Rejoicing the Crisis in the Name
Judith Butler’s notion that language is performative and therefore can be used as a tool to subvert dominant discourse is very appealing. For Butler, gender and race are social constructs that can be deconstructed through the ‘slippage’ or the failure of the performative, which opens a space of resistance for the marginalized. She cites Spivak’s “enabling violation” to explain how agency can be realized from within the conditions of oppression. The repetition of hegemonic terms can “reverse and displace their originating aims.”
The iterability of the terms of subjectivation creates a space of ambivalence that allows the other to rework them (Derrida anyone?). Butler claims that heterosexuality as the normative ideal seeks to both naturalize itself and render itself original so homosexuality becomes a product of repudiated heterosexual love. However, Butler insists that when a drag queen imitates the ideal woman it becomes clear that the ideal does not exist. No performance of sexual norms can reach this ideal, and the resulting gap between the ideal and reality opens up an ambivalent space from which other voices can speak and be heard. The drag performance then can create agency as the “Queen will out-woman women.” (I really like this!) In this way, the fetishization of the feminine ideal can bring about a symbolic crisis which will in turn effect a crisis in the morphological stability of the name ‘woman’, or ‘man’.
In other words, the language of oppression can be used against itself, so to speak, to reveal that terms overtly fixed in meaning are inherently ambiguous. And if this is so, they no longer refer to their original referent. In this way, through the reworked terms imposed identities are exchanged for space to construct new ones.
Butler’s text reminds me of the old films in which Carmen Miranda sings with a pineapple? on her head. She represents the quintessential Latina: loud, colorful, exotically over the top. She is so ridiculous that her parody of the stereotypical Latin American female proves the fallacy of the myth. The Irish Spring soap ads do the same regarding the ideal man.
Any problems?
I think that some may question using the language of oppression to resist its power. There may be the danger that this will only strengthen the performativity of language that has traumatized generations of people living in the interstices of society. They might call for the invention of a new language to remove the shackles of the old. However, Butler claims that the “I” cannot extract itself from the history that created it and gains agency from the power relations it hopes to undermine.
Who Can Speak for Whom?
When bell hooks asks if we can imagine a black woman lesbian making a film about white gay subculture, I find it very difficult to justify my pursuit of an MA in post-colonial studies. I mean, who am I to comment on the experience of the colonial subject? I write about trauma at the hands of European hegemony, but even as an Irish-Canadian woman my experience cannot be called trauma. There is no real ‘post’ in subaltern studies. People continue to suffer the ravages of the European legacy of expansion. I have no answer to bell’s question; just a rather shamefaced and pathetic shrug is all I can come up with. Perhaps my experience as a privileged expat at local public schools in West Africa urges me to make some sense of it all.
One incident in particular that occurred at school when I was about eight or nine haunts me. Hassana, a Fulani girl and I were sent to the principal, Mrs. Jarma, to receive punishment for running around a public swimming pool. Hassana was beaten with a ruler and emerged from the office with a huge gash on her upper arm. When it was my turn to be dealt with, Mrs. Jarma spoke to me harshly and sent me on my way. Writing this makes me very aware that the story is mine in every sense of the word: my world, my words, Hassana’s lack of space, her quiet sobbing . . .
Yes, whiteness informs my perspective, so how can I write about/for the multitudinous Other without taking their space? Maybe our only option is to write/read, film/watch, sing/listen with or alongside one another.
Another point hooks makes is that films such as Paris Is Burning often make spectacle out of ritualized play and commodify blackness. Her point brings to mind the traditional Sunday night documentary (the objective ethnographer’s gaze) in which empowering forms of self-expression, such as theatre depicting slavery in the Ivory Coast, become exotic entertainment for North Americans.
The appropriation of dominant discourse to articulate social and cultural identities is one way of resisting oppression and dismantling cultural essentialism; however, there is a need for global institutions of higher learning to open themselves up to indigenous texts, films, music, etc… Perhaps this way the sexist/racist ideas, for example, that black men are hyper-masculine, that whiteness personifies the idea of femininity, that gay men are feminine will give way to the possibility that there are many ways of being in the world.