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Sexuality
Any examination of what the traditions of existentialism and phenomenology have brought to bear on the discourse on sexuality is complicated first by the fact that – for many of the thinkers in these traditions – sexuality was dealt with in problematic ways, if it was considered at all. At the same time, the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism have been major contributors to philosophical discourse on sexuality, and remain so to this day. While phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have been criticized for their elision and/or outright neglect of sexuality, their work has also been enthusiastically – if critically – appropriated by those interested in exploring what it is that phenomenology and existentialism might bring to bear on contemporary discussions of sexuality. Objections to assumptions of sexual neutrality and universality that have tended to pervade many phenomenological accounts of experience are ubiquitous. Notwithstanding these criticisms, it would be impossible to trace the history of sexuality studies, and indeed what has come to be known as queer theory, without making recourse to these traditions. Consequently it is quite possible to trace the evolution of this relationship, particularly with reference to the varying elaborations of sexual embodiment that have emerged from the existential and phenomenological traditions.
The 1990s saw the publication of a number of important books on feminist theories of the body, including Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990 ) and Bodies that Matter (1993), Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993), Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies (1994), and Moira Gatens’ Imaginary Bodies (1996). While these texts explore the themes of embodiment and sexuality in different ways and with different aims, they all employ phenomenological and existential resources (albeit in more or less acknowledged ways) in their attempts to give voice to sexually specific experiences of the body. Corporeal feminism is that subset of feminist theory that emphasizes the importance of lived, sexed embodiment, and takes as its starting point the claim that the sexed body is central in the figuring of experience. Drawing in particular on insights from the phenomenological tradition, corporeal feminists have argued that sexual difference cannot be theorized apart from the particular experience of sexed embodiment. Insofar as corporeal feminism is oriented around the claim that it is the body that is central in the figuring of subjectivity, it may be read as a critique of the philosophical tradition’s privileging of reason and the mind over and above embodied experience. For this reason, corporeal feminism might be read as a critique of Cartesian dualism, attacking the assumption that the ready dissociation of mind and body, reason and emotion, is even possible. While corporeal feminism draws attention to the sexually specific dimension of embodiment, this return to the body need not provoke the accusation of essentialism. This is because corporeal feminism advocates an understanding of the body as culturally and historically specific and is, in this sense, far removed from the idea of a natural or essential body that prefigures culture. While corporeal feminism brought to the fore the ways in which phenomenology might be employed in the service of feminist aims, existentialism has also emerged recently as a lucrative resource for those seeking to give an account of gender identity that avoids the pitfalls of essentialism.
Cartesian Legacies: The Sexual Body in Existential Phenomenology
In the 1940s, three major texts were published in French existential phenomenology: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943; cited as Sartre 1956), Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945; cited as Merleau-Ponty 1962), and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949; cited as Beauvoir 1989). While considerations of embodiment were not evenly treated in these texts, the theme of sexuality was prevalent in them all. As a group, the authors worked to reconcile and move beyond Cartesian dualism, and to grant more attention to the experience of the lived body, or the experience of one’s body as it is immersed in a culture and a world that gives it meaning and value. It is for this reason that the work of the French existential phenomenologists in particular has been of interest to theorists working on issues surrounding sexuality and embodiment.
The French Existentialists interrogate the Cartesian rift between body and mind with an eye toward generating new elaborations of experience, freedom, and embodiment. It is nonetheless the case that this dualism proves to be a recalcitrant influence in these works. This much seems clear, given Beauvoir’s treatment of women’s embodiment in The Second Sex. While Beauvoir does situate women’s identity in her experience of her body, Beauvoir’s descriptions of the nature of this experience are in many ways ambivalent and perplexing. This is due to her loyalty to the existentialist rendering of the body as the site of immanence, which she shares with Sartre. On this reading, subjectivity is thought to be situated in consciousness, and in the self’s capacity for rational reflection and deliberation. To be sure, both Sartre and Beauvoir endeavored to bring the situated and embodied nature of subjectivity and freedom to the fore. But it must be acknowledged that these attempts met with varying degrees of success. The body is frequently portrayed as an entity that complicates and hampers the capacity for freedom and deliberation, by making the mind subject to the influences of the concrete world. This understanding of embodiment commits itself to the claim that subjectivity is realized in transcendence, in the transgression of the limitations imposed by the situated body. Hence while Beauvoir and Sartre recognize that there is no disembodied subjectivity, the body is occasionally rendered as the other of consciousness, implying a rift between the two.
