‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment in the Second Butler 1 MARIE-HÉLÈNE BOURCIER Abstract This article takes issue vigorously with what it argues are the disempowering effects of Judith Butler’s more recent work, for transgendered people in particular and accordingly for the queer movement in general. In so doing it contests the way in which the reception of Butler’s work in France has been mediated by a transphobic psychoanalytic establishment and attacks Butler for playing along with their selfinterested political agenda by retelling, in Paris, for their ears, an anecdote of a savoury encounter with a transgendered interlocutor in a subcultural queer space in San Francisco. Keywords transgender, trans studies, melancholia, psychoanalysis, Butler, interpellation, sexual subcultures Notes on contributors entry Marie-Hélène Bourcier is a queer theorist and activist based in the sociology department at Lille 3, where she teaches cultural studies, performance studies, feminist studies and queer studies. She convenes a queer studies seminar affiliated to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, entitled ‘Fuck My Brain’, and is a founder member of the French queer activist group Le Zoo. She has translated Monique Wittig and Teresa de Lauretis into French and written several 146 books and articles on queer theory and sexual subcultures, in France and abroad, most notably Queer Zones: politique des identités sexuelles et des savoirs (1st ed. Paris: Balland, 2001; 2nd revised ed. Paris: Amsterdam, 2006), Queer Zones 2: Sexpolitiques (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005) and Queer Zones 3: identités, cultures, politiques (Paris: Amsterdam, 2011). * The programme articulated in the second Butler derives, to a great extent, from what could, at best, be called a politics of vulnerability. It is presupposed that we are all vulnerable, indeed that ‘it is unclear whether we are still living, or ought to be, whether our lives are valuable, or can be made to be, whether our genders are real, or ever can be regarded as such’.2 This is supposedly the cost of challenging gender norms after Undoing Gender. The genealogy of this language of vulnerability deserves closer inspection, yet for the moment it suffices to remind ourselves of two things. The very term ‘vulnerability’, when applied to the American nation, to the United States, took hold several weeks after September 11th. It was cunningly injected into public discourse by the Bush administration and the Department of Defense; it became the motto of the commanding officers at Abu Ghraib. It is also a term which figured in a new free-market approach to governing poverty, adopted by a range of international institutions from the 1980s on, among them the OECD and the UNDP. Its aim was to redefine the standard of poverty by using new statistical instruments, including ‘vulnerability’ and ‘precariousness’ [précarité] (as in the Social Vulnerability Index, created in 2003), in order to allow experts from the richer 147 countries and those of the North to regulate the human and economic development of poor countries and emerging economies. Butler not only transposes uncritically this ‘episteme of vulnerability’ to sexed and gendered subjects, while ignoring its biopolitical dimensions and its rootedness in imperialism, but she widens the ‘we’ of ‘the poor’ such that ‘we’ can not only be included within it but even substitued for them.3 So it is that we are led to mourn for vulnerable individuals from wartorn countries which are unable to mourn for their own, in Frames of War.4 This lament of vulnerability is altogether anachronistic (melancholic?) if one thinks about the ways in which gender norms have been successfully outflanked in recent years, above all in urban LGBTQ subcultures. It is in this context that ‘we’ are told that ‘everything’ can be resignified, or culturally retranslated: not only norms, which suddenly seem to weigh so heavily down upon us, but also the universal and the state: ‘I think the state can also be worked and exploited’.5 Such assertions suggest that we have now reached the limits of a hypertextualism which was already an issue in Gender Trouble; it can legitimately be remarked that there is a difference between saying that signification and resignification always have a provisional, or performative, character and using them as a ready recipe on any given occasion. But is it true that universality is open to resignification; is this true, especially, in a country such as France, where universalism is sacred? Is there not a difference between the repetition, or performative recitation, of this particular buzzword and insulting hate-speech directed against minorities? Is this accumulation of terms such as ‘universalism’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘precariousness’ [précarité] not itself part of a biopolitical game with which we are all too familiar? Who is the political subject of this resignification of the universal? What effects are produced by the way in which 148 the capacity for action – formerly conceived as an impersonal quality emanting from minoritarian sites of self-articulation – is transferred over to the neo-Modern philosopher seeking disciplinary recognition in Old Europe, the cradle of philosophy? What of the displacement of the terms ‘vulnerability’ and ‘poverty’ and their use in almost metaphorical fashion? In Gender Trouble gender was undone not by an agent but by way of a capacity for action. How is it that we find ourselves instructed, in Undoing Gender, to reply to metaphysical or ontological questions such as ‘What does gender want?’, or What does desire want?’6 The answer, however, is very simple: nothing. The same question could be asked of the new political goal to expand the human as of the project to resignify universality: is ‘the human’ not already one of the most dilated of categories, as well as one of the foundations of modernity?7 The consequences of modifying the capacity for action in this way are very clear. In Gender Trouble the performativity of fidelity to texts or discourses is impersonal and reversible, for better and for worse. By contrast, Undoing Gender is plagued by personalization and the continental figure of the philosopher who is ready to save the world, or lament its passing, depending on the circumstances, has made a comeback. It will be public intellectuals and philosophers who decide whether resignification is possible and desirable and it is they who will, if required, go crusading for the vulnerable.8 The futility of such a way of thinking would be amusing were it not for the fact that it quite simply erases the work accomplished by minorities and the specificity of their needs and demands. Is it that identifying as a philosopher rather than ‘a mere queer theorist’ and switching causes by moving from an aggressive and euphoric theory of gender to a well-meaning theory of victimization affords one 149 