptively following, in pursuit of, in agreement with, positioned
behind, referencing, mimicking, declaring to be over; or what, exactly?
Sometimes, all we mean by such a prepositioning, post-positioning, is simply
Subjectivity, 2008, 25, (381394) c 2008 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341/08
www.palgrave-journals.com/sub
to ask what comes next, after Butler; however, in academic debate that usually
necessitates the speaker differentiating/distancing herself or himself, knowingly,
attempting some supposedly greater sophistication, if not adversarial position-
ing, compared with that now past, already superseded, paradigmatic Butlerian
moment, whether we are addressing issues of gender, sex, subjectivity
or anything else. It is as if Butler were always at one with herself, no shifts or
re-positionings, which is, as hopefully with most of us, certainly not so.
Ambiguous, then, that after.
Theoreti cal fi xtures
First, simply regarding/surveying Judith Butler, it would be hard to overestimate
her impact on feminist thought and gender theory. Like it or not, there was
simply no overlooking, no sidestepping, no coverage of gender theory, without
her, at least for most, though not quite all, gender theorists in the 1990s. No
referencing Gender Trouble (Butler, 1990); no Gender Theory, it would seem,
even if one merely chose, such as Tania Modleski, Biddy Martin, Susan
Bordo, Nancy Fraser, Toril Moi, Susan Fraiman, the list continues, including,
to a certain extent, myself, to distance the feminist political project, or at
least significant aspects of it, from Butlers compelling post-Foucauldian
re-conceptualization of gender, sex and subjectivity (Modleski, 1991; Bordo,
1993, p. 291; Martin, 1994, p. 103; Fraser, 1998; Moi, 1999; Segal, 1999;
Fraiman, 2003). For various reasons, catching a tide in feminist scholarship, she
aroused seemingly unprecedented levels of adulation, that Judy fanzine;
unquestionably, she also triggered equal measures of hostility (Breen and
Blumenfeld, 2005). In Gender Trouble, gender and sexuality are fully liberated
from any stable notion of intrinsic sexed identity, female or male, from
any secure attributions of identity, feminine or masculine, and from any fixed
bodily markings, except as performatively monitored and incited in discourse,
through a process of cultural reiteration, framed within a coercively
imposed heterosexualization of desire. Bodily actions are rendered intelligible
via, and only via, oppositional markers binding femininity/passivity/femaleness
and masculinity/activity/maleness, within a strictly heteronormative matrix
of desire.
Moreover, after that publication (if not before, through psychoanalytic or
other ways of glimpsing the instabilities and contradictions attending any
identities, even their differing assertions of situatedness), this much at least we
knew, gender trouble was always imminent, and in this book rather playfully
and excitingly so. Although just how significant that trouble might prove, or not
prove, in challenging or overturning the gendered heteronormative positionings
we were born into we never did quite know; not yet, anyway. Signs of trouble
were constantly flashing before us in the actions of those who saw themselves
outside heterosexual/normative gendered practices, in the seemingly infinite
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potential for dissident gendered or sexual acts to signal, however inconsistently,
the skillful crafting, artifice, unpredictability and possible ruptures, within those
culturally fashioned, fragile, oppositional markers of heterosexuality. Almost
immediately, so it seemed, there was only one confidently radical intellectual
spirit pervading an otherwise unusually mournful political world throughout
the 1990s, at least only one that could invoke levity and laughter on academic
platforms. Somewhat at first to the surprise of Judith Butler herself, as she later
said, in ran the Queers, bringing new, often hitherto largely unnamed or
unrecognized forms of desire to do their work of gleefully subverting gender and
heteronormativity. The latter term was coined by another North American gay
cultural critic, Michael Warner, who in 1991 published the introduction to what
would be one of the most dramatic texts of queer, Fear of a Queer Planet
(Warner, 1991, 1993). With several new sexual twists to its very own perverse
beat of desire, it was a type of action replay of the by-then-exhausted passion
and excitement that articulating womens active desires, of any sort at all, had
once brought to the early gatherings of womens liberation, now two decades
earlier. We should be familiar with the role of triggering new forms of desire in
the marketing of any commodity and love it or hate it talk of the Fear of a
Queer Planet was, at the very least, titillating, whether pleasurably or
murderously so. Queers goal was provocation, and the popularity of carefully
crafted semiotic sabotage suggested, for a while, that deliberately disrupting the
binaries of gender, sexuality and their ways of coercively forming and enfolding
subjectivity was strategically central for feminists and their allies.