While it may be disingenuous to claim that Sartre subscribed to untenable and absolute notions of human agency, it is important to take note of those places in his texts that gave his readers this impression. For all of Sartre’s interest in describing human freedom as contingent and situated, his descriptions of the body in Being and Nothingness betray his investment in the idea that the body is, in an important sense, the other of consciousness, and in many cases an impediment to the exercise of human freedom. He writes of the body: “either it is a thing among other things, or else it is that by which things are revealed to me. But it cannot be both at the same time” (Sartre 1956: 402). While clearly cognizant of the ways in which the body enabled one’s being subject and object at once, the early Sartre is in some ways reluctant to reconcile the two, insisting that they remain incommensurable and irreducible to each other. In a description that anticipates but defies the later Merleau-Ponty’s rendering of the flesh, Sartre claims that the phenomenon of “double sensation” – the feeling that one is touching and the feeling that one is touched – is a contingent and inessential phenomenon of human embodiment. The experience of one’s body as subject and object, Sartre claims, are “radically distinct,” existing on “incommunicable levels” (Sartre 1956: 403). The lived body and the body as object cannot be reduced to each other. Hence the experience of subjectivity and agency is compromised by the recognition that one’s body is an object for others: “Thus to the extent that my body indicates my possibilities in the world, seeing my body or touching it is to transform these possibilities into dead-possibilities” (ibid.). Inasmuch as the body facilitates an understanding of one’s lived possibilities, it also represents the finitude and limitation of one’s freedom and agency. However, in describing the body as a “transcended transcendence,” Sartre points to the fact that the body could never be an object in the same sense as an inanimate object; rather it is an object insofar as its possibilities are compromised and restricted by the contingencies of the situation and by others.
Neither brute object, nor free and unencumbered consciousness, what Sartre names the “third ontological dimension of the body” is that lived body wherein I know myself as a body known by others. Caught in the gaze of the Other, one experiences one’s transcendence transcended. In this sense, the experience of sexual embodiment is one wherein one utilizes the concepts of the Other to understand one’s own self. While the body is necessary for the realization of subjectivity in transcendence, the experience one may have of that body may actually serve to limit and thwart certain projects. Concretely this is best demonstrated through consideration of the ways in which women may internalize certain societal expectations regarding beauty, and judge themselves in accord with these “norms.” Hence it does not suffice to say that we are objectified as sexually embodied beings by others; we internalize and take up the norms according to which our bodies are interpreted, and ultimately use them to judge our own selves. This is what Sartre means when he claims that I know myself as a body known by others. The experience of sexed embodiment is intersubjective through and through.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that Sartre’s descriptions of concrete relations with others in Being and Nothingness render them as inherently conflictual and alienating, his theory has proven to be useful in describing the more oppressive dimensions of objectification, and for this reason has been engaged by thinkers seeking to address the manner in which some groups have had their agency unjustly compromised by the gaze of the oppressor. The Sartrean resonance is clear, for instance, in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1952; cited as Fanon 1967), where he describes the experience of the colonized as being “sealed into crushing objecthood,” deprived of subjectivity in the eyes of racist colonizers. Similar analyses are employed by Beauvoir in The Second Sex when she seeks to give voice to the experience of women’s objectification within a misogynist society. What Beauvoir’s descriptions betray, however, is an uneasy ambivalence when it comes to the way in which the sexual body should be understood.
