Gender as Social Temporality: Butler (and Marx)
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Cinzia Arruzza in
Current site
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This article addresses the notions of gender performativity and temporality in Butler’s early work on gender. The paper is articulated in four steps. First it gives an account of the role and nature of temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Second, it shows some similarities and connections between the role played by temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity and its role in Marx’s analysis of capital. Third, it raises some criticisms of Butler’s understanding of temporality and historicity, focusing in particular on the lack of historicisation of her own categories in both Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. This deficit is a consequence of the epistemological framework within which she is operating, in particular of her understanding of social practices and relations through the lens of linguistic concepts extrapolated from their theoretical context. The article concludes by referring to Floyd’s and Hennessy’s analyses of the formation of sexual identities as examples of the fruitful historicisation of gender performativity, which also sheds some light on the ‘the abstract character’ of the temporality of gender performativity.
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Althusser Louis Brewster Ben ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ For Marx 2005 London Verso
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Austin John Langshaw How to Do Things with Words 2003 Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press
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Bensaïd Daniel La discordance des temps 1995 Paris Les Éditions de la Passion
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Bensaïd Daniel Elliott Gregory Marx for our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique 2002 London Verso
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Butler Judith Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative 1997a London Routledge
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Butler Judith ‘Further Reflection on Conversations of our Time’ Diacritics 1997b 27 1 13 15
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Butler Judith ‘Merely Cultural’ New Left Review 1998 I 227 33 44
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Butler Judith Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 2008 London Routledge
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Butler Judith Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ 2011 London Routledge
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Cowling Mark & Martin James Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)modern Readings 2002 London Pluto Press
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Crary Alice Beyond Moral Judgment 2007 Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press
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Cruz-Malavé Arnaldo & Manalansan Martin F. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism 2002 New York New York University Press
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Derrida Jacques ‘Signature Event Context’ Limited Inc 1988 Evanston Northwestern University Press
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Drucker Peter ‘The Fracturing of lgbt Identities under Neoliberal Capitalism’ Historical Materialism 2011 19 4 3 32
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Duggan Lisa Castronovo Russ & Nelson Dana D. ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’ Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics 2002 Durham, NC Duke University Press
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Edelman Lee No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 2004 Durham, NC. Duke University Press
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Eng David L. , Halberstam Judith & Muñoz José Esteban Social Text 2005 23 3/4 special issue, What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?
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Ferguson Sue ‘Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition’ Critical Sociology 1999 25 1 1 15
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Ferguson Sue ‘Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor’ Race, Gender & Class 2008 15 1/2 42 57
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Floyd Kevin ‘Making History: Marxism, Queer Theory, and Contradiction in the Future of American Studies’ Cultural Critique 1998 40 167 201
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Floyd Kevin The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism 2009 Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press
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Foucault Michel Gordon Colin Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 1980 New York Vintage Books
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Foucault Michel Hurley Robert The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction 1990 New York Vintage Books
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Fraser Nancy Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition 1997 London Routledge
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Fraser Nancy ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler’ New Left Review 1998 I 228 140 9
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Freccero Carla Queer/Early/Modern 2006 Durham, NC. Duke University Press
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Freeman Elizabeth ‘Introduction’ glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2007 13 2/3 159 176
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Freeman Elizabeth Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories 2010 Durham, NC. Duke University Press
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Gimenez Martha Hennessy Rosemary & Ingraham Chrys ‘The Oppression of Women: A Structuralist Marxist View’ Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives 1997 London Routledge
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Gutting Gary ‘Foucault’s Genealogical Method’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 1990 15 1 327 343
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Halberstam Judith In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives 2005 New York New York University Press
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Hennessy Rosemary Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse 1993 London Routledge
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Hennessy Rosemary Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism 2000 London Routledge
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Love Heather Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History 2007 Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press
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Martin James Cowling & Martin ‘Performing Politics: Class, Ideology and Discourse’ 2002 2002
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McCallum E.L. & Tuhkanen Mikko Queer Times, Queer Becomings 2011 Albany State University of New York Press
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Marx Karl The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx/Engels Collected Works 1975 Volume 11 New York International Publishers
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Marx Karl Fowkes Ben Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1976 Volume I Harmondsworth Penguin Books
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Marx Karl Fernbach David Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1978 Volume II Harmondsworth Penguin Books
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Marx Karl Nicolaus Martin Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 1993 Harmondsworth Penguin Books
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Meiksins Wood Ellen Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism 1995 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
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Muñoz José Esteban Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity 2009 New York New York University Press
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Tomba Massimiliano Thomas Peter D. & Farris Sara R. Marx’s Temporalities, Historical Materialism 2012 Leiden Brill Book Series
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Tomba Massimiliano ‘Marx as the Historical Materialist: Re-reading The Eighteenth Brumaire’ Historical Materialism 2013 21 2 21 46
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Tombazos Stavros Le Temps dans l’analyse économique. Les catégories du temps dans le Capital 1994 Paris Cahiers des saisons
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1
Butler 1998; Butler 2008; Fraser 1997.
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2
Fraser 1998, p. 140.
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3
Hennessy 2000.