greater recognition and numerous privileges which have nothing to do with queer theory and politics? Trans trouble Butler’s decidedly ambivalent relationship to transexuality, to trans studies and to what she has recently been calling ‘the transgender’, is another key element in the politics of disempowerment which lie beneath Butlerian vulnerability. Trans academics and activists sounded the alarm over ten years ago: in Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (2000), Viviane Namaste showed how a constructivist approach which treats the drag queen as exemplary and sets it up as a paradigm erases the life and experiences of trans people in society.9 In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1998), eight years after Gender Trouble, Jay Prosser, one of the first out trans academics, criticized the Butlerian conception of performativity for foreclosing the possibility of transgender identification.10 He also emphasized the extent to which Butler’s conception of gender in terms of performance and performativity is hyperdiscursive, somatophobic and desexualizing in its treatment of sexual practices and sexual orientation. In fact, even after the publication of Bodies that Matter, in 1993, bodies in general and trans bodies in particular still barely mattered. The Butlerian body is merely a residue, a discursive product, just as sex and gender are. Materiality and Interpellation 150 Another form of trans materiality, of the production of trans genders and of trans interpellation is missing from the Butlerian paradigms of trans genders and bodies. Although Teresa de Lauretis is very invested in psychoanalysis and takes into consideration the importance of psychic life when she analyses gender identifications and processes of subjectivation, this has not prevented her from elaborating a definition of gender as technology, one which has allowed her to broaden Foucault’s understanding of that term.11 The definition of technology offered by de Lauretis allows cultural processes and representations to be taken account of in the reproduction of genders, and these include visual representations and representations from popular cultures, even from ‘national-popular’ cultures in Gramsci’s sense, from feminism and from theory. Unlike Butler’s work, this model of gender as technology succeeds in grasping the crucial role of the visual. Foucault was born into a world already saturated with visual stimulation and mass culture, not to mention with the visual dispositifs discernible in P.T. Barnum’s circuses and other kinds of freak show, in universal exhibitions, and in the theatricals of the Salpêtrière, directed by the hand of the ‘maestro’, Charcot, every Tuesday, not far from the photographic laboratory which he had had built. Foucault may well have devised genealogy as a new epistemological method yet, when he was compiling his own genealogy of female hysteria (which takes up much of his Collège de France seminar of 1975, entitled The Abnormal), he left out Albert Londe’s photographs and the work of the director William Friedkin, intended as it was to ‘tame’ the possessed woman.12 It is surely not a coincidence that Freud was especially resistant to all forms of visual technology, especially when, in the form of cinema, they threatened to take psychoanalysis captive. Should this be seen as an attempt to protect the private 151 character, indeed the secrecy, of what took place in the psychoanalytic consulting room, his own or any other, and so to retain control over the administration of the dark continents he had ‘discovered’? When asked in 1926 about plans for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film, The Secrets of a Soul, the ‘father’ of psychoanalysis confronted the threat head-on by declaring: ‘filming seems to be as unavoidable, it seems, as page-boy [garçonne] haircuts, but I won’t have myself trimmed that way and do not wish to be brought into personal contact with any film.’13 Freud may have escaped the butch’s scissors while he was alive but there was nothing he could do about the fact that psychoanalysis and cinema were born at almost the same moment. There is more to this than Foucault’s Panopticon. Butler and Althusser This difficulty understanding the crucial role of the image and of visual dispositifs can also manifest itself in a desire to contain the visual. This is true of the theories of identification, subjection and subjectivation (assujettissement) in Lacan and Althusser. Lacan quickly does away with the problem in his Mirror Stage.14 Less well understood perhaps is that Althusser’s theory of interpellation, with which first-wave American queer theorists were besotted, proves to be decidedly shaky without its specular dimension. For this dimension cannot, as it often is in Butler’s analyses, be reduced to the now famous scene in which the cop calls you over. In Althusser’s ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ the process by which individuals are interpellated as subjects implies the specular structure of ideology and this is constitutive of one of the four levels of interpellation which he identified.15 For there to be subjectivation 152 (assujettissement) there must be more than a scene with a cop. For Althusser, an act of ideological interpellation functions if its frame has already been established beforehand, well in advance of the scene with the cop. Accordingly, ideological interpellation must be guaranteed by an absolute subject, who is the ultimate mirror in which the subject will recognize him or herself, as well as in acts of recognition involving other people. It is very significant that Butler strips these theoretical elements from her account in the Introduction to Excitable Speech.16 She wrongly reproaches Althusser for relying only on the scene with the cop. She asserts that he fails to consider the conditions of the possibility of this type of performative subjectivation, which precede the scene. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, in so doing Butler misses the game of mirrors with the big suject, or in other words the specular character of ideology, of gender interpellation, or of racial and sexual insult. Indeed she goes further, by reducing the ‘theatre’ of Althusserian interpellation (to use Althusser’s term) to a phonic event. This is not a matter of saying that there is a correct interpretation of Althusser and that Butler’s confection is false, but of noting that the ultimate logical conclusion to which the recalcitrant queen of queer theory arrives, after cutting away these elements, is that ideology does not need a voice in order to articulate itself. To maintain that the scene with the cop is unnecessary and that it is possible to do away with the dialogic situation which brings its two protagonists together is to effect a radical dematerialization in the very midst of the discursive and performative field. Switch off the sound; get rid of this public scene; be blind and mute. It is the very materiality of the interpellation which can and must vanish. And why should it not? The only problem is that the Butlerian conception of performativity in its entirety – in the acts of naming which form part of the gendering process, as in hate speech, 153 insult included – rests on this type of iteration, re-citation and repetition. There can be no performative force without such real scenes, irrespective of the valency of that force, of the direction in which it travels; in other words, regardless of whether it opens onto possibilities of resistance or is, on the contrary, coercive. More so still in the case of genders and of sexual and racial minorities. This reluctance to take account of the materiality of speech and language is entirely consistent with the altogether disembodied paradigms of gender proposed by Butler. The consequences of this unflinching desire to provide an extremely abstract version of what subjectivation consists in are legion. Not least among them is a reinforcement of those logics of disempowerment which block the technologies and counter-biopolitical strategies of the transgender movement. To cite merely the example of transmasculinity, many trans men and boys already draw on performance, performativity and the visual in a multiplicity of resourceful ways. Some claim the right to invent different masculinities; others do not. Many reject the burden of subversion with which first-wave American queer theory saddled them, according to which transgendered people are better predisposed to break down the binarism of the dominant sex/gender system than transsexual people. This is without even mentioning those feminisms which have sought to discipline transgendered people, trans men in particular, by making out that they are perfect.17 Most of the technologies of transmasculinity rely on acts of reappropriation and resignification which are as visual as they are phonic; Butler’s conception of performativity, try though it might, can neither silence them nor render them invisible. Should we not be trying to embrace the widest possible spectrum of those biopolitical strategies and gender technologies which issue from what are often politicized subcultural sites? 154 Trans interpellations Biopolitical technologies rely heavily on acts of visual and phonic reappropriation; images speak and we can almost hear their voice. This is the case in a series of selfportraits by the Anglo-American trans photographer Loren Cameron from 1996.18 By reworking the codes and the performative power of anatomical charts and photographs, Cameron offers a lucid critique of medical discourse and its pornographic dimension. He controls his image because he is the one taking the photographs; he is the one who presses the shutter button. He can show us his body; he can exhibit a different sexed masculine body, that of a man without ‘the’ dick, without being objectified. So it became possible, in the 1990s, for those trans people who wanted to, to figure the ‘before and after’ through self-representations; this allowed them to depart from the exploitative way in which sensationalist popular journalism and medical discourse treat this narrative trope. Loren Cameron counters some very specific interpellative processes (bird names, insults, as well as the eroticization of the objectified trans body) with self-portraits which are at once visual and phonic responses, altogether equal to a successful speech act. Many of the strategies deployed by a group of trans activists from Paris, le Groupe Activiste Trans de Paris (GAT), are also part of this ongoing process of material resignification. In a video produced by this group, ‘The Finger of God; We Have Found Lacan’s Cock’, we find a doctor’s prescription which reads: ‘Patient Jacques Lacan. Doctor Queer (MD), place: Paris is burning’, the last part being reference to Jennie Livingston’s film. We could also cite many of the zaps (direct 155 action protests) undertaken by this group, or by Act Up-Paris, against self-proclaimed French experts in transsexuality such as Patricia Mercader, a feminist psychologist, and the psychiatrist Colette Chiland; or there is the existence of a trans radio programme (2003–2006) entitled Bistouri, oui, oui (Yes, the scalpel, yes).19 These examples, chosen from many, very clearly show the diversity of technologies of transmasculinity and transfemininity and the way in which they are anchored in visual and phonic materiality. The limitations of Butler’s theory of gender as performance and performativity should not lead us to throw out the baby of performativity with the bathwater. There is no reason whatsoever for us to deprive ourselves of the valuable resources of performance and performativity, in particular when it comes to identitarian performance. Other ways of theorizing and other practices have demonstrated and will continue to demonstrate their efficacy. Acknowledging the performative dimension to gender does not, for one moment, entail an automatic dimunution in agency. By not taking into consideration the empowering character of certain forms of embodiment, of biopolitical strategies and scenes from daily life, we run the risk of undoing a myriad of trans possibilities and missing the multiplicity of ways in which genders are done. The Butlerian paradigms of gender as performance and melancholy obscure our vision by disconnecting queer theory from trans, queer and genderqueer subcultures; again, however, we are not obliged to follow Butler in her transition from drag queen to drama queen. This shift simply reminds us that firstwave American queer theory is, like the various feminisms, also itself a technology of gender.20 From this perspective it is vital that we aim for the greatest possible critical reflexivity and that we offer up for critique the uses we make of theory and fantasy. 156 Transgendered people: aggressive melancholics? Her failure to take account of the politics and subcultures of the trans movement perhaps explains the gulf which has opened up between Butler and trans people, in her bid to become (in an intermittent and ambivalent manner) both the incarnation of ‘queer theory’ and the Saint Sebastian of trans studies, as was clear in a lecture she delivered at Paris 8 on 13 November 2008.21 Falling back on the infallibility of psychoanalytic dogma hardly helps either; still less the recourse to that other paradigm of gender, gender as the melancholic remainder of transgender identification. In Paris, Butler has twice passed round the story of a woman philosopher interpellated by a poet who shouted ‘Fuck you Judith Butler!’ during a slam poetry event in San Francisco: at the aforementioned lecture at Paris 8 and in a very significant text published by a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, ‘Transgender and “Attitdues of Revolt”’.22 The story differed, depending on whether it was addressed to an auditorium of students who had come to listen to the lecture at Paris 8, or to the Lacanians. Butler said that she attended the event incognito. In reality, contrary to Butler’s interpretation of the incident, a MtF poet who is very well known in San Francisco knew perfectly well what she was doing when she spoke in front of an informal audience accustomed to such open mic events and familiar with queer and gender-queer politics and subcultures. Butler admits as much in the version for the Lacanians, even though she did not in the lecture itself: ‘several years ago, during a slam poetry event I attended in San Francisco, a number of people from the transgender community spoke publicly: gender-queers, boys, transgendered people, transsexuals, butches, fems who loved trans men’.23 157 ‘Fuck you Judith Butler!’ At the beginning of the text for the Lacanians, however, Butler tries hard to erase the context and the materiality of the scene even as she insists, but in theory, on dialogism and interlocution as essential constituent parts of the performative scene: ‘I recognize you as a woman and I recognize you as a man; such speech acts are modes of address; they establish an “I” and they seek to address a “you” and this interlocutory scene is perhaps just as important, if not more so, that the category through which I address myself to you’.24 Yet in the midst of this effot to reflect on enunciation and naming, Butler never thinks to name ‘the MtF’ in question. She opts instead to analyse verbal aggression by referring to a ‘similar’ situation recounted by Julia Kristeva, who interpreted the gesture of a woman who left one of her lectures at The New School for Social Reseach, in New York, slamming the door as she went, as a declaration of love. A proximity to Kristeva is thus secured. Butler then goes on to elaborate, in profoundly psychoanalytic terms, the nature of the address, of ‘the impossible demand’, from which the poet’s speech supposedly sprang and which appears to be similar in every way to the impossible and sometimes aggressive complaint of the melancholic woman described by Freud in 1915.25 During the lecture at Paris 8 Butler could not resist eroticizing her encounter with ‘the MtF poet of San Francisco’ and sought to show the comic side of the situation from her point of view. Butler relates how she went to see the poet at the end of the slam and how she blushed when Butler revealed her identity. The poet was apparently not indifferent to her charms, which 158 shows along the way that the philosopher immediately cast this transpoet as a lesbian attracted to women. Lacanian psychoanalysts in France love this story because they have no difficulty in resituating ‘this impossible demand’ in a transferential context and because they naturally take the anecdote as proof of the suffering and vulnerability of ‘transsexuals’ (the term they tend to use arbitrarily for any transgendered person).26 And what a relief for them to see Butler return to the path of righteousness, to see that ‘the activist’ of yesteryear (her activism being the reason why she failed to understand the deep structure of Lacan’s thought and misinterpreted this (queer) master) has calmed herself.27 The difficulty is that, in this text for Parisian Lacanians, Butler uses the transgendered person (‘the MfF of San Francisco’ included) as her quintessential example of suffering by gender. From this perspective, the ‘MtF of San Francisco’ inherits the place within the paradigm once occupied by the drag queen of Gender Trouble. The paradigm in question is a very troubled one, distinctly less flamboyant than Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The philosopher does not hesitate to describe melancholia and the kind of speech which issues from it as a ‘transgender’ weapon, simultaneously aggressive and ineffectual. And according to Lacanian theory and the transphobic texts of French Lacanians, foremost among them Catherine Millot, trans identification never succeeds in structuring itself as a language, which excludes it de facto from the Lacanian Symbolic.28 For Butler, lecturing at Paris 8, trans identification remained an impossibility; it was foreclosed. The text which arose out of the seminar with the Lacanians is more cautious and Butler makes out that she is trying to avoid any form of ‘diagnosis’ and pathologization. What she does is far worse. Under the pretext of ascribing to melancholy, not without some difficulty, an entirely social and cultural origin, and at the price of some quite striking 159 decontextualizations, she arrives unfailingly at the same fatal result for the transgendered subject. From pathologization to pathos Drive out pathologization and pathos returns with a vengeance. The MtF of San Francisco suffers by gender; quite unawares to her, this is supposedly the underlying meaning of her ‘Fuck you Judith Butler!’. Butler will set about trying to understand the origins of this suffering in cultural and sociological terms (suffering which will nevertheless turn out to derive simply from Freudian melancholy), in such a way as to deflect the accusation of pathologization in the ‘psychological’ sense. Even as she contests the idea of the mutual impermeability of the psychic and the social, the interior and the exterior, Butler continually renews their separation. In fact Butler’s text is forever oscillating between the psychological and the sociological, indeed between ‘the psychological girl/boy’ and ‘the sociological girl/boy’. As it does, more than any other it is the ‘interior/exterior’ opposition which becomes reified as it is mapped ‘naturally’ on to the ‘psychological/sociological’ opposition. Sometimes the contents of the two spheres swap over such that the spheres themselves become indistinct. The ‘sociological’ outside can be on the inside: ‘I did not want to say that gender is only outside and that we must, therefore, in our theorizations of gender, evacuate the interior. I wanted rather to say that the outside is also the inside, that what we refer to as ‘interior’ is a particular way in which the cultural norm takes on form as psychic reality, very often as psychic identification’.29 160 It could be asked, moreover, whether the attempt to separate suffering with a social origin from suffering with a psychic origin, with which the text begins, is helpful. What exactly are the mutually excluding conceptions of psychic and social identification which Butler has in mind here? Once again, the opposition which she reestablishes between psychological interiority as the site of identification and ‘the exterior’ as the site of social constraint, in order to acquit herself of the accusation of pathologization, proves to be porous. This is also the case when she decides that we are thrown into ‘the exterior’ beyond the psyche at the moment when self-naming is completed by an act of address and thereby acquires a dialogic dimension: ‘in fact two acts take place: the first is an act of self-naming but the second is a form of address, an address to a “you” which is