Butler and Rousseau on Identity

Discussions, often controversial ones, about same-sex marriage are largely, among other things, about one's gender identity.  And discussions about gender identity can vacillate from the deterministic pole ("I was born this way") to the performative pole ("I construct my own 'gender,' which might differ from my 'sex'").  A recent speech by Lori Watson, Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of San Diego, illustrates especially the performative emphasis.  The speech was given in support of the Catholic university's Pride organization student group, which was organizing its 2nd Annual Drag Show.  In thinking about contemporary issues involving gender identity, I returned to the influential theorist Judith Butler.  Her 1990 book Gender Trouble is a seminal study of performativity that is influential in gender/queer circles such as Professor Watson's.

As I began Butler's 2004 book Undoing Gender, in which she clarifies her position on this passive/performative spectrum, I began to wonder about the pedigree of her central theoretical claims.  To what extent does her balancing act now between biological determinism and social construction resemble concerns about identity that also flowered in another era like the Enlightenment?

Although Judith Butler herself would likely not draw connections between her critique of gender and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment, some noteworthy echoes (and perhaps unacknowledged debts) exist. In particular, her insistence in Undoing Gender that gender “is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (p. 1) reflects, despite some important differences, a comparable tension that in his discourses Rousseau argued attended human self-invention in Enlightenment society: enslaving liberation, or alternatively liberated confinement. This similarity between Butler and Rousseau appears in several respects: recognition, the paradox of agency, and (in)authenticity.

I.

First, for Butler, gender wants recognition (p. 2). When she writes that gender is an “improvisation,” she means at least that it is a performance, “a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed.” It is partly unwilled but not “automatic or mechanical” (p. 1). Ultimately, it seeks, even needs, to be viewed and acknowledged. This dynamic presents a tension. On the one hand, “improvisation” suggests freedom and creativity to invent outside the bounds of a script. On the other hand, an improvisation must be consistent with the “drama” of which the actor is a part: “one does not ‘do’ one’s gender alone. One is always ‘doing’ it with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary” (p. 1).

Gender, Butler contends, as a form of identity is neither completely created ex nihilo nor completely predetermined. It is both self-fashioned and limited: constructed by one’s own spontaneous activity; constrained by the social system in which that activity occurs. The desire for gender recognition within a community that has expectations and norms of gender partially constrains the improvisation. Gender is performed for society, within a community, and in order to be more fully and authentically incorporated into it.

Second, this matter of recognition relates closely to the paradox of agency. If I am constrained in improvising my gender identity by cultural framing, to what extent can I say that it is mine, that I am self-author? Full autonomy for Butler seems elusive: “What I call my ‘own’ gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself)” (p. 1).

In very much Foucauldian fashion, Butler identifies discourse about gender as a locus of power relations. The socially permitted terms and categories for discussing gender control its permitted and possible performance. This is at bottom a social controlling of what is considered human, or what is constitutive of human beings in a social sense: ”The terms by which we are recognized as human are socially articulated and changeable” (p. 2; see p. 10). This means that I am at once an agent and not an agent, a human improvising my gender but perhaps not deemed human by society depending on its prevailing gender norms. I am simultaneously free within society and shackled by it.

Third, this paradox of agency raises questions about authenticity. What does it mean to be authentically individual and human, to be “myself”? Butler acknowledges that this is difficult to answer: “...the social norms that constitute our existence carry desires that do not originate with our individual personhood. This matter is made more complex by the fact that the viability of our individual personhood is fundamentally dependent on these social norms” (p. 2). Or again, she highlights the ways in which our desires constrain our free improvisation of gender, or of being human: “there is nevertheless a desire that is constitutive of gender itself and, as a result, no quick or easy way to separate the life of gender from the life of desire” (pp. 1-2).