However, the idea that some form of linguistic or performative interrogation
was pivotal for feminism, putting any general reference to women and all our
familiar concepts of gender in the Derridean sense under erasure, was just
too galling for other feminist theorists. This was especially so for those still
trying, against the tide, to grapple with the overall rising, rather than falling,
immiseration of women and the increase in violence against women on the
global map during that same decade of the 1990s and now getting ever worse,
beyond it. The new theoretical opacity triggered the anger of older activist
organizers, such as Heidi Hartmann, Ellen Bravo, Charlotte Bunch and Nancy
Hartsock, who complained, along with many other feminist voices in the
journal Signs in the mid-1990s, that feminist theory was now of no use in their
work. They no longer even tried to read Signs, many announced, in the pages of
the journal they were now writing for (Hartmann et al., 1996). And this is also
what made Butler herself so many academics favourite whipping boy, for
those who like to use her name as metonymic for the theoretical demands and
difficulties of post-structuralism and deconstruction generally. Having been
meanly selected for the Bad Writing award in 1998 by the journal Philosophy
and Literature, she was fiercely attacked the following year by Martha
Nussbaum, in the pages of New Republic, as the hip-defeatist, Professor of
Parody. Other older academic feminists, including those exceptionally scholarly
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in their own fields, often remained sceptical, if not hostile, to Butlers work and
influence (see, e.g., Gubar, 1998). Envious aggression is my first reaction,
although it is certain that Butlers youthful style was provocative, those
challengingly wandering/wondering sentences in Gender Trouble and Bodies
that Matter, their sub-clauses always dealing in abstractions, their endings
usually interrogative. Were readers really supposed to supply the answers
themselves?
On the move
Yet, Butler has herself changed her positions over a mere decade and a half,
often questioning the way in which others have interpreted and used her work.
I detect at least five changes. She has moved from primarily semiotic analysis
to stressing the significance of the socio-cultural moment; from political
abstractions to ethical reasoning; from pivotal concern with gender and
sexuality to a general interest in alterity and the face/place of the other; from a
Foucauldian engagement with exteriority and performativity to a more
psychodynamic interest in interiority and stress upon the formative early years
of life; from a rejection of identities into the specific embrace of several very
distinct ones, articulated with a suitable plethora of caveats in the form of an
identity politics. All five interconnect, and also place Butler much closer to, if
not in one and the same boat as, many of her former critics, especially, I quickly
hasten to acknowledge, myself. A tendentious reading then? Maybe. So let me
expand on my appraisal of these shifts, before saying why I feel in harmony with
some, if not quite all of her moves, being perhaps most sceptical of what might
be read as her substituting ethical abstraction for political analysis in some of
her recent Levinasian and Arendtian turns.
In the collection Undoing Gender (2004b), containing essays written by
Butler over the previous six years (hence between 10 and 15 years after Gender
Trouble), we can find many passages that to some might seem to be not so much
Undoing Gender as Undoing Butler. Here she leaps free from many of her
former positions to state that she has rethought the question of change since
articulating it in Gender Trouble, in her own words, a text I probably wrote
too quickly, a text whose future I did not anticipate at the time (Butler, 2004b,
p. 213). Well, of course she did not, especially if, as she says, she wrote it for a
few friends yand yimagined maybe 200 people might read it (ibid., p. 207).