asked to consider this person a boy. At that moment we can no longer speak of an exclusively psychic reality as something which is effected internally and which exists separately from a sociological identity or a sociological scene of interlocution’.30 Sociological exteriority and the address to another person thus supposedly coincide as though the act of self-naming arose from an unmediated interior monologue, which is highly unlikely. Finally, when the attempt to re-sociologize and depsychologize the scene becomes an assertion both of the indissociable relationship and of the noncorrespondence, of interiority/the psychological, on one hand, and exteriority/the socio-cultural, on the other, it has to be said that the sociological supplement soon reveals itself to be unequal to the task. It is, as it were, introjected or absorbed as though it were a supplementary mediation which must be taken into consideration; thus the psychological once again becomes the sole site of the identificatory process. After a first movement in which the process of transgender identification is resociologized we are very quickly invited to overcome what Butler calls ‘the 161 sociological referent’ (presupposing an opposition between the reference and the signifier?) which is held to be fixed (as opposed to the plasticity of the psyche?). The sociological, when understood in this way, bears a striking resemblance to the Lacanian Symbolic. Understood in these terms, the sociological is neither more nor less than the existence of psychic and cultural reality, a reality which Freud never denied and which provided him with the matter from which he fashioned his ‘complexes’, so many mythologies of Hellenistic inspiration. This amounts to thinking that the unconscious is structured like a language, by language, and that certain identificatory phases are and must be guaranteed by access to the Symbolic, as Lacan asserted.31 And although psychologizing pathologization has been avoided, Butler merrily psychoanalyses ‘the case’ of the MtF of San Francisco. To consider the address which was made to her as a metonymn for the splitting or the suffering of the transgendered subject is very reminiscent of the kind of dream interpretation practised by the early Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, which relies almost entirely on condensations and displacements, on metaphorical and metonymic substitutions.32 Let us suppose that the origin of transgender suffering is external, or at any rate social and cultural. On this understanding, the wretched norms of gender bear down with all their force on the MtF of San Francisco, to the point where she is rendered unintelligible. They ‘torture’. Why does the same phenomenon of social and cultural constraint described in Gender Trouble not have the same effects on the MtF of San Francisco as on the drag queen and why does it not entail the same possibilities of resistance? How have we gone from the gender euphoria produced by the dissonance of the drag queen to a veritable gender dysphoria in the utterance of the MtF of San Francisco? What has changed between 1990, when Gender Trouble first appeared, and 2008 or 2009? No explanation is given by Butler. And when it comes 162 to accounting for melancholia in cultural terms, she becomes extensively reliant on a Freud who is almost tacked on, a Freud, in this essay of 1915, who is hardly interested in culture at all. The mechanism of ungrievable loss is set in motion and stands ready to go on autopilot. For what, after all, is the object of the transgendered subject’s loss? Is this, in an updated, cultural, understanding of melancholia,‘the cultural consequence of forbidden mourning’, as in the case of the American soldiers killed in Iraq and whose coffins are no longer shown (on television)?33 Even though we still do not know exactly what the transgendered melancholic has lost, this loss is hypostasized and becomes fit to stand in for loss itself: ‘the melancholic’ (that is, the transgendered person) embodies this loss.34 Instead of finding out what has been lost we learn that the melancholic displays ‘attitudes of revolt’, that s/he seeks to break a bond while continuing to maintain it, that s/he addresses someone who is not there (a ‘self-denying address’), that s/he exhibits a propensity towards ‘public self-laceration’ and complaint.35 In short, while the transgendered subject is unaware of what causes their suffering, s/he has the performance of melancholia down to a tee. Butler certainly tries to establish a connection between melancholia and social exclusion in general, of which exclusion due to the presentation of a ‘non-normative’ gender would be merely one example among others, and sees such exclusion as leading to the subjet’s being deprived, unrecognized or misrecognized. Yet the question must be asked whether, if the structure of melancholia is so widespread, it can really be the exemplary structure of transgender identification. If what we are talking about is gender dissonance then how can we assume, even for a moment, after several decades of transgender revolution, that the MfF of San Francisco is unaware of what has been denied her and what she has therefore lost forever? 163 My name is nobody The strangest thing about Butler’s text is doubtless this attempt at re-sociologization which neglects to consider the subcultural benefits of a city such as San Francisco, as of queer culture in general, and which thus fails to consider in its analysis the contexts informing the concrete situation of enunciation which will be transformed into an anecdote by the author. Nobody from that rather savvy San Francisco audience was worthy to appear in the acknowledgments. This is not all. Butler’s analysis of the ‘case’ of the MtF of San Francisco achieves the opposite of its stated goal; although supposedly reaching for a cultural explanation of transgender melancholy it consists of a series of failures to depathologize and depsychologize. Once again, even if we relativize the psychoanalytic presuppositions which hold Butler’s theory of trans melancholia together – which is practically impossible, so riddled is the text with traditional ‘psychoanalisms’– Butler’s interpretation leads to a pathologization of the transgender demand which is extremely pernicious because it involves the attribution of victim status. When the text is trying to be ever so slightly culturalist then it stipulates, for the MtF poet of San Francisco, pathologization by a culture which exerts an unequalled power over her, a power which can barely be resisted since when she does speak her speech is doomed to failure and inaudibility. Far from succeeding in her attempt to depsychologize, Butler adds several further unnecessary layers of pathologization. The first comes with her interpretation of the raging anger of the MtF of San Francisco. By positing the existnce of a single and arbitrary connection between these emotions of rage, anger and suffering