Chapter 20 Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion Judith Butler We all have fiends who, when thay knock an the door and we ath, tbrough the door, ‘tho question, “Who's tbere?,” answor (since “t's obvious’) “t's me.” And we rcogntza 1ouls Althusser, “Ideology andl Tdecogical Sate Apparanses,” emphasis added ‘he purpose of “aww” ts absolutly the last ting 10 enpley ins tbe history of be origin ofa on the coniary...the cause of the aigin af a thing and ts evenual wy, Is actual enpleyment and place in a syste of purposes, He words apa whatever exis, baring somehow come into being, & again andl again relaepreted Wo new end tater over, transformed, and redirected. Friedich Niewsche, On tbe Genealogy of Morais In Louis Althusser's notion of interpeliation, it is the police who initiate the call or address by which a subject becomes socially constituted. ‘There is the policeman, the ‘one not only who represents the law but whose address “Hey youl” has the effect, of binding the law to the one who is halled, This “one” who appears not to be in a condition of uespass prior to the call (for whom the call establishes a given practice asa trespass) is not fully a social aubject, is not fully subjecivated, for he or she is not yet reprimanded, The reprimand does not merely repress or contol the subject but forms a crucial par of the juridical and social formation of the subject, The call is formative, if not performative, precisely because it initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject Althusser conjeccuces this “hailing” or “interpellation” as a unilateral act, as the power and force of the law to compel fear at the same time that it offers recogni Won at an expense, In the reprimand the subject not only receives recognition but fatains ag well a certain order of social existence, in being transferred from an outer region oF incifferent, questionable, or impossible being to the discursive or social domain of the subject. But does this subjecivation take place as a direct effect of the reprimanding utterance, or must the utterance wield! the power to compel the fear of punishment and, from that compulsion, to produce a compliance and obe- dience fo the law? Are there other ways of being addressed and constituted by the law, ways of being occupied and occupying the law, that disarticulate the power of punishment from the power of recognition? Althusser underscores the Lacanian contribution to structural analysis of this 38382, Judith Butler kind and argues that a relation of misrecognition persists between the law and the subject it compels! Although he cefers © the possibiliy of *bad subjects,” he does not consider the range of disobedience thst such an interpellating law might pro- duce. The Inw not only might be refused but might also be ruptured, Forced into f reaniculation that calls into question the monotheistic force of its Own unilateral operation. Where the uniformity of the subject is expected, where the bekavioral confomity of the subject is commanded, the refusal of the law might be produced in the four of the parodic inhabiting of eonformity that subtly calls into question the legitinacy ofthe command, a repetition of the aw into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it. Here the performative, the call by the law that seeks to produce a lawful subject, prochices a set of con: sequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the lave. Interpelation thus loses its status as a simple performative, an act of discourse with the power to erate that to which it refers, and creates more than itever meant to, signifying in excess of any intended referent Tes this constntive failure of the performative, this slippage between discursive ‘command and its appropriated effec, that provides the linguistic occasion and index for a consequential disobedience, ‘Consider that the use of language is itself enabled by first having been called a name; the occupation of the name is that by which one fs, quite without chotce, situated within discourse. This *],” which is produced through the aecumitlation an ‘convergence of such “calls,” cannot extract itself from the historicity of that chain or raise itself up and confront that chain as if were an object opposed to me, which isnot me, but only what others have mice of me; for that estrangement or division produced by the mesh of interpellting calls and the "I" who is its site és not onty vi- ofating but enabling as well, what Gayzti Spivak refers to as “an enabling violation." “The I” who would oppase its constuction is always in some sense drawing from that construction to articulate its opposition; further, the “I” draws what is called its agency" in par through being implicated in the very rehtions of power that it seeks to oppose. To be implicated in the relations of power, indeed, enabled by the re- lations of power that the “T opposes, is not, as a consequence, to be reducible to theic existing forms. ‘You sll note that in the making ofthis formulation, I bracket ths 1” in quotation sma, but am sill eve. And I should acid that this ian “T” that I produce here