Like Fanon and Sartre, there are clearly moments wherein Beauvoir explicitly adopts the existentialist understanding of the body as the site of immanence. Although she claims that biological facts in and of themselves have no significance, and that biology cannot dictate for women some inevitable destiny, there are surely moments where Beauvoir herself describes the sexual body in quite negative terms (Beauvoir 1989: 34). That Beauvoir understood the body as the site of immanence that must be overcome should women attain equality is of little doubt. In The Second Sex, her phenomenological descriptions of birth, menstruation, and sexuality demonstrate the recalcitrance of the conflict between consciousness and flesh in her texts. Through her phenomenological investigations of sexed embodiment, Beauvoir renders the woman’s body not only as an impediment to her quest for subjectivity and transcendence, but also as a being from which she is, in an important sense, alienated. Menstruation is described in these terms: a woman’s body is said to become other than itself, an “obscure and alien” thing, held hostage by “a foreign life.” This sense of alienation is iterated in Beauvoir’s descriptions of the experience of pregnancy; she goes so far as to argue that morning sickness is the manifest “revolt” of the maternal body against the “invading species” (Beauvoir 1989: 29).
That Beauvoir employs a rhetoric of alienation and violation in her rendering of female embodiment is of some significance. It is not simply the case that women struggle to realize themselves in transcendent projects set over and against the carnal confines of the body, as this seems to be universally the case in existentialist descriptions of an individual’s project. For women, Beauvoir claims, this striving for transcendence is doubly complicated by the fact that women as a group are associated with the body, and thought to be tethered to it, in ways that men are not. So it is not simply the case that women understand their bodies as a hindrance to transcendence, but that this understanding is also made more acute by the fact that women, more so than men, are identified with reference to their sexual body. Indeed, the history of philosophy is predicated upon the association of men with rationality and spirit, and women with the body, emotion, and passion. Sartre may indeed claim that all individuals have an experience of objectification as they are embodied in the gaze of others. Beauvoir argues that this objectification is all the more problematic when it masquerades as neutral, which it does in the case of women as they are always already understood as flesh and immanence. This is simply to claim that the objectification of women’s bodies becomes all but invisible within the confines of a culture that always already assumes that the feminine is synonymous with the carnal and the sensuous.
Despite her attention to the manner in which the association of women and the body is culturally reproduced, there are moments when Beauvoir seems to adopt the very understanding of the body that she is critiquing. In her discussion of the lesbian in The Second Sex, Beauvoir is careful to note that “sexuality is in no way determined by an anatomical ‘fate’” and yet she persists in the opinion that homosexuality is something to which one might be “doomed” (Beauvoir 1989: 405). What comments such as these indicate is that while Beauvoir may have been concerned with the social and cultural mores in which the body is interpreted, she persists in reading corporeality as a hindrance to transcendence. In rendering lesbianism as that to which one might be “doomed,” and in describing pregnancy and menstruation as experiences of violability and alienation, Beauvoir appears to be subscribing to the Western philosophical tradition’s rendering of sexuality and embodiment as hindrances to rationality and autonomy. This much is clear, given her contention that lesbianism is a woman’s attempt to “reconcile her autonomy with the passivity of her flesh” (Beauvoir 1989: 407). To be fair, Beauvoir is not trying here to pathologize lesbianism. Indeed, her aim is quite the contrary. In claiming that “homosexuality is no more a perversion deliberately indulged than it is a curse of fate,” Beauvoir argues that every type of eroticism “expresses some general outlook on life” (Beauvoir 1989: 417). Knowing this, however, one is certainly shocked to read Beauvoir’s somewhat outrageous claim that love between women is “more contemplative” than heterosexual love, and the “carnal affection” between women “more even” (Beauvoir: 1989: 420)! Such claims are worrying, indicating, as they do, that Beauvoir was too comfortable issuing prescriptions concerning lesbianism that now seem at best presumptuous and at worst downright essentialist. Hence in spite of her desire to defend lesbianism against certain discourses that would render it pathological, there are moments in which Beauvoir appears unable to resist this tendency herself.