which form part of sexual politics in general and various forms of feminism in particular, 164 Butler erases whole swathes of the history of performativity. Yet rage, as an emotion in the field of sexual politics, has some recent antecedents. It was valued as a source of empowerment by femists and lesbian feminists to the point where it became, in 1970, the centrepiece of a feminist manifesto, the Woman-Identified Woman of the Radicalesbians, which opened with these now famous words: ‘What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.’36 Butler refers to the imposition of an impossible mourning for the first victims of HIV but how can she not be aware that rage and anger also figured in the pantheon of Act Up’s values since its foundation in New York? The kind of performativity in question has nothing to do with a crisis of anger afflicting the transgendered person, a crisis which is no more than a crisis of address, or ‘an open wound’. The anger of Act Up saved many a life and nobody seriously doubts whether it was heard and proved its efficacy. That politicization of rage and anger neither led to, nor arose from, some fantastic state of incommunicability. The second level of pathologization is added by Butler’s dramatizing and selective reading of Freud, in which the 1915 essay is taken to be authoritative whereas Freud himself is careful to say there that the definition of melancholia is ‘fluctuating’ and that he lacks a sufficiently sophisticated empirical means of investigation.37 Without offering any explanation why, Butler opts spontaneously for the ‘hard’ version, for the pathology of mourning which is melancholia. It is true that in melancholia the symptomatology is harder to bear, is more desperate, for ‘the patient’, if not for the analyst who knows more than the melancholic. By contrast with the person who is in mourning, thanks to those attitudes of ‘rebellion’ which are very understandable, according to Freud, in the case of the melancholic, or of melancholia, both the loss and its object are hidden from awareness. Another major difference is 165 that the melancholic suffers from a disturbed sense of self which becomes manifest in a highly reflexive manner: ‘self-reproach’, ‘self-beratement’, ‘self-denigration’, ‘selfaccusation’, which, even though they are all directed at a love object, according to Freud nevertheless take the form of an attack on the self in which the ego undervalues and rages against itself.38 It is clear, however, that ‘Fuck you Judith Butler!’ displays none of these characteristics of turning against the self. Quite the opposite. No more than it does of ‘shame’, a term Butler adds to her clinical portrait but which not even Freud would throw into the mix: ‘They are not ashamed and do not die themselves, since everything derogatory that they say about themselves is at bottom said about someone else.’39 The MtF of San Francisco did not take the crooked path of (self-)accusatory complaint when she targeted the philosopher. Moreover, she neither undervalued nor pitied herself. Her melancholic complaint is wholly a product of the reconstruction undertaken by the addressee of her insult, who is reduced to an affirmation, which takes the form of a disavowal, that she could be the lost love object of the MtF. This, in addition to the accompanying narcissistic satisfaction, is what allows Butler to hold on simultaneously to both the amorous, Kristevan, understanding of melancholy and to her own understanding of melancholy as related to gender; it moreover allows this latter theoretical construction to become the MtF of San Francisco’s even more ideal lost love object. The Christlike paraphrase of Freud’s definition of melancholy which Butler offers (‘melancholy is a form of address which cannot reach its addressee, which never could and never will; an open apostrophe, apostrophe as open wound’) should be taken for what it is: a pious wish which respects neither the enunciative bearing of trans speech nor the interlocutory situation in which the philosopher found herself.40 166 Butler speaks of ‘politics’ only to conjure a timid promise which has already come true on numerous occasions. In the twentieth, as in the twenty-first century, in San Francisco as in many other places, there is nothing singular or exceptional about the speech act of that MtF poet. It is simply that any adequate description of her act of speaking out requires reference to be made to the fact that she is ‘living a psychic reality which is socially informed and mediated’.41 This is not a matter of sociology but rather of politics; it is called doing politics. All this presupposes is that we keep reminding ourselves of the constraints imposed by a sex/gender system which is inadequate, binary and prescriptive, but also of the memory and the knowledge of how to resist that system. Instead, Butler superimposes a sort of primal performative scene, which is both personalized and diminishing, a sort of Mirror Stage with a twoway mirror, a scenario in which neither party listens to the other. The addressee (it is as though there were only one, Butler herself) manages to be both on the run and fully present. The staging of this anecdote of the transgendered melancholic participates in the structure of the ‘double bind’. Not only is MtF’s address, in keeping with Freudian dogma from 1915, destined to fail ‘because melancholia is a form of address which cannot reach its addressee’, but the addressee in question (conceived reductively to be Butler alone) is gifted with the peculiar power to be everywhere at the same time.42 When she is there she is not there, either because her notoriety exceeds her person or because nobody recognizes her even though she teaches at the other end of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, at Berkeley. We end up in a situation, which would be comic were it not so asymetrical in terms of power and notoriety, in which there is an encounter between two people, neither of whom is ‘recognizable’: the MtF who is defined as not recognizable by Butler, in a manner which is entirely excessive and unrealistic, by virtue of her demand for an impossible gender, and the 167 invisible celebrity, Butler in person, who does not understand when she is told to go fuck herself. Even better, Butler ends up inhabiting the very structure of melancholic enunciation she has described. The fact that she has not been recognized seems to be the condition of the possibility of articulating this complaint of transgender melancholy, as well as of its failure. No doubt this manner of occupying the place of the absent addressee is a way of escaping the utterance of the MtF of San Francisco, who was simply echoing a familiar and growing body of criticism of Butler by trans people. Melancholy may well be more cultural than it is psychic (even if this reversal does not stand, as we have seen, and gives way to a new form of pathologization), yet it must be remarked that with an