Against Performativity
Among the odd collection of (variously-) ‘trans’ (variously-) ‘women’ that I call my friends, there is a recurring situation that we have all witnessed or experienced that has taken on the form of a collective trauma. A trans woman is observed in a ‘progressive’ or ‘feminist’ space, perhaps a university feminist society or a women-and-femmes book club. Before she is asked her name, she is asked if she has read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Regardless of her response, she will find herself as a receptacle for this person’s summary of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. That summary will inevitably include a clumsy reflection on how ‘we’ are all ‘performing’ gender really and isn’t that interesting? and what a wonderful thing to have in common with each other.
Our gender-troubled-feminist will not reflect on why it is that this is how she approaches trans women. Nor will our gender-troubled-feminist reflect on why it is that she has never approached a fellow gender-troubled-feminist in the manner in which she approaches trans women. If a trans woman dares to speak, she might ask if there is something beyond this shared performance that ‘we’ are all engaged in that means her performance, and hers alone, warrants remarking upon. If the trans woman dares to speak, she finds herself ejected from the space for being too vocal or aggressive, by the kind of Judith Butler gender-troubled-feminist who has a collection of feminist books titled Mouthy Woman, Loud & Angry, and Nagging B!tch. If the trans woman did not dare to speak, she has already understood her exclusion and resigned herself to it.
So far, no-one in Red Fightback has asked me if I’ve read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
Marxism and Transgender Liberation was collectively written, but the manuscript was finalised shortly before I joined the party. When a review of the book drawing upon Butler was published – by Ebb Magazine no less, whose analysis I have great respect for – I jumped at the opportunity to write a personal response. I include my own thoughts on Butler, and attempt to develop the analysis of the book further. I hope to give some indication as to the direction Red Fightback’s Marxist Transfeminism may develop; to speak to the theoretical content of each work; and to reflect on the accompanying practices that each work generates in my experience.
The key difference between Butler’s approach and Red Fightback’s – from my perspective – is as follows. Marxism and Transgender Liberation takes my humanity as fundamental and proceeds unapologetically to reconcile the material world with that premise, weaving together feminism, history, biology, class analysis and other disciplines in an effort to construct a basis for shared struggle. For its faults – and I share some of Hodder’s critiques – it does what it sets out to do quite successfully, and this is even clearer to those of us within the party who find ourselves among comrades who understand that our liberation is bound up together, not as an afterthought, burden or inconvenience but as utterly fundamental to the project of revolution and socialist construction. Gender Trouble approaches the question from a different direction.
Attempting to provide the tools with which feminists can deconstruct sex and gender, Butler has generated a framework through which feminists can, under the guise of deconstructing performance, actually heighten the transmisogynistic scrutiny of gender non-conformity. To Red Fightback, I am a comrade. To the gender-troubled-feminist, I am a curioso.
Given Butler’s focus on the discursive, you might have hoped that she would pre-empt the actor/audience dialectic implied by the notion of performativity. Rather than the shared-by-all practice of gender performance, our world is one in which the lights illuminate gender non-conformity, while the conformant observer remains submerged in hegemonic darkness, unobserved and uninterrogated. They accept us – as characters, if not as people – so long as we stick to their script. Attempts by those of us on the stage to reverse that dynamic, to dare to break character, to stare back into the audience and reflect, for a moment, the same scrutiny we live our lives under finds us battered by the fourth estate for breaking the fourth wall.
I cannot fault the willingness of Butler and Hodder to negate biology in attempting to make sense of our place as trans people in gendered society. An approach that assumes we are what we say we are, that our genders are just as real as everyone elses’, is a humanising solidarity all too rare to reject lightly. But the beauty of the dialectical method is that we needn’t reject the apparently contradictory in making sense of the world. We embrace the unity of opposites, the motion of contradictions in all things through which history continually unfolds. As Karen Barad explains in Meeting the Universe Halfway:
‘While Foucault and Butler attend to the materialization of human bodies as constituted through social forces, they take for granted the materiality of nonhuman beings/ bodies and do not consider the productive workings of natural forces. This imbalanced accounting practice translates into an asymmetry in the accounting of material and discursive, natural and cultural, and spatial and temporal, factors in their respective works. These theorists also leave unexamined important ways in which matter is an agentive factor in processes of materialization.’ (Karan Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 232)
To paraphrase Marx’s 18th Brumaire: We make our own bodies, but we do not make them as we please; we do not form ourselves from virgin clay, but from matter existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The gendered biologies, practices and forms of all dead generations weigh like nightmares on the bodies of the living. And just as we seem to be occupied with revolutionizing ourselves, becoming something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis we anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to our service, inheriting from them names, customs, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured drag and borrowed language.