However, if Beauvoir’s phenomenological descriptions testify to her loyalty to a Cartesian framework wherein body and mind are at odds, it is crucial to remember that Beauvoir is not describing what she takes to be some unchanging reality, but rather an experience of immanence or vulnerability that is culturally prescribed. “Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself “(Beauvoir 1989: 725). There is, in woman’s experience of her body, an alienation born of the fact that this body is understood as lesser and abject in a misogynist cultural order. To be sure, The Second Sex is a perplexing text to the degree that it is difficult at times to dissociate Beauvoir’s descriptions of embodied alienation from her criticisms of the way in which this experience is enabled by certain cultural norms. Nevertheless, it is disingenuous to claim that Beauvoir remained naively committed to a certain Cartesianism that granted priority to the reason over and above the experience of one’s own body, as some of her critics have claimed. As Emily Zakin has noted, Beauvoir was interested in proffering phenomenological descriptions of the experience of women in a masculinist and patriarchal society. Doing so involved the exploration of the ways in which the concept of the human has been appropriated by men. This in no way renders Beauvoir complicit in the conflation of masculinity and humanity; indeed, it is precisely this conflation that her work endeavors to undermine (Zakin 2000).
Beauvoir concludes in the chapter “The Independent Woman” by noting of woman that “it will be through attaining the same situation as theirs that she will find emancipation” (Beauvoir 1989: 715). Comments such as these have spawned the accusation that, for Beauvoir, women’s liberation was to be achieved in the struggle to be more like men. But as Zakin notes, such an interpretation evades consideration of the manner in which Beauvoir’s largely phenomenological methodology would prevent her from coherently making such a claim. Equality feminism is marked by its reluctance to concede the irreducibly different nature of the experience of differently sexed bodies. Insofar as The Second Sex reads as a description of women’s embodied experience, it can hardly be coherently argued that Beauvoir’s humanist tendencies represent equality feminism in any straightforward way. Indeed, it is even possible to read Beauvoir as advocating some romanticized version of difference feminism when she claims that the liberation of women will in no way curtail or compromise the wonder and passion that is the “genuine significance” of the human couple in its “true form” (Beauvoir 1989: 731). She writes that “the reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories” (Beauvoir 1989: 731). In her mention here of a miraculous love and wonder that will always abide between the sexes, Beauvoir places herself in proximity to Luce Irigaray, who has argued – with and against phenomenology – that the question of sexual difference is the question of our time. It is in this sense that Beauvoir’s philosophy seems to rest on certain tenets that would be familiar to both equality and difference feminists; indeed, she has been critiqued along both lines. Not only have feminists worried over her claim that women will find emancipation in becoming more like men; they have also resisted the potentially heterosexist tenor of her claims about sexual difference.
What is clear is that Beauvoir’s work cannot be readily categorized, and does not neatly conform to the genres of feminist theory as we have come to know them. This has prompted critics such as Tina Chanter and Penelope Deutscher to argue that her work is best received when its internal contradictions and tensions are left intact and unresolved, allowed to speak for themselves (Deutscher 1997; Chanter 2000). Hence to claim that the inconsistencies in Beauvoir’s figuring of the body are demonstrative of some deficiency on her part are disingenuous. As Deutscher notes, the suggestion that Beauvoir was somehow “out of control” of the inconsistencies in her philosophy may work to infantilize Beauvoir as they portray her as an incompetent author (Deutscher 1997: 170). In truth, the tension to which Beauvoir’s writing on the body attests is one that still structures much of the work done in feminist theory, and recent work in queer theory as well. Indeed, should one follow the advice of Chanter or Deutscher, a productive reading of Beauvoir’s philosophy of the body is one that takes the ambivalence in her descriptions of female embodiment to be indicative of an important tension that has yet to be resolved. As Judith Butler has recently noted, there are certain thinkers in queer theory that have suggested that if one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, then becoming itself becomes the vehicle for the realization of gender (Butler 2004: 65). This lineage can indeed be traced to Beauvoir, who as early as 1949 defined woman as a “becoming.”