for you in response co a certain suspicion that this theoretical project has lost the person, the author, the ife; over and agains this claim, or rather, in response to having been led the site of such an evacuation, I write that this kind of bracketing of the " ‘may well be crucial to the thinking through of the constitutive ambivalence of being socially constituted, where *constitution” caries both the enabling anc the violating sense of “subjection.” i one comes into discursive life hnongh being called or halled in injurious terms, how might one occupy the interpellaion by which one i already ‘occupied to direct the possibilities ofresignfication against the aims of violation? “This is not the sume as censoring or prohibiting the use of the “I” or of the autobi ‘opraphical as such; on the contrary, it the inquiry into the ambivalent relations of power that make that se possible, What does it mean to have such uses repeated In one's very heing, ‘messages implied in one's being,” as Patricia Willams claims, onlyGender Is Burning 383 to repent those uses such that subversion might be desived from the very conditions ‘reolation? In tis sense, the argument that the category of "sex isthe instrument fr efect of *Sexismn® or its intecpellating moment, that “race” is the instrument and Ghec oF “racisi” OF ts interpellating moment, that “gender” only exists inthe service Sf hererosexisn, does nol entail that we ought never 10 make we of such terms, as ffsuch terms could oaly and always reconsolidate the oppressive regimes of power by mbich they are spawned. On the contrary, precisely because such terms have teen produced and consuained within such regimes, they ought to be repeated in directions that veverse and displace their originating aims. One does not stand at an inarumental distance from the terms by which one experiences violation. Occupied by sich terms ane! yet occupying them oneself risks a complicity, a repetition, a relapse into injry, but i is also the ocession to work the mobilizing power of in- jar, ofan interpelation one never chose. Where one might understand violation #8 { irama that can only induce a destructive repetition compulsion (and surely this, is a powerful consequence of violation), it seems equally possible to acknowledge the force of repetition as the very coneition of an affirmative response to violstion ‘The compulsion to repeat an injury is not necessarily the compulsion to sepeat the injury in the same way oF to stay fully within the troumatic otbit ofthat injury. The force of repetition in language may be the paractoxical concltion by which a certain agency — not linked! to a fiction of the eyo as master of circumstance —is derived from the impossibility of choice. its in this sense that Luce trigaray’s eral mime of Plato, the fiction of the les bian phallus, and the reaticulation of kinship in the film Paris 1 Burning (1990) might be understood as repetitions of hegemonic forms of power that fal to repeat Toyally and, in that failure, open possibliies for resigalfying the terms of violation agaist their violating aims, Wills Cather’s occupation of the paternal name, Nella Tarsen’s inquity into the painful and fatal mime that is passing for white, and the reworking of “queer” rom abjecton 10 politicized afiiation will interrogate similar sies of ambivalence produced at the linits of discursive legitimacy “The temporal structure of such a subject is chiasmatic inthis sense: in the plice ‘ofa substantial or self determining “suijec,” this juncture of discursive demands is something ike a “erossoads,” to use Gloria Anzalda’s phase, a crossroads of cul tum andl poltical discursive forces, which she herself claims cannot be unclerstood thvough the notion of the *subjec.”® There is no subject prior to its constructions, and neither isthe subject determined by those constuctions; Is always the nexus, the nonspace of cultural collision, in which the demand to resignify or repeat the very terms that constitute the “we" cannot be summarily refused, but neither can they be followed in srt obectence. I isthe space ofthis ambivalence that opens up the possibilty of a reworking of the very terms by which subjectivation proceeds — and fails to proceed. Ambivalent Drag, From this formulation, shen, T would like to move to consideration of the fils Paris Js Burning, to what it suggests about the simultaneous production and subjugation384 jut Butler Of subjects in & euture that appears o arrange aways andl in every way forthe lation of queers but that nevertheless prociuces occasional spaces in which those annihikting noms, those killing ideals of gender anc rice, are mined, reworked, re- signified. A3 much as there is defiance and affirmation, the creation of kinship andl af ‘glory in that film, there is also the kind of reiteration of norms that cannot be called subversive and that leads to the death of Venus Xtravaganza, a Latina preoperative transsexual, crossdresser, prostitute, and! member of the "House of Xtravaganza," To ‘what set of interpedlating calls does Venus respond, and how is the reiteration of the law to be read in