In particular, Butler critiques the concluding chapter of that earlier book, From
Parody to Politics, which provided the critical underpinning of much
subsequent Queer thought and practice. Her self-critique is precisely a situating
of herself temporally, spatially, politically in the writing of that text. It was
the 1980s, and there she sat, we learn, as a bar dyke, her self-description, after
spending her days immersed in Hegel, on a bar stool in a gay club that at times
turned into a drag bar: So I was there, undergoing a cultural moment in the
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midst of a social and political struggley it dawned on me that some of these
so-called men could do femininity much better than I ever could, ever wanted
to. Ever would. And so I was confronted by what can only be called the
transferability of the attribute. Femininity, which I understood never to have
belonged to me anyway, was clearly belonging elsewhere, and I was happier to
be the audience to it, have always been very happier to be the audience to it,
than I ever was or would being the embodiment of it (ibid., p. 213.). Not one
abstraction, not one question mark, in sight. There she sat, pondering gender
and what is was to be a woman, now clearly identified as a female, but not just
any female, but rather already marked out as a lesbian, and not just any lesbian,
but more precisely, identifying herself as a dyke, a butch lesbian, one who could
identify with the boys, but who could only dis-identify, and smile, if and when
their performance staged practices of femininity.
Clearly, then, what Butler offers here is not so much an undermining of either
gender or the feminine, and least of all, surely, is she undermining that
always complex, contested, fluctuating category of identity, the one that
subtends subjectivity. What she does produce is greater diversity within these
identificatory markings and a multiplicity of ways of displaying them, which, as
she spells out in Undoing Gender, and again more clearly than she ever did in
her earlier text, operate at the level of cultural fantasy. Many others have also
articulated the paradoxes of both identitarian concepts and politics, and also
Queers supposedly anti-identitarian rhetorical stance. Identities, as we have
learned to see them today, are best seen as unstable, contingent and always in
need of re-affirmation through the performative work (to use Butlers language)
we must do to stabilize them as safe and secure marks of our existence.
Nevertheless, our descriptive markings, whether seen as freely chosen or else
thrust upon us, may not be quite as fluid as some recent Queer writing seemed
to be suggesting. And though we might like to, we never manage to transcend
some notion of identity, but rather, as Stuart Hall, among others, suggests, once
you lift a term from its moorings, it proliferates y rather than looking less
useful, it is somehow everywhere (Hall in Johnson and Otto, 1999). I feel these
two thinkers, Hall and Butler, are now in closer agreement than they once were.
Moreover, in her recent writing, and against the thrust of her earlier critics, the
Butler of today always insists rather forcefully: What operates at the level of
cultural fantasy is not finally dissociable from the ways in which material life is
organized (Butler, 2004b, p. 214). She is becoming a lot less scarily different
from earlier incarnations of feminist theorists, those long familiar to me, who
identified themselves as materialist or, dare I say it, socialist feminists.
Nevertheless, Butlers ongoing legacy surely has such an unswerving cultural
focus that it tends to mute out the possibility of any critical role attributable to
unavoidable biological aspects of our corporeal or embodied existence, except
as its manifestations are caught up as indeed they must be in networks of
power, whether linguistic, social, fantasmatic and more . Butler sees these sites
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of power as situated within a diversity of cultural domains, the familial,
medical, educational, social, economic or political, but never are they located,
in any crucial way, within the body itself. Thus when Peter Osborne and
I interviewed Butler in 1994 for Radical Philosophy, she sidestepped any need
for a discussion, however complex, of the significance of womens bodies as, at
least currently, the only potential sites of impregnation, gestation, procreation,
lactation, with the comment: There are female infants and children who cannot
be impregnated, there are older women who cannot be impregnated. yWhat
the question does is try to make the problematic of reproduction central to the
sexing of the body. But I am not sure that is, or ought to be, what is absolutely
salient or primary in the sexing of the body (Osborne and Segal, 1994). True
enough, but the question had taken the form of asking what, if any, material
significance the female reproductive body might have, as such.
Even here, however, Butlers position has shifted. Today, or only yesterday,
interviewed by Vicki Kirby, she speaks of the limitations of her critique of the
illegitimate cultural use of natural arguments for normative reasons: I think
perhaps mainly in Gender Trouble, I overemphasize the priority of culture over
nature y [My] criticism did not take account of a nature that might be, as it
were, beyond the nature/culture divide, one that is not immediately harnessed
for the aims of certain kinds of cultural legitimation practices. She goes on to
praise the efforts of the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling for her
interactive models of biology/culture, insisting both that biology conditions
cultural life and contributes to its forms and also that cultural life enters
into the reproduction of our bodies at a biological level (Kirby, 2006, p. 145).