Sexual Being as Becoming: Merleau-Ponty and Sexual Being
Beauvoir’s appeal to the notion of “becoming” in The Second Sex is made with reference to Merleau-Ponty, who understood “humanity” as an historically embedded and evolving idea, and not a static essence. It is in reference to this notion of the individual as a culturally located becoming that Beauvoir argues that women should define their possibilities. Indeed, for the Merleau-Ponty of Phenomenology of Perception, “neither body nor existence can be regarded as the original of the human being, since they presuppose each other, and because the body is solidified or generalized existence and existence a perpetual incarnation” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 166). His descriptions of sexual life as “one more form of original intentionality” conceive sexuality as an influence at the very origin of experience, knowledge, and expression. This means that sexuality is irreducible to an object of analysis and is not a finite and isolated dimension of existence. Sexuality imbues one’s experience of the world in myriad ways, and to greater and lesser degrees: “Sexuality without being the object of any intended act of consciousness, can underlie and guide specified forms of my experience. Taken in this way, as an ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is coextensive with life” (ibid.). In this sense, sexuality is not an autonomous entity available for analysis, but influences the form of experience through and through. Sexuality can never be reduced to a content or attribute of experience, for in phenomenology there is no content of experience that does not inherently contribute to its form. Put differently, sexuality cannot be said to be the discrete content of experience, but rather a fundamental influence on the way in which experience is structured.
Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body in its sexual being is in many ways bound to the notion of the lived-body, a figure that pervades much of his early work. With reference to the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty intends the lived-body to be understood in terms of the body’s thrownness into a world in which it always already finds itself situated. For him, the “corporeal schema” or body image is the figure of the lived-body as it is taken up by the subject, neither grasped intellectually, nor understood objectively. In descriptions that foreshadow his later discussion of the chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty claims that human embodiment is defined by a fundamental ambiguity. As the fundamental locus of intentionality, the body is a in a sense responsible for the constitution of a world, yet it is also bound to this world, and subject to its influence. Merleau-Ponty explores the manner in which the body is habituated in the world, indeed, using habit as an example to demonstrate the inadequacy of explanations of embodiment that would appeal solely to claims about the consciousness of one’s body (intellectualism) or to mechanistic and material conceptions of the body as a thing. Habits testify to the body’s being given over to a world which it constitutes and by which it is in turn constituted: “The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities” (MerleauPonty 1962: 453).
Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty share much of their approach to the sexual being of the body. Both are critical of a Cartesian understanding of an abstract and immaterial cogito somehow suspended apart from the flesh. And both recognize the philosophical importance of describing the lived ambiguity of human embodiment, though for Beauvoir this exercise was doubtless informed by more explicitly political concerns. Yet insofar as she understood human subjectivity to be realized in transcendence, and insofar as the body remains the site of the immanent frustration of these projects, the degree to which Beauvoir manages to break with a dualistic way of thinking through the body remains ambiguous. Merleau-Ponty’s thought is motivated by the critique of transcendental idealism and its attendant conception of an intentional and volitional consciousness. There are ways in which this is and is not the case for Beauvoir. While there are moments wherein she insists on the inherently embodied and concretely situated nature of consciousness and freedom, there are others in which she seems reluctant to move beyond the rhetoric of choice and intention. However, pace suspicions of a recalcitrant Cartesianism, her understanding of woman as an embodied and historically situated becoming resonates deeply with more contemporary elaborations of gender identity.
More specifically, despite (and because of) the ambiguities that Beauvoir’s account may manifest, her existential and phenomenological descriptions of embodiment might be read as forerunners to more contemporary theories on the performativity of gender, where “performativity” is meant to connote the fluid and culturally imbued sense of gender as opposed to a binary and biologistic understanding of sex. As accounts of gender performativity tend to accentuate the manner in which gender is accomplished in time as an effect of performance, they are indebted to two main tenets in the existentialist philosophy of identity, first the claim that existence precedes essence, and secondly the claim that the accomplishment of an identity is a project undertaken in the eyes of others. Indeed, there is no making sense of a performative elaboration of gender apart from some understanding of the inherent other-directedness of our actions. Nor is the influence of the existential tenet “existence precedes essence” in many places more lucratively employed than in discourse on sexuality and performativity.