In articulating gender as a social performance, Butler loses sight of what makes trans people so important. It is our biological differences that compel her to attempt to explain us in the first place. We have taken the biology which was used to situate us in a given location of the social order – our bodies – and turned them into a site of resistance against that order. Butler therefore has it backwards when she writes ‘The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations.’ In fact, it is gender non-conformity – our active proliferation of gender configurations – that is destroying gender norms.
Further, our bodies do not exist in one of two possible sexual modes which are then, at the social level, divided into the genders that inscribe meanings not otherwise present onto that biological dichotomy. The dichotomy itself is false. In early infancy, the difference between a ‘penis’ and a ‘clitoris’ is a quantitative measurement. The apparent qualitative distinction is created by a violent destruction of the middle ground that bridges the two through the surgical mutilations of intersex babies. Then over the course of a child's development numerous environmental and biological factors typically cause that mere quantitative distinction to develop into a qualitative difference in one direction or another.
Sometimes these developments occur in a superficially contradictory way, which is to say, a way that materially disproves the male/female distinction, for example by producing people who have ovaries and penises, or wombs and internal testes. These people are not exceptional to the 'normal' human development which could be discussed separately from them, but an integral part of humanity whose materiality compels us to take up a different understanding of sex and biology. We do not know how widespread these variations are because they have thus far only been studied where they result in infertility – a by no means inevitable result.
Trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people compel biological science to reconcile itself with our existence. Hodder reminds us that the purpose of dialectical materialism is not simply to recognise what exists, but ‘to recognise it in order to change it.’ By recognising ourselves as prediscursive, as contingent, as material, we are already changing sex and gender, without first requiring Judith Butler to ‘open the door’ for us.
Hodder is correct that ‘it is gender that determines sex – as gender genders the genitalia.’ But bourgeois feminism does not dispute this. The problem that bourgeois feminism has with female penises is not that penises are ‘gendered’, ‘sexed’ or ‘biologically’ male. Indeed, if penises were male then their real or imagined presence between the legs of certain trans and non-binary people would earn us respect and authority rather than revulsion and dehumanisation. My genitals are not gendered but de-gendered – rendered subhuman. In bourgeois society, trans people don’t have genders. I don’t mean by this that we don’t articulate genders for ourselves or develop new conceptions of gender. But our genders are in contradiction with the hegemonic, colonial, patriarchal gender system. Trans people are not legible to this system. It is not capable of understanding us and it is unwilling to conceptualise us as subjects. We are gendered by this system in much the same way that infants or animals are.
This condition is by no means unique to trans people – Hortense Spillers articulates ungendering in the condition of chattel slavery, C. Riley Snorton formulates it at the intersection of Blackness and transness, and Audre Lorde relates it to disability through the experience of breast cancer. I analyse it here with particular regards to transness, on the understanding that ‘gender conformity’ cannot be understood in totality through gender alone.
The system’s subjects, gender-conforming men and also women, whose ‘performance’ is typically un-interrogated, have the authority within this system to gender us, to decide our genders for us. Gender is not legible to animals or to infants. ‘Good boy’ has no meaning to a dog, ‘she’ makes no sense to a cat, and having a boy or girl name has no meaning to a newborn child. Animals and infants are ‘objects’ in this system, they cannot articulate themselves nor relate to the concepts. As we age and develop our ability to conceptualise and articulate gender ourselves, we gain ‘subjectivity’ but only to the extent that we articulate ourselves correctly, in a gender-conforming way. If we transgress this line, we are infantilised and dehumanised, considered unable to articulate our genders for ourselves, objectified, denied subjectivity. It ought to go without saying that, because we are capable of understanding this process, because we are capable of articulating gender, because we have subjectivity, the act of denying this of us is necessarily violent. It requires violence to remove subjectivity.
Violence against gender non-conformity is what makes us misgender-able. We need to be de-gendered, stripped of the gender we have, in order to have society’s genders re-imposed upon us. Trans people’s genitalia have to be un-gendered in order to be wrongly re-gendered in a way that makes us legible to society. Transmisogyny is the violent stripping of subjectivity in order that the gender ‘male’ can be falsely applied. A bittersweet vindication arrives here – if we were really male, we would not need to be subjected to violence in order to make us ‘male’. ‘Male’ is legible to society, and ‘male in the wrong place doing the wrong things’ is legible as a target for ‘correctional’ violence through the logic of carcerality and punishment that our society is built upon.
It is a failure of Western transfeminism that so much effort has been spent attempting to integrate into a gender system with which we will always fundamentally be irreconcilable. Rather than trying to articulate the inarticulable, and frequently appropriating the cultural systems of colonised peoples in an attempt to justify a historical existence of ‘transness’, Western transfeminists ought to be breaking with the hegemonic, revelling in our illegibility and following the revolutionary leadership of the colonised peoples who have been resisting the imposition of this gender system for centuries.