Quite so, and who could disagree? Only that now mythical Butlerian, perhaps,
a Queer icon expected always to jiggle and fragment, but within the very
same slot.
Surely, however, you might insist, Butler retains her intense Foucauldian
scepticism about interiority, her suspicion of the normativizing, oppressiveness
of basic Freudian narratives. Well no, it is not quite so, depending, that is, upon
which contemporary Freudian you choose to invoke. There are a lot of shrewd
Freudians around, who have themselves reconfigured some of the mysteries of
sex, intimacy and power, deploying psychoanalytic insights to help them convey
rather than conceal the complexities of our gendered and sexual lives. Butler
has joined them. My own work has perhaps moved in the direction of
Jean Laplanche, she explains, emphasizing the ways in which primary and
traumatic impressions [from the outside] come to structure through iteration the
trajectory of desire itself y the Other becomes constitutive of bodily
formation. One might even say, many of the core aspects of the Freudian
narrative have now lodged themselves inside Butler, though of course, and why
not, with a few added twists: infancy is itself always recurring, [so] that no
adult is finally over his or her childhood yThe point about telling the Oedipal
story differently is to open up the possibility that primary attachments can take
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many forms, whether, as she points out, it is to the mother, the father, to both
or to some other caregiver, irrespective of gender. Only what some might see as
Neanderthal Freudian followers, who of course still lurk in many clinical lairs
(so one does need to be wary), would nowadays quarrel with Butlers recent
account of the ways in which culture embeds itself in desire during infancy, with
the formation of sexuality during those years, through, as Butler puts it, the
mechanisms of impingement and interiorization (ibid., pp. 145146, 149).
A gl obal ethi cs
There is more in Butlers recent writings that might be read as a type of
deliberate self-sabotage, or contented Undoing, of others still busy, Doing
Butler, and thereby foreclosing her own evolving thoughts. A definite swerve
can be seen in her reflections, written after September 11, 2001, the day now
globally marked simply as 9/11, as though nothing else happened in the whole
wide world that day, and indeed still nothing of equal impact since, compared
with the destruction of the twin towers and the accompanying loss of 3,000
lives in Manhattan that day. In this writing, where she develops arguments
for an ethics of non-violence, Butler draws upon Levinass thoughts on
the precariousness of human life in the context, for him, of his reflections on the
divine. Butlers arguments, here also in line with Levinas, are developed, as
ever, in the context of her Hegelian lineage, contemplating the formation and
positioning of the subject through its necessary subjectiveness to the Other: we
are instigated, or called into being, as what we will become, only through the
recognition of the Other (Butler, 2004a, p. xviii). This is always also, as others
have said before her (most commandingly Lacan), what makes it a misrecogni-
tion, because of the partial, and inevitably norm-inflected vision of that other.
Once, however, we accept that any subject is only called into existence in this
way, then we can begin to register the mutual interdependence, along with the
mutual precariousness, of both ourselves and others.
Reflecting upon 9/11, for instance, Butler asks how we can prevent the endless
recurrence of acts of violence producing, relentlessly, only further cycles of
violence. This is indeed, of course, just what that event has served to trigger in US
foreign policy, at least under George W. Bush. In the five essays in Precarious Life
(Butler, 2004a), Butler wonders how violence, loss, grief and mourning might be
used to suggest instead possiblilities for non-violent reactions, asking us to
consider what makes for a grievable life. In her view, could we but recognize
and accept our own complexity and shared primary vulnerability; more generous
encounters with others on the international stage might become possible. We
cannot will away our own vulnerability without ceasing to be human, she observes,
but what we need to ask ourselves is why some lives are grievable while others are
not. Here, of course, she notes the endless roll calls for the American dead, in 9/11,
or in subsequent military maneuvres; the non-existence, even of body counts,
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let alone obituaries, for the war casualties inflicted by those same military
encounters, waged by the US government (ibid., p. xix).