Performativity as Existential Practice
Judith Butler is the most renowned philosopher of gender performativity. In her seminal book Gender Trouble (1990), she argued for a certain ambiguity that plagues Beauvoir’s account of the construction of gender. Butler applauds Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” as well as the challenge her work posed to essentialist notions of gender that would bind it to an irreducible material sex. Yet while Beauvoir may have been one of the first to introduce a feminist discourse on social construction, some have argued that she failed to sufficiently interrogate the assumption of an agent that somehow prefigures or precedes the appearance of the subject. While Butler may agree with the variability of gender on Beauvoir’s account, the rhetoric of volition and intent that pervades her existential descriptions of embodiment is worrisome for Butler. The worry here is that Beauvoir reduces the discourse on construction to a discourse on choice. Ironically, while Butler goes some distance toward dissociating herself from this view, which she attributes to Beauvoir, Butler herself is accused of assuming too wilful a subject in her model of gender performativity. This is a criticism that Butler takes up in Bodies that Matter (1993) and more recently in Undoing Gender (2004).
In a sense, the fact that Butler is frequently accused of adopting a voluntaristic notion of subjectivity is ironic, given the fact that much of her work is intended as an explicit criticism of such an understanding of the relationship between sexuality and agency. Having claimed in Gender Trouble that there are certain regulatory practices that govern not only gender norms, but also the gender identities that these norms admit as intelligible, Butler argues that there is no static “truth” to sex or gender; rather one’s gender is accomplished in time as an effect of certain performances. “In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject that might be said to pre-exist the deed... There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 1990: 25). Clearly Butler does not imply that there was a voluntaristic agent free to adopt, or cast off at will, one gender identity or another. Indeed, for Butler, the stakes of performance are high indeed, as they are legislated and to some extent determined – though not in their entirety – by cultural norms that govern the limits of sexual intelligibility, and more urgently the liveability of one’s sexuality. Hence in claiming that gender was constituted performatively, Butler argued against a static and naturalist conception of the sexual subject, and for a subject whose gender is realized in time, through a sequence of acts that are governed by cultural norms. In this sense, performativity must be differentiated from performance. Performance presupposes a subject, while the idea of performativity is meant to combat the very notion of the subject, stressing instead the ways in which subjectivity is constituted in particular historic moments as the effect of certain acts. In this sense, “femininity” must not be conceived as the exteriorization of some innate and inherent essence; rather, femininity is actualized as the effect of certain gendered performances culturally coded as feminine. “Femininity” is a cultural construct, malleable and impermanent; it cannot be conceived as some sort of preexistent essence that is exteriorized as gender. Hence to say that identity is performative is not to say that the performance masks a more foundational subject that assumes or performs certain roles. Indeed, a performative understanding of sexual subjectivity contests the notion that there is a thinking self that precedes and remains unchanged through action.
There is clearly both symmetry and dissymmetry here between Butler’s account and an existentialist understanding of identity. The proximity between a performative account of gender and the phenomenological and existential approach is evident should one remember Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body in the chapter on “The Body as Expression and Speech,” from Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty’s aim here is to give an account of embodiment that debunks transcendental idealism and materialism alike. Through his descriptions of the simultaneous constitution of language and thought in expression, Merleau-Ponty belies the intellectualist assumption that thought exists for itself prior to expression (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 183). He subordinates reason and the intellect to the expressive powers of the body. When Merleau-Ponty exposes the myth of disembodied thought, he argues for the simultaneous constitution of thought and language, such that there is no thought apart from its expression in the flesh. So, too, when he writes of a particular “corporeal style” with which one approaches the world, he provides resources for thinking through the relationship between materiality and language that does not reduce each to the other, but forces an examination of their ambiguous relationship. One might read Merleau-Ponty’s work not only as a criticism of the cogito, but also as a critique of the idealist tradition more broadly construed. When he claims that speech does not translate thought, but accomplishes it, he aims to undermine intellectualist understandings of language that would take language as a superficial vessel, one that was meant to convey or translate thoughts that were already preformed. For Merleau-Ponty, thought was accomplished in language and expression, meaning that consciousness is realized in an embodied and animate subject and does not exist apart from its embodied instantiation and expression. In this sense, Cartesian dualism is undone. If thought is accomplished as embodied expression, it ceases to live when it is torn free of the body. Moreover, insofar as Merleau-Ponty is also concerned to elaborate the manner in which the body both maintains and disrupts habit, the temporal dimension of his philosophy of existence is not unlike the one that comes to inform the model of gender as performativity. According to the performative account, the accomplishment of gender is a forward-looking temporal unfolding. It is not in the realization of isolated acts that one’s gender comes to be, but rather through the repetition or iteration of certain acts that gender is instantiated.