exceptional lack of political receptiveness Butler, finding herself at a site of queer culture, chose to embody the dominant culture, the culture which refuses to read and listen. This gives rise to a further contradiction: Butler is not unaware of what trans studies hold against queer theory, a body of theory of which she is the metonym, yet she still chooses to occupy the place of the dominant culture of gender, faithful in this regard to that structure of melancholia for which she is also a metaphor. Indeed this is what the MtF of San Francisco is saying to her; this is what Butler refuses to hear even when everyone else has understood perfectly well: clear off… This way of staging the MtF’s utterance enacts the dematerialization of Althusserian interpellation analysed above. In this instance we can say that the sound has been definitively muted and the interpellation destroyed. What remains is Butler coming to a communicative understanding with the Lacanians to whom the text is addressed; for they, far more than trans or queer people, are its addressees. This no doubt explains the regrettable absence of any reference to critical work on 168 psychoanalysis within trans studies, work which is more precise, more adequate and less narcissistic, or to non-pathologizing clinical approaches adopted by practitioners who may themselves be trans, or not, for example those promoted by the organization Gay and Lesbian Affirmative Psychotherapy.43 Butler’s way of conceiving of the simultaneously psychic and social exclusion of trans people is entirely in keeping with Millot’s attempts to define trans people in terms of their ‘incredible’ propensity to demand, which is qualified by the highly ambiguous term ‘fantastic’ in Butler’s text.44 It follows logically from Butler’s ‘turn’, her turn away from Gender Trouble, in which we find a proliferation of genders all made possible by the malleability of norms by contrast to the fixity of the law, her turn towards a reification of gender norms which create suffering and render mourning impossible. This undoes the averred possibility of identification with multiple genders, for trans people among others, and tips ‘us’ over into disempowerment. To queer, yes, but starting out from where? Far from being the sworn enemies of queer theory and politics, the critical positions arising out of trans studies are invaluable. Two such contributions to queer theory and politics could well constitute their next big challenges: what could be called ‘sexual disorientation’ and the question of ‘the directionality of our queering’, to cite Jin Haritaworn.45 How we can avoid ‘queering from above’ and how we can avoid identifying with first-wave American ‘queer theory’ have become pressing questions. According 169 to Haritaworn our sexual situation is linked to our epistemic position and the fact that white queer theory constructed heterosexuality as enemy number one is itself is a mark of a certain ‘heterocentrism’. Haritaworn criticizes the way in which heterosexuality occupies the privileged position of queer’s principal Other, as though heterosexuality were a single-issue discourse, because this ignores racialized and minoritized forms of heterosexuality. Twenty years after first-wave American queer theory (de Lauretis) first called for intersectionality, the harvest has been meagre to say the least. By drawing on empirical research on Thai multiracialities in Britain and Gemany and by positioning himself as queer, as a trans witness and researcher, Haritaworn pursues the self-appointed task of elaborating a queer methodology and positionality ‘which can both tell the difference and ultimately make a difference’.46 The difference that means, for example, as in the case of a gay Thai man living in London interviewed at part of Haritaworn’s study, that outlandish dancing on a podium does not simply signify a camp aesthetic but points back to a Thai mother who was a sex-worker, a whore ‘who might have done podium dancing not to express her sexuality but to make a living’.47 It is true that first-wave American queer theory shifted the emphasis from homosexuality to the deconstruction of the opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality (at least in the work of Butler and Sedgwick). In so doing it left gay and straight sexual orientation untouched. It was a given that gay people would be attracted by boys and lesbians by girls. So sexual orientation was fixed. Yet BDSM and queer transcultures do not respect this alignment. We knew full well that what is termed ‘sex’, or ‘gender’, ‘reassignment’ had nothing to do with sexual orientation but who could have anticipated that lesbians, trans men, some trans women and some gay men, would have sexual and emotional relationships with each another? This 170 multiplication of sexual possibilities is an evolution within trans and queer subcultures which is not to be found in gay culture. Today, ‘gender trouble’ is accompanied by a sexual ‘troubling’, a ‘sexual disorientation’, or at least it is when queers, trans people and sex-workers mix. For reasons which remain to be elucidated, queer transmasculinity has fuelled these major developments. If queer theory and queer subcultures want to move forward in their grasp of sexualities and sexual politics then they have as much to learn from trans studies as from trans bodies. This will involve some major realignments, although I am no more able than you are to foretell precisely what these will entail. Translated by Oliver Davis 1 By ‘the second Butler’ I am referring to work of the period after Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), published in French as Défaire le genre (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006), although there are signs of this approach in earlier works such as Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). This analysis forms part of a wider project of critical reflection on the work of Judith Butler, one which will eventually be the subject of a book in its own right. Earlier versions have been presented at a number of conferences and seminars and my argument has been refined in the light of the ensuing discussions: in particular, at the ‘Queer in Europe’ conference organized by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett at the University of Exeter (September 2008); at the second and third years of the estudios queer symposium, organized by Agustin Villalpando and Lars Ivar Owesen-Lein Borge at the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, in Mexico City (2008 and 2009); at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, 171 Concordia University, in 2010, as part of the Lillian Robinson Lectures; finally, at Mireille Calle-Gruber’s seminar at Paris 3. I am grateful to Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett for offering me the opportunity to present my work at their conference and for publishing part of that paper in their special issue of Sexualities. Marie-Hélène Bourcier, ‘Cultural translation, politics of disempowerment and the reinvention of queer power and politics’, Sexualities 15, 1 (February 2012), special issue: European Culture / European Queer, edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, [INSERT PAGE REFS]. The present article is a continuation of that discussion. 