In pointing this out, Butler hopes that she can provide the basis of an ethics
for rethinking our conceptions of what is normatively human, for imaging the
conditions that would enable all to have access to what counts as a liveable life
and a grievable death (ibid., p. xv). It is easy to admire the strategic optimism
here, even if the philosophical idealism underpinning it is somewhat less than
fully convincing. In this recent writing, when Butler does invoke notions of
gender again, she does so in a way that is new for her, but in actuality seems
a rather old, familiar identitarian move to me. She suggests, not that women are
necessarily less warlike or violent than men, any such notion can easily be
exposed as absurd if we choose to do so, but rather that the social work of
mourning women have traditionally done has made some women particularly
committed to peace activism around the world. She names global peace
movements, such as Women in Black (originally began by Israeli women to fight
the injustices and brutalities perpetrated against Palestinians in Israels occupied
territory) and other womens groups. These are movements usually most
forcefully supported and promoted by those, such as Cynthia Cockburn in the
UK, Cynthia Enloe in the USA, whose names were once synonymous with
Anglo-American socialist feminism.
The Hegelian/Levinasian ethical route Butler navigates in articulating her
current global egalitarian, pacifist stance is one which, on its own, seems to need
the addition of considerable political analysis if it is to produce convincing goals
for engaging with, let alone attempting to confront, the alarming political
conjuncture of the 21st century. It is one where the currently unopposed, US-led,
ferociously interventionist phase of corporate capitalist globalization has
emerged as a seemingly unstoppable planetary force, one attempting to roll
over nation states, with its goals often that of eliminating whatever traditional
non-market spaces, take-for-granted social-democratic entitlements and protec-
tions, they may previously have had. However, Butler is absolutely right to
emphasize the need for historical and cultural translations if we are to try to
understand those we create as the face of the other, as our most threatening
outsiders. There is undoubtedly a need for new forms of genuine multi-
culturalism, critically engaged with the unpacking/the deconstructing of the
multiple meanings often attaching to just those emblematic markers of
otherness that we find most disturbing the we here referring to the
putatively white westerners, secular, Christian, and today, very determinedly at
official levels, also Jewish. Such close scrutiny of our fears and fantasies is
necessary if we are ever to combat those seemingly ubiquitous cultural forces
now dictating that the whole wide world should begin to mould itself on what is
promoted as the American way of life.
It is clear that Butler has recently dedicated herself to precisely this task, in her
nuanced discussion of Western attitudes to, for instance, the wearing of the veil
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or other Islamic attire. Interviewed by Renate Solbach, for the German cultural
yearbook, Iablis, in 2006, Butler said: I think that in France and Germany, for
different reasons, the burka has come to signify not only the threat of Islam but
a certain threat to secularism itself. I am not sure that the burka states identity
any more definitively than an excellent dress by Christian Dior. She goes on to
point out that the differing dress codes of the numerous Islamic communities
that already inhabit Europe signify many things: a private faith, a way of
negotiating female shame and sexuality, the signalling of cultural belonging,
even resistance to the full encroachment of the Western fashion market. Were
we to see this, she continues, we would know something of the diversity of
Islams and the complexity of womens negotiations of agency within them,
rather than instantly resorting to the now prevalent phobic and reductive
projection onto a unitary Islam (Solbach, 2006). However, as she knows, we
can only make these points once we attend precisely to the shifting particulars of
lived experience. I am not so sure that many will want to follow Butler along
her own preferred Hegelian/Levinasian route, asserting the place of the Other in
the formation of subjectivity, though I can see that this is what she is
encompassing when she writes: I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the
we except by finding the way in which I am tied to you, trying to translate,
but finding my own language must break up and yield in order to know you
(Butler, 2003b, p. 19). Few will master Butlers own demanding art of
translation in the formation of subject positions, or see the radical potential
bursting out of her philosophical reasoning that the human comes into being,
again and again, as that which we have yet to know (ibid.). She is right, I am
sure, but this in itself will not draw quite as many people as she might hope into
political activism.
I denti ty recl ai med
Fortunately, as Butler now often points out in her lectures, various routes lead
us to politics, various stories bring us onto the street, various kinds of reasoning
and belief.