If gender identity is defined as an effect of multiple culturally meaningful practices, it is also the case that performativity, as a model for the accomplishment of gender, is quite far removed from a model wherein there is a strong sense of volition and agency detached from cultural prejudice and influence. When read in light of the trajectory that Butler’s work has taken, the accusation that she presupposes too volitional an agent is strange indeed. Stranger still is the fact that when the Butlerian account of gender does not stand accused of voluntaristic humanism, it is subjected to the exact inverse of this criticism, namely, the charge that this model of gender and sexuality forecloses the possibilities for agency that one would like to think should accompany any account of gender formation that is motivated by an emancipatory politics. It is precisely in the incommensurability of these criticisms that one might locate the ties that bind the Butlerian approach to sexuality with those put forward by the existentialists before her. There are important ways in which Beauvoir’s project, for instance, might be read as an attempt to reconcile the hope for an increased political agency on the part of women, with the acknowledgment that the possibilities for the liberation of women were radically impinged by misogynist cultural norms that severely compromise a woman’s sense of agency. In this sense it resonates quite clearly with Beauvoir’s discussion of women in The Second Sex, Sartre’s discussions of freedom and alienation, and Merleau-Ponty’s rendering of human embodiment as an expressive mélange of language and materiality. It is clear that the French existentialists were motivated by the desire to proffer an account of human subjectivity that took seriously the political necessity of articulating some sense of agency, even if this articulation must negotiate and respond to the ways in which this agency is limited in hierarchical and oppressive societies. Sartre was concerned throughout his work with the manner in which political agency was always a work in progress, a contingent endeavor enacted in a climate weighted by history, cultural norms, and the expectations of others. In this respect, Butler would be quite amenable to his approach. It is for this reason that Alan Schrift has suggested that a certain proximity exists between Butler’s own work and that of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty (Schrift 2001). In this sense, the theory of gender performativity can be said to be an existentialist theory of some ilk, despite the fact that Beauvoir and the other existentialists may have presupposed a more robust and substantive sense of agency and volition than the one that Butler’s account would allow.
Queering Phenomenology from Beauvoir to Butler
Recently, existentialist and phenomenological notions of embodiment have been re-surfacing surrounding narratives of transgenderism and transsexuality. Indeed, the consideration of these narratives is in many ways a requisite consequence of the fact that feminist theory has evolved in the way it has, namely as a series of arguments, at times contentious, concerning the degree to which one’s body is decisive in identifying one’s gender. In this context, these narratives are of interest insofar as they point to what at times is a radical symmetry – and at others an obvious dissymmetry – between one’s own gender identification and the material contours of one’s own body. While some read the transsexual’s desire to inhabit a different body as the valorization of a traditional correspondence between gender identification and embodiment, others read transsexualism as pushing sex, as a discursive entity, quite beyond the body.
Jay Prosser has argued that poststructuralist theories of gender have neglected consideration of the manner in which subjects construct their identities as much as they are constructed; they are themselves constituting agents to some degree. It is for this reason that Prosser charges poststructuralist theories with having forsaken “valences of cultural belonging” (Prosser 1