Feminist Theory

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Gender in Counterpoint
Wendy Brown
Feminist Theory 2003 4: 365
DOI: 10.1177/14647001030043011

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 365

Gender in counterpoint
FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2003
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 4(3): 365–368.
[1464-7001
(200312) 4:3;
Wendy Brown University of California 365–368; 037067]
www.sagepublications.com

Wonderfully titled ‘Beyond Sex and Gender: The Future of Women’s

Studies?’ the provocation and the question mark framing the 15th Women’s
Studies Network Association (UK) conference in 2001 asked us to think
about the possibilities for women’s studies without a fixed circumscription
of its subject and object. In the course of doing so it has produced conver-
sations between queer and feminist perspectives, across thinkers from the
First, Second and Third Worlds, between social scientists and humanists
and between postfoundational theory, socialist theory, postcolonial theory
and cultural feminist theory.
In addition to, and perhaps occasioned by, these productive crossings
and this generative setting, it seems to me that the papers at this conference
have swayed between two places in contemporary feminist thought. These
places might be framed as ‘the persistence’ vs. ‘the beyond’ of sex and
gender, or they might be reframed as the ‘radical instability of gender’ and
the ‘relentless power of gender’. At one pole, gender, sexual identification
and sexed bodies themselves incessantly slide in their meaning and
relation; at the other pole, conventional and subordinating productions of
gender seize, sometimes throw down and incessantly interpellate the
subject, often violently (as in sexual violence) but just as often routinely
(as in the feminization of poverty). Can both of these truths about gender
be true? How could radical instability and power be reconciled?
The emphasis upon one or the other pole, it seems to me, is not simply
a matter of choice, methodology, epistemology, object of study or politics.
It is not simply a question of whether one is inclined towards performa-
tivity, representation, or divisions of labour for thinking about gender, or
whether one focuses upon queer sexual practices or masculinist sexual
violence in the study of it. Without question, certain historical develop-
ments, technologies and theoretical insights have forced gender’s slide
from sexed bodies. Ranging from queer fantasy and transsexual surgeries
to critiques of essentialism, these developments make it seem that there is
little which is true, fixable or stable about gender meanings. Yet if women
as a group are still poorer, less in control of their bodies and sexualities,
more susceptible to humiliating sexual violence and more subject to
performing the lion’s share of emotional and janitorial labour without

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366 Feminist Theory 4(3)

recognition or remuneration, it would seem that little we do to performa-

tively resignify gender and its relation to sexuality affects these conditions.
In the first case, there is no such thing as women and men and, in the
second, the powers constructing and organizing gender designate much of
the meaning and possibilities of being born into a sexed body.
So, at this moment, we appear to have two powerful, mutually cancelling
truths in feminism: on the one hand, there is no stable sex or gender and
on the other, women too often find themselves unable to escape their
gender and the sexual norms governing it. What to do with this double truth
that does not even seem paradoxical in its operation? How to allow each
to have a productive place in our theoretical and political work? How to
allow each its urgency and vision and how also to allow the urgency and
vision from each pole to interrupt or supplement productively that of the
other? How do we simultaneously mark the operating constraints of sex
and gender and practice a world in which these constraints can be inter-
vened in, even in which their significance has vanished or at least has
become richly mobile and contestable?
Let us put the question somewhat differently: if both the self-
deconstruction of gender and the persistence of gender construction are to
be thought simultaneously, what exactly is the nature of this simultaneity?
Is it a movement of oscillation? An orchestration of mutual instruction? An
insistence upon context sensitivity – or context rebelliousness?
Late modernity has revealed the limits in most of the usual models for
holding together two or more truths. The many inflections of dialectic bear
a common dependency upon a magically metaphysical meeting of oppo-
sites; indeed, a construction of the formulations at stake as opposites, and
a dependence as well upon a progressive metanarrative. If paradox tends
to be anti-political in the mutual undoing (by virtue of multiplicity) of the
truths it address, contradiction, figuring mutual cancellation, tends to be
forthrightly paralyzing. Psychic models of an opposition between
conscious and unconscious truths forecast either eruptive acting out or
therapeutic adjustment (or resignation) as opposed to political generativ-
ity. Pluralism capitulates to relativism and celebrates the incommensura-
bility of multiple truths without giving us a clue about how to weigh or
navigate them. Integration always entails the high price of assimilation;
invariably, one side normatively governs and incorporates the other, which
then must cede a part of itself. And irony simply grimaces – comically or
tragically – at the loss of truth sustained by multiplying or removing
grounds or accountability from truth claims.
In addition to coming up short in epistemological viability or political
generativity, each of these models involves submitting one truth to the
other. None provides a frame in which several truths are enriched even as
they are offset by the other – or better, a frame in which the relation or even
interlocution between two truths enriches each – offsetting to set off or
incite one another. Moreover, none allows the truths themselves to be
dynamic and the proliferation of truth itself to be part of the dynamism. So
I want to borrow from the arts, and especially music, another way of
holding things together, namely, counterpoint. Counterpoint, as I have