the manner of her response? Venus, ancl Pars Js Burning more generally, call into question whether parodying the dominant norms is enough to clsplace them—incleed, whether the denaturaliza- tion of gender cannot be the very vehicle for a reconsolidation of hegemonic norms Although many readers understood my book Gettder Trouble to be arguing for the proliferation of drag performances asa way of subverting dominant gender norms {want yo unclerscore that there is no necessary relation between drag sind suber sion and that diag may well be used in the service of hoth the denaturalization and the reidedlization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms, At best, it seems, drag is asite ofa certain ambivalence, one that reflects the more general situation of being mplicted in the regimes of power hy which one is constiuted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes. ‘To caim that all gender tke dag, or is drag, is to suggest that imitation” is at the hear of the beterosexta project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a sec- ‘ondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself’ constant and repeated effort to imitate ts own idealization ‘That itinustrepest this imitation, that sets up pathologizing pracices and normal ining sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual pesformativity is beset by an anxiety that i ean never fully overcome, that ts effort to become its Own idealizations can never be finaly or fully achieved, ac that its consistently haunted by that domain of sexal possibilty chat must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself. In this sense, then, drag is subversive tothe extent that it refleets on the imitative struc. ture by which hegemonic gender i itself preclucee! and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness. and originality Buc here it seems that lam obliged to add an important qualificaion: heterosexwal privilege operates in many ways, and cwvo ways in which it operates include nate clizing iself and cencering itself as he original and the norm. Bur these are not the ‘only ways in which it works, for itis clear that there are domains in which hetero- sexuality can concede its lack of originality and naturalness but still hold on to its power. Thus, there are forms Of drag that heterosexual culture produces for itself — ‘we might think of Julie Andrews in Victor, Vicoria or Dustin Hollman in Tootsle or Jack Lemmon in Some Like 1 Ho, where the anxiety over a possible homosexual consequence is both produced and deflected within the narrative trajectory of the films. These are fms that proctice and contain the homosexual excess of aay given drag pesformanee, the Fear that an apparently heterosexual contact might be made before the discovery of a nonapparent homosexuality. This is drag as high het en- ‘ertainment, and though these fllms are surely important to real 2s cultural texts inGender Is Burning 385 which homophobia and homosexual panic are negotiated,’ T would be reticent 10 call tem subversive, Indeed, one might argue that such films are functional in pro- viding a tlualistic release For 1 heterosexual economy that must constantly police town boundaries against the invasion of queemess and that this displaced produc: tion and resolution of homosexual panic actually fortfies the heterosexual regime in as sell-pecpetuating task Inher provocative review of Paris is Burning, bell hooks etieized some produc: tions of gay-male drag es misogynist, and tere she allied herself in part with feminist theorists such as Marilyn Frye ancl Janice Raymond,’ ‘This tradition within feminist thought has argued that drag is offensive to women and tht it isan imitation based inridicule and degradation, Raymond, in particular, places drag on a contintsum with cossltessing and transsexualism, ignoring the important differences between thet, maintaining that in each practice women are the object of hatred and appropriation and that there is nothing, in the identifeation that is respectful or elevating. As a rejoinder, one might consider that identification is always an ambivalent process. Identifying with @ gender under contemporary regimes of power involves identify. ing with a set of norms that are and are not realizable and whose power ancl sts precede the identifications by which they are insistently approximated. This “being a man” and this “being woman’ are internally unstable affairs. They are always beset by ambivalence precisely because there is a cost in every identification, the loss of sonie other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, « norm that chooses us, but that we occupy, reverse, resigniy to the extent that the norm fails to determine us completely. ‘The problem with the analysis of drag as only misogyny is, of course, that it figires inale-to-female transsexuality, cross-dressing, and drag, as male homosex ties — which they are not always —and it further diagnoses male homosexwality ‘is rooted in misogyay. The feminist analysis thus makes male homosexuality about ‘women, and one might argue that at is extreme, this Kind! of