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4
Althusser 2005.
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6
See Hennessy 2000, pp. 88–90.
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8
Butler 2011, pp. 70–1.
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10
See, for example, Halberstam 2005. In Halberstam’s work, queer temporality is understood as a specific ‘way of life’, an embodied alternative to the conventional temporality of people’s lives. Contrary to this conventional temporality, determined and rhythmed by the cycle of highly regulated markers of experience, such as birth, marriage, reproduction and inheritance, and by a desire for long periods of stability, queer time ‘is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (Halberstam 2005, p. 6).
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11
See, for example, Freeman 2007. As Elizabeth Freeman writes in her Introduction to an issue of glq dedicated to ‘Queer Temporalities’, temporality is a mode of implantation through which institutional forces appear like somatic facts: through the manipulation of time, and therefore of the temporal experience, ‘essences’ are not just qualified, but actually produced. It is, then, the manipulation of time that makes body politics possible at all. Freeman deepens her critique of the idea of an objectivity and naturalness of the temporality of our lives through the articulation of a notion of ‘chrononormativity’ in Freeman 2010.
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12
See, for example, Freccero 2006, Love 2007, and Muñoz 2009. That queer theory should concern itself with futurity has now become a controversial issue. Within the debate on the ‘anti-social’ turn, for example, Lee Edelman has suggested that queer theorists should reject any futurity, hence any normative politics, and fully endorse that negativity to which queer people have anyway been bound: Edelman 2004.
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13
McCallum and Tuhkanen (eds.) 2011, p. 2.
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14
Butler 2008, p. 189.
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15
Butler 2008, p. 190.
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16
Butler 2008, p. 191.
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17
Butler 2008, p. 35.
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18
Butler 2011, pp. 59–60.
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19
Butler 2008, pp. 191–2.
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20
Butler 2011, p. xix.
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21
Butler 2011, p. xii.
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22
Butler 2008: ‘If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a “ground” will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time.’
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23
Butler 1997b.
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24
Butler 2011, pp. 191–2, n. 5.
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25
Marx 1993, p. 173.
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26
See Tombazos 1994; Bensaïd 2002, pp. 72–7; Tomba 2012.
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28
Marx 1976, pp. 163–77.
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29
Marx 1993, p. 272.
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30
Bensaïd 1995, pp. 29–30.
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31
Marx 1976, p. 279.
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32
Marx 1978, p. 185.
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33
Marx 1978, p. 184: ‘as a whole, then, the capital is simultaneously present, and spatially coexistent, in its various phases. But each part is constantly passing from one phase or functional form into another, and thus functions in all of them in turn. The forms are therefore fluid forms, and their simultaneity is mediated by their succession’.
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34
Tombazos 1994, pp. 11–12.
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35
Floyd 2009, p. 116.
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37
Butler 2008, p. 23.
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38
Foucault 1990, p. 114.
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39
Butler 2011, pp. 58–73.
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41
See Derrida 1988, pp. 1–23.
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42
Austin 2003, p. 6. See also the illuminating interpretation of Austin’s treatment of the performative in Crary 2007, pp. 49–95. While Crary agrees with Derrida, against most commentators, in reading Austin as attacking the idea of literal-sentence meaning in general, she suggests, contra Derrida, that this opens the path not to overcoming the idea of objectivity, but rather to elaborating a less narrow conception of objectivity.
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43
Derrida 1988, p. 14.
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44
Derrida 1988, p. 18.
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46
Butler 2008, p. xv. Here Butler clarifies that her original reading of performativity was strongly influenced by Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’.
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47
Butler 1997a, p. 51.
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48
Butler 1997a, p. 16.
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49
Gutting 1990, p. 340.
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50
Foucault 1980, p. 114.
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51
Butler 2008, p. 201. The same view is restated in somewhat different terms in Butler 2011: ‘Performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a “pure” opposition, a “transcendence” of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure’ (Butler 2011, p. 184).
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52
Marx 1975, pp. 103–4.
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55
Tombazos 1994, p. 18.
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56
Floyd 2009, pp. 94–119.
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57
Hennessy 2000, pp. 97–103; Floyd 1998.
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Gender as Social Temporality: Butler (and Marx)
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Cinzia Arruzza in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article addresses the notions of gender performativity and temporality in Butler’s early work on gender. The paper is articulated in four steps. First it gives an account of the role and nature of temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Second, it shows some similarities and connections between the role played by temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity and its role in Marx’s analysis of capital. Third, it raises some criticisms of Butler’s understanding of temporality and historicity, focusing in particular on the lack of historicisation of her own categories in both Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. This deficit is a consequence of the epistemological framework within which she is operating, in particular of her understanding of social practices and relations through the lens of linguistic concepts extrapolated from their theoretical context. The article concludes by referring to Floyd’s and Hennessy’s analyses of the formation of sexual identities as examples of the fruitful historicisation of gender performativity, which also sheds some light on the ‘the abstract character’ of the temporality of gender performativity.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 6204 | 1142 | 85 |
| Full Text Views | 1705 | 182 | 18 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 2346 | 341 | 35 |