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 Brown: Gender in counterpoint 367

argued elsewhere, is a deliberate practice of multiplicity that exceeds

simple opposition and does not carry the mythological or methodological
valence of dialectics or contradiction (see Brown, 2002).1 At once open-
ended and tactical, counterpoint emanates from and promotes an anti-
hegemonic sensibility and requires a modest and carefully styled embrace
of multiplicity in which contrasting elements, featured simultaneously, do
not simply war, harmonize, blend or compete but rather bring out the
complexity that cannot emerge through a monolithic or single melody. This
complexity does not add up to a whole but, rather, sets off a theme by
providing an elsewhere to it; indeed, it can even highlight and thus contest
dominance through its work of juxtaposition.
Counterpoint, then, is my provisionally proposed technique for holding
together the inherent slide of gender on the one hand and the powers
comprising regimes of male dominance on the other. It is the art by which
we may be able to hold simultaneously the theoretical co-ordinates and
political angles of vision we require to apprehend gendered subordination,
exploitation and violence, and those angles which bring into view the
instability of conventional gender norms and the vulnerability of their sites
of enforcement. More than simply featuring both emphases in contem-
porary feminist theory and practice, counterpoint also indicates the possi-
bilities for transforming the usual assumptions framing each. For example,
attention to norms and signification poses the question of whether the
‘structures’ or ‘divisions of labour’ ordinarily referenced in work on gender
violence and exploitation exhaust the materiality of the construction and
positioning of women. Conversely, the spectre of women’s persistent social,
economic and political vulnerability challenges theoretical emphases on
performative subversion and resignification either to delimit its field of
applicability or, better, apply itself more assiduously to the conditions
productive of this vulnerability.
In addition to the epistemological and methodological issues at stake in
this practice of contrapuntal analysis, there is a distinctly political one
related to how and whether we conceive an emancipatory future. If we
underscore only what we take to be materialist sexist constraints and we
fail to practice living beyond these constraints in the present, we fail to
build a bridge to another world with our feminist knowledge projects and
everyday practices. At best, we leave the emancipation of gender, or from
gender, to imagined better days. But if we do not strain in this moment
toward another world and especially towards pleasure and freedom, we
live as if these constraints were total, which means that invention and
possibility is not part of our politics. This fatalism consigns us either to live
in the permanent nightmare of the present or to make an anti-political
retreat from the present by practicing various versions of withdrawal or
separatism. In either case it tends to condemn us to the present.
However, if we emphasize only the uncapturability of gender – its refusal
to be fixed or stabilized – if we dwell insistently upon resignifications of
sexed and gendered bodies, we also sacrifice crucial political perspectives
and possibilities and are thus condemned to the present in a different
fashion. In this modality we may eschew the important work of developing

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368 Feminist Theory 4(3)

strategies for eliminating (not only resisting) certain kinds of gendered and
sexual subordination and violence, precisely those that are not easily
subject to resignification. (Of course these strategies will also always entail
the resignification of gender and sexuality, but the justice projects that
frame them may also work within gender conventions as they reveal their
undersides or the violence they sustain.) Moreover, projects of performa-
tive resignification, especially those delighting in the transgressive
pleasure they produce, may inadvertently instantiate, even celebrate,
certain elements of gender dimorphism organized by male dominance and
heteronormativity for the sake of this pleasure. That is, they may bear a
conservative edge in which this dimorphism is inadvertently conserved
precisely in order to obtain the pleasure of transgressing it, thereby prac-
ticing a subversion that appears radical only up to the point at which it
becomes clear that it is a subversion that does not actually want to succeed.
This is the conservative edge that may be made visible through the coun-
terpoint of a feminist analysis that attends closely to the powers organiz-
ing and enforcing gender dimorphism.
A contrapuntal perspective and theoretical frame, then, may let us simul-
taneously comprehend the persistence of sex and gender and, above all,
grasp what makes them persist, while we also comprehend and live their
overcoming as fixed co-ordinates, their beyond. Indeed, it may be what will
allow women’s studies to remake itself as it also undoes sex and gender.

Notes
1. This essay on the future of political theory offers an extended version of
this argument.

References
Brown, W. (2002) ‘At the Edge’, Political Theory 30(4): 556–76.
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Manhood and Politics:
A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (1988), States of Injury: Power and
Freedom in Late Modernity (1995) Politics Out of History (2001), Left
Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (2002), and Edgework
(forthcoming 2004).
Address: Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720,
USA. Email: wlbrown@socrates.Berkeley.EDU

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