analysts i in act acol- nization in reverse, a way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual aetivity Gand thus to reinseribe the heterosexual matrix, parte doxically, at he heatt of the radical feminist position), Suet an accusation follows the samme kind of logic a8 those homophobic remarks that often follow upon the ddscovery that one Is lesbian: a lesbian is one wo must have had a bad experi fence with men or who has not yet found the right one. These clagnoses presume that lesbianism is acquired by virtue of some fare in the heterosextial wachin- ‘ery, thereby continuing (© install heterosexuality as the “cause” of lesbian desire; lesbian desire is figured as he Fatal effect of a derailed heterosexual causal. In this framework, heterosexual desire is always tiie, and lesbian desire fs always and ‘only mask andl forever false. In the radical feminist arguinent against drag, the dis placement of women is figured as the aim and effect of male-to-female cheg inthe homophobic dismissal of lesbian desire, the disappointment with and displacement of men is understood as the enuse and final truth of lesbian desire. Accorling (© these views, drag is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of “Wwomen’ and hence funclamenally based in a misogyny, a hatred of women; ancl lesbianism is nothing but the ispkicement and appropriation of men, anc! so fundamentally & mater of hating, men — misandry.386 Judith Butler ‘These explanations of displacemtent can only proceed by accomplishing yet ans cher st of displacements of desire, of phantasmatic pleasures, and of forms of love that are not reducible toa heterosexual matrix andl the logic of epuctiation. tne, the only place love is tobe founds for the estensibly repudiated object, where love 's uncerstood to be strely produced through « logic of repudiation; hence, dag is nothing but the effect ofa love embittered! by disappointment oF rejection, the ince. poration of the other whom one originally desiced, but now lites. And lesbianism {s nothing other than the effect of a love embittered by disappoiaument or rejection and of a reeol from that love, a defense against if, of in the case of butchness, the appropriation of the masculine position that one originally loved ‘This logic of repudiation instlls heterosexual love as the origia andl truth of both «lrg and lesbianism, and it incespets both practices as symptoms of thwarted love. But what is displaced in this explanation of displacement is the notion that there ‘might be pleasure, desi, and love that are not solely determined by what they repudiate Now € may seem at fist that the way to oppose these recuctions and degradations of quer practices is co assert their radical specificity, to claim that there i a Kesbian clesvericically different from a heterosexual one, with no rea- tion to it that is neither the repuclation nor the appropriation of heterosextalty and hat has radically other origins than those that sustain heterosextaliy. Or one might be tempred to argue that dag is not relate to the ridieule or degradation or appropriation of women: when itis men in drag as women, what we hive fs the dlesublization of gender self, a destabilization that is denaturing arxl that calls into question the claims of normativiy and originaliy by which gender and sexual oppression sometimes operate. But what ifthe situation is nether exclusively one sor the other; certainly, some lesbians have wanted o retain die notion that the seal practice fs rootel in part ina repudiation of heterosexuality, but also to claim that this reputation does not account for lesbian desire and cenmot therefore be identified as the hieden or original “uth” of lesblan desire. And the case of ig is cifcult in yet another way, for it seems clear to me that there is both a sense of defeat and sense of insurrection to be had from the drag pageantry in. Pars 4s Burning, that the drag we see, the drag that is afer all framed for us, filmed for ts, one that both appropriates and subvers acts, misogynist, and homophobic "noms of oppression, How are sve 0 account for this ambivalence? This is not fis an appropriation and then a subversion. Sometimes & is both at once; sometines it emains caught in an tesolvable tension, and sometimes a tally unsubversive appropriation takes place Paris fs Burning is a film produced and directed by Jennie Livingston about drag bulls in New York City, in Harlem, atended by and performed by “men” who are either Afsican-American or Latino, The balls are contests in which the contestans compete under a varity of categories. The eategores include a variety of sock om, many of which are established in white culture as signs of clas, lke that of the “executive” and the Ivy League student, some of which are marked as feminine, ranging from high drag to butch queen; and some of which, like that ofthe “bangle,” are taken fom straight black, masculine stret culture, Not al of the categories, then, ae taken rom white culture; some of them are replications of a straightness thit is not white; andl some of them are focused on. class, especially those that almos