2 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 206. 3 The expression ‘episteme of vulnerability’ is borrowed from Hélène Thomas, Les Vulnérables: La démocratie contre les pauvres (Broissieux: Editions du Croquant, 2010). 4 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009); published in French as Ce qui fait une vie. Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil (Paris: La Découverte/Zones, 2010). 5 Butler, Undoing Gender, 116. 6 Butler, Undoing Gender, 2. 7 Butler, Undoing Gender, 222–5. 8 See, for example, the conditions for realizing the universal which Slavoj Žižek set for queer politics in The Ticklish subject, The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London & New York, Verso, 1999). Žižek was critical of Butler for not having respected the demands of universality; now they should both be in agreement. 9 Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 172 10 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 11 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The Technology of Gender’, Technologies of Gender: Essays in Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 37–94. 12 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (New York: Picador, 2003). 13 Freud and Ferenczi, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, volume 3 (1920–1933), edited by Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, volume 3, letter of 14 August 1925. 14 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, Écrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977), 3-9. 15 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 1–60. 16 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (Routledege: New York and London, 1997). 17 On the constraining effect of this injunction see Marie-Hélène Bourcier, ‘Technotesto: biopolitiques des masculinités tr(s)ans homme’, Cahiers du Genre 45 (2008), Les Fleurs du mâle, masculinités sans hommes?, 59–84. 18 Loren Cameron, Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (San Francisco: Cleis, 1996). 19 The programme’s archives can be consulted at http://bistouriouioui.free.fr/. 20 See Bourcier, ‘Technotesto’. 21 Ironically, during this lecture trans studies were only mentioned by Judith Butler for this very reason; the philosopher did not, however, answer questions from 173 members of the audience who were interested in such studies. It is also worth mentioning that the term ‘transgender’, which figured initially in the title of the lecture organized by the Department of Feminine and Gender Studies [le départment d’Etudes féminines et de Genre] was subsequently withdrawn in favour of the more general title ‘Gender, Psychoanalysis and Politics’. Omitting this word ‘enabled’ the number of trans people in the audience to be reduced. This encounter was organized by Anne Berger, professor at Paris 8 and daughter of Hélène Cixous, who founded this department of ‘feminine’, but certainly not ‘feminist’, studies in the 1980s. This department was essentially devoted to the study of her own work from a LacanoDerridean perspective. Until recently Anne Berger continued to further this mission of celebrating the timeless works of one of the greatest French writers (her mother) and lately declared herself a specialist in queer theory. When informed of them, she was not receptive to the consequences of this change to the lecture’s title (which Butler had requested), a change which made the lecture a ‘no show’ for trans people. 22 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, in Sexualités, genres et mélancholies, S’entretenir avec Judith Butler, edited by Monique David-Ménard (Paris: Campagne Première, 2009), 13–36. 23 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 16. 24 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 13. 25 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, SE XIV, 237–260, 248. 26 Alain Lemosof, ‘Roc de queer’, in Monique David-Ménard (ed.), Sexualités, genres et mélancholies, S’entretenir avec Judith Butler (Paris: Campagne Première, 2009), 99–122. 27 Not quite enough, however, since she ‘still seems too fixed in her opposition to the heteronormative symbolic order’, an opposition which is ‘intensely activist’ and 174 which ‘brings with it, in my view, certain contradictions’. Lemosof, ‘Roc de queer’, 116 and n.1. 28 On Catherine Millot’s Horsexe: Essays on Transsexuality, translated by Kenneth Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1991) see also Marie-Hélène Bourcier, ‘Zap la psy, on a retrouvé la bite à Lacan’, Queer Zones 2: Sexpolitiques (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), 251–71. 29 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 2. 30 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 23. 31 Summarizing her approach, Butler says that she is trying ‘to understand what it means to assert an identification in language’, Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 22. 32 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV and V. 33 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 26. 34 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 29. 35 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 28. 36 The text can be consulted in Duke University’s online archive of the history feminism: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/womid/ (consulted 10 September 2011). 37 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, SE XIV, 237–260, 243. 38 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, SE XIV, 237–260. 39 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, SE XIV, 237–260, 248. 40 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 30. 41 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 24. 42 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 31. 175 43 Gay and Lesbian Affirmative Psychotherapy (http://www.glapnyc.org/). In 2010 the GLAP organized a conference in New York entitled ‘In Translation: Clinical Dialogues Spanning the Transgender Spectrum’, the proceedings of which have been published in a special issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 15, 2 (2011). 44 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte”’, 24. All the more ambiguous given that Butler borrowed the adjective and the entire formulation from the psychoanalyst Ken Corbett. 45 Jin Haritaworn, ‘Shifting Positionalities: Empirical Reflections on a Queer/Trans of Colour Methodology’, Sociological Research On Line 13, 1 (2008), abstract. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/1/13.html. 46 Haritaworn, ‘Shifting Positionalities’, section 4.6, unpaginated. 47 Haritaworn, ‘Shifting Positionalities’, section 3.2, unpaginated. 176