“The feminist ‘we’ is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent… The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself.
The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in & through the deed.” 194-195
Identity politics’s “reasoning falsely presumes (a) agency can only be established through recourse to a prediscursive ‘I,’ even if that ‘I’ is found in the midst of a discursive convergence, and (b) that to be constituted by discourse is to be determined by discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of agency.” (195)
“The theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’ at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This is a sign of exhaustion as well as the illimitable process of signification itself. It is the supplement, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once & for all.” (196)
“I have tried to suggest that the identity categories often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics, that is deemed necessary in order to mobilize feminism as an identity politics, simultaneously work to limit & constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up. The tacit constraints that produce culturally intelligible ‘sex’ ought to be understood as generative political structures rather than naturalized foundations. Paradoxically, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of ‘agency’ that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational & fixed. For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial & arbitrary. That the constituted status of identity is misconstrued along these two conflicting lines suggests the ways in which the feminist discourse on cultural construction remains trapped within the unnecessary binarism of free will and determinism. Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated & becomes culturally intelligible. The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location &, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize. The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity &, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them.” (200-201)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
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Philosopher Judith Butler rejected feminist identity politics.
Butler states that feminism presupposes a prediscursive subject, a subject prior to any social construction. On the contrary, subjectivity exists only in and through our performance of discursiveness.
In positing a prediscursive identity, feminists claim to rely on a firm foundation for a political action. The identity claims to be totalizing to all who fall into said identity because it precedes there existence. However, such an identity is a fiction and open to great instability. Any politics which proceeds from such an assumption ultimately ends up excluding many of the very individuals it claims to represent. No matter how identities attempt to close themselves off, there is always an etcetera, a remainder, which the identity simply can’t account for.
Butler contends that the identity woman is not prior to the acts a women performs. On the contrary, identities are not the cause, but the effect of acts. This theoretical framework allows identities to always remain open, to evolve or adapt, for such identities are constituted on the performative acts of subjects.