Nevertheless, Butler wants to carve out space for real agency within the social system: “One only determines ‘one’s own’ sense of gender to the extent that social norms exist that support and enable that act of claiming gender for oneself. One is dependent on this ‘outside’ to lay claim to what is one’s own. The self must, in this way, be dispossessed in sociality in order to take possession of itself” (p. 7). Authenticity in gender, for Butler, is exercised within social norms, not in the absence of them. One must lose one’s gender in order to gain it.

II.

This line of thinking about the freedom and constraints in performing one’s gender recalls important elements of Rousseau’s critique of humans’ confined liberty resulting from the Enlightenment. We see this in both the “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts” (DOI) and the “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (DSA).

First, Rousseau claims that civilization introduced the notion of public esteem, or recognition: “Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. And this was the first step toward inequality and, simultaneously, vice” (DOI, 64). The desire to be recognized, which springs from recognizing that others have what society values (and wanting to be so valued oneself), actually leads to social fragmentation, discord, and immorality. New desires to be, do, or have what society values (new learning, industry, and property ownership) magnify distinctions between natural tendencies and social status. Individuals recognize difference yet desire and promote homogenization. One’s identity is preoccupied now not with who one is uniquely but who one wants to become socially, not autonomous expression but constrained imitation of a social ideal.

Second, imitation also leads to a certain paradox of Enlightenment agency. As Rousseau saw it, historical progress and liberalizing tendencies actually introduce forms of social slavery. Humans formed political society, and thereby “they all ran to chain themselves, in the belief that they secured their liberty” (DOI, 70). They seek to act freely within a social system that in fact constrains them. Humans seek to gain knowledge and beliefs that fit within contemporary society, although they are acting according to what society has told them to desire and seek. Their agency is circumscribed.

Third, Rousseau criticizes the Enlightenment because the desire for recognition and the paradox of agency lead to inauthentic human existence. Enlightenment, and maybe modernity, for him was a tremendous mistake because it has deceived humans that they are free when in fact they -- their behavior, desires, and identity -- are fettered.

While government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people.  (DSA, 3)

Civilization pretended to liberate when it really limited behavior and identity. Moreover, civilization is dehumanizing. The arts and sciences, a synecdoche for Enlightenment sociality generally, cover up human oppression, To be really human is to be fully free, as in the state of nature. In both the “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts” and the “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” for Rousseau contemporary Enlightenment civilization disguises oppression because it creates new needs. No longer oriented merely toward self-preservation in the state of nature, humans are lured by and lust after the luxuries that the arts and sciences present. No longer practicing innate sympathy for their fellows, humans are more self-absorbed, more lustful of current social norms, and less authentic. They have not gained but have lost themselves.

Here is one critical difference between Butler and Rousseau, despite their similar critiques of social constraints on human identity. Rousseau denies that authenticity is possible within Enlightenment society because its expectations and norms constrain individuals and breed new, limiting desires. He launches his critique of identity within civil society from the supposed foundation of his hypothetical state of nature and an essential quality of human identity. Butler, however, wants to find a place within sociality for individuals to exercise agency in improvising gender. She does not cling to any such epistemological or anthropological foundation.

For Butler, the social fabric of communities must be changed to allow for less policing of gender-making expressions. For Rousseau, cultural framing of norms appears always to inhibit authenticity. In other words, Butler envisions authenticity within social constraints; Rousseau also identifies the challenge that this tension poses but is less sanguine about a solution.

III.

Thorough engagement with these complex notions of humanity and culture is best left for another time.  What I will say now is this.  Both Butler and Rousseau in their own ways are concerned with what contemporary society is concerned with:  authenticity of individual human identity with a morally structured society.  One reason that contemporary debates are so controversial is that they reflect this central, abiding human matter of the human in this world order.  And one core element of the present debate is whether the notion, complex as it is, of what is "human" or "male" or "female" -- or even "marriage" -- is a protean shape-shifter within a scene of constraint, or something ultimately grounded in an original (foundational) condition that facilitates evaluation.