The problem presented by female penises is that, without something essentially and irreparably violent about the organ, the failure of bourgeois feminism to meaningfully confront patriarchal violence is called into question. The reality that transmisogyny constitutes a greater extreme of patriarchal violence than is faced by gender-conforming women, not simply at the hands of men but with the equal participation of many women, not in spite of but because of our biology, shakes the very foundations of bourgeois feminism.
There are those of us who, despite our apparently contradictory biology, betray the patriarchal ordering of things, by accident or choice, in ways large and small. We are punished in the most extreme manner by society for doing so. Rather than retreating, falling in line and conforming to that gender which is demanded of us, we advance, we place ourselves ever further into patriarchy’s firing line, and upon arriving at this point, we find ourselves met not by ‘sisterhood’ but by more violence. This betrayal damns bourgeois feminism for eternity! No matter – we have rebuilt gender, we can rebuild feminism too.
The fact that trans women can be subject to the most extreme forms of gendered violence leaves bourgeois feminism’s male oppressor with no penis to hide behind. The reality of patriarchy is exposed – a most profoundly unnatural ordering of things, an order with no biological justification, an order produced entirely by the historical forces of human society; an order shaped by a division of labour long since abolished stands naked before us.
Gender’s relations of reproduction are today held in contradiction to gender’s productive forces. The gendered division of labour was nurtured by the surplus generated by the higher productivity of specialisation. The division carries itself forward by gendering the specific labour of men and women and the consequent physical differences produced by the gendered work – but capitalism’s complementary tendencies of ever-increasing specialisation of the means of production and ever-increasing generalisation of the labourer has exceeded what the gendered division can accommodate. In his exploration of the factory, Marx writes:
‘Along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints inseparable from human labour-power. This destroys the technical foundation on which the division of labour in manufacture was based. Hence, in place of the hierarchy of specialized workers that characterizes manufacture, there appears, in the automatic factory, a tendency to equalize and reduce to an identical level every kind of work that has to be done by the minders of the machines; in place of the artificially produced distinctions between the specialized workers, it is natural differences of age and sex that predominate.’ (Marx, Capital Vol. 1, p. 284)
We understand today that the typical differences in size and strength attributed to ‘sex’ are by no means ‘natural’. ‘Women’ had stronger arms than today’s atheletes for the first 5500 years of Central European farming, on account of lifelong rigourous manual labour (Macintosh, 2017). When teaching infants to crawl, parents asked to set an incline ramp to a ‘challenging level’ will set it higher for a ‘son’ than a ‘daughter’ (Fine, 2010). In a study on mothers’ expectations of infants showing ‘identical levels of motor performance’, ‘girls’ were underestimated and ‘boys’ overestimated (Mondeschein et al, 2000). Without a shred of irony, the abstract of this study begins ‘Although boys outshine girls in a range of motor skills, there are no reported gender differences in motor performance during infancy.’ We can only begin to imagine what scientific inquiry will reveal when conducted by people who don’t take patriarchy as prediscursive.
The means by which capitalism’s gendered division of labour can be entirely abolished has been brought to us, but rather than allow gender to wither away with the softer coercion of economic incentive that nursed its development, capitalism increasingly maintains this by violence alone. The biological essentialism that underpins trans-exclusionary ‘feminism’ is a defensive reflex to obscure the fact that these ‘feminists’ have no explanation for patriarchy, nor any strategy for resisting it.
I gladly concede that Red Fightback has yet to develop its theoretical direction as far as it should, and I welcome Ebb Magazine’s intervention in spurring us on. Theoretical development ought never to cease, and I hope to develop the concepts I have touched on here more concretely in a later work. As Hodder’s conclusion graciously acknowledges, any theoretical weakness on our part does not stem from a ‘failure of commitment to LGBT struggles’. Our theories are developed in struggle and developed for struggle, so I conclude with a thought on practice.
The role of ‘most people’ – and by this I assume Hodder means gender conforming people – must go beyond standing by, remaining submerged in the hegemonic darkness, observing ‘the loss of gender norms’ on stage while convincing themselves that the mere act of observation renders them active in effecting ‘proliferating gender configurations’. I have little interest in an audience participation that finds its limits in ‘allowing people to move beyond what contingencies they are bound to.’ Thus far, observation – and its complement, visibility – have been more hindrance than help. ‘Most people don’t give transitioning a second thought.’ To this, Hodder says ‘okay.’ I say, ‘think again.’ I am no longer selling tickets. I am asking you to join me on stage.