1
When not triggering envious attack, it is of course her academic
celebrity itself that now moves her audiences, me included, as she urges their
political engagement, while allowing studious fans to project their best selves
onto her intellectual aura and radical political stance. But what is particularly
interesting for me to see is the now less ambivalently proclaimed, rather than
steadfastly rebuffed, role of identity politics beckoning Butler herself, as well as
others, onwards down routes of radical political engagement. Thus it is as a Jew
that Butler is nowadays working for peace in the Middle East. She quite
explicitly foregrounds this identity in her claims to authority in her
involvements in this political debate. She has even found her own, suitably
reformed, Jewish synagogue, in California. It is therefore, definitively, as a Jew
that she asks What do we make of Jews such as myself, who are emotionally
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invested in the state of Israel, critical of its current form, and call for a radical
restructuring of its economic and juridical basis precisely because
we are invested in it? It is always possible to say that such Jews have turned
against their own Jewishness. But what if one criticizes Israel in the name of
ones Jewishness, in the name of justice, precisely because such criticisms seem
best for the Jews? Why wouldnt it always be best for the Jews to embrace
forms of democracy that extend what is best to everyone, Jewish or not?
I signed a petition framed in these terms, [she continues] an Open Letter
from American Jews, in which 3,700 American Jews opposed the Israeli
occupation, though in my view it was not nearly strong enough: it did not call
for the end of Zionism, or for the reallocation of arable land, for rethinking the
Jewish right of return or for the fair distribution of water and medicine to
Palestinians, and it did not call for the reorganization of the Israeli state
on a more radically egalitarian basis. It was, nevertheless, an overt criticism of
Israel (Butler 2003a, p. 5).
I agree with every word Butler writes here, and have signed many such
petitions myself, but why would she, of all people, do this, as a Jew, rather than,
as she seemed to suggest one should in her early writings, as a unique individual,
politically analyzing the brutalities ensuing from Israels 40 long years of
Occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and its continued enclosure of
Gaza? I asked her this question recently, at a Jewish Book week, which she and
I were both addressing, primarily to raise questions about Israel and Palestine,
and express our opposition to its occupation and our solidarity with those
working for peace and justice over there. She answered, quite simply, that this is
her heritage. She was brought up in a very Jewish tradition, so it is, literally, a
familiar move for her to make. In one of her most recent books, Giving an
Account of Oneself (Butler, 2005), Butler writes more clearly than ever about
the specific cultural grounding of any subject position in the precise historical
conditions and the particular crucible of social relations available for
self-narration. Aporias, opacity, gaps and fissures are an inevitable part of
any self-narration, given the untidy jumble of experience and the unspeakable
dimensions of the unconscious. But Butler today is far more appreciative of
narratives of self-making, hoping that studying them may help us find some
forgiveness to offer to others and perhaps also to oneself when and if it becomes
clear that giving a full account of oneself is impossible (Kirby, 2006). I may
risk intelligibility and defy convention but then I am acting within or on a socio-
historical horizon, attempting to rupture or transform it (Butler, 2005). Put
more simply, we might say, we can only give an account of ourselves to an
audience that is prepared, and already at least partly knows how, to listen to us
through some form of shared vernacular. In a recent article on the limits of
translation, Heike Bauer spoke of the significance of shared discursive history
(an expression borrowed from the linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet) referring to
the ways in which our particular conceptual framings affect how we translate
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and convey knowledge. She was studying the appropriations, misreadings and
conflicts generated by sexological knowledge in shaping the ways women
over the last century have framed their self-perceptions and enactments
when identifying as lesbians: Postmodern criticism privileges readings
of the fragmented subject, Bauer writes, then she goes on to discuss
why it is, however, often more important to consider the subjects cultural
context (Bauer, 2003, p. 382). Butler, who has never herself chosen to march
under the always woolly, now tattered flag of postmodernism, would
certainly agree.
Pol i ti cal l ocati ons
The emphasis on cultural location, of course, is hardly new. It is just what those
who have emphasized the significance of counter cultures, subcultures or, more
recently, invoking a notion of queer belongings have argued from the
emergence of women and gay liberation back in the 1970s, that is, well before
the post-stucturalist/deconstructive turn, which as Ive suggested often doubles
as Butlerian. The latter, certainly, usefully highlighted for us that what the body
flashes out, veils, silently or shamefully buries, is everywhere incited by the
imprints of heteronormativity, the straightgeist, as Nicholson Baker labelled it
(Baker, 1994, p. 6). But merely to demonstrate the artifice and fragility of
dominant linguistic framings is hardly, thereby, to weaken them. On the
contrary, perhaps, the phantasmatic hold of gender and sexuality, rather like the
now ubiquitous grip of market capitalism, has always thrived and renewed itself
through surviving its own inevitable instabilities and contradictions. Alan
Sinfield was neither the first, nor the last, gay theorist to point out that Queers
celebration of the fluidity and fragmentation of the subject suited market
forces very well, glamorizing risk, titillation and the endless embrace of the
novel: The task, as he says, is less to applaud and hasten the disintegration of
residual identities the market will take care of that than to assess and
exert some influence over the emergence of new ones (Sinfield, 1998, p. 198).
Quite so. And that, despite knowing all the paradoxes of subject positions, is
what Butler now seems to be doing nowadays, though less so, of late, as a bar
dyke. This, I suspect, is not just because she is maybe getting too old for all
that, nor just because it is no longer so necessary anyway to fight for
recognition of same-sex desires, at least in Berkeley, Paris, London or
Berlin, though for certain it is still, in Tehran, Warsaw, Lagos or Harare. It is
simply that since her reference points remain, as she says, particular, social
and political, there has emerged another rather distinct way of making
trouble (in the context of a now long-standing refusal to recognize the
humanity of another people) by using Jewish philosophy itself to critique the
use of violence by the state of Israel, supposedly in defence of Jewish people
everywhere.
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I dent i t i es , Who Needs Them?
Of course, youll hardly be surprised to learn that in presenting Butlers
trajectory in the way that I have, I cunningly manage to draw her closer to my
own way of assessing the strange and always somewhat unpredictable ties
between the personal and the political. Political commitments usually flow from
those ties of identity and belonging that happen to lead certain people into
fighting for equality and justice, when puzzling over how to live. At least, that is
the conclusion I came to when brooding over my own backward glances as an
ageing feminist, and those of others before me, who tried to live with a strong
sense of connectedness with and responsibility for others (Segal, 2007).
Passionate political identifications, I suggest in Making Trouble (Segal, 2007),
become more prevalent when cultural shifts and ruptures encourage confronta-
tion with old constraints, especially with the opening up of new public spaces. It
is then that successful resistance sometimes accompanies parallel acknowl-
edgement of the injustice and suffering of others. Yet, it is never easy to isolate
why it is that some people find political convictions have an inescapable hold on
their lives, while others do not. Personal trajectories do matter. But neither
ones specific background, nor good theory, maintains political allegiances
which, in my view, when passionately asserted, are inevitably lived as forms of
identity. Here, most of all, we are dealing with the impact of certain
historical conjunctures, as again the gay theorist Alan Sinfield suggests:
Political identity derives mainly from involvement in a milieu (Sinfield,
1999, no.s ix and x, p. 25). Involvement in, affiliation with, any progressive
milieus is only maintained by some shared sense of self that we can
manage to find by narrating a collective story about ourselves, even if we
believe we always already know the pitfalls of trying to stand together
with others on that slippery rock, that space that allows us to unite with others,
when the I publicly joins the we. Hopefully, today, we may also have a
little more understanding of the ambiguous, conflictual, exclusionary, nature
of any such positionings in relation to all those others, which would require
that our shared belongings, though essential for any form of agency, and
especially that of political engagement, remain always in further need of
opening up, self-interrogation and more. Nowadays, I like to think that
Butler would be in agreement with these thoughts on the ties between identities
and politics. Certainly, the Butler I have constructed here would be, though
I fear I may have presented her to you just a little too shorn of some of the
more subtle philosophical and ethical reasoning she uses in defence of her
political stances.
About the author
Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at
Birkbeck College, London University. Her books include Is the Future Female?
Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing
Subjectivity
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392
Lynne Segal
Masculinities, Changing Men; Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure; Why
Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politic; Making Trouble: Life and Politics.
Note
1 I have heard Butler makes exactly this comment replying to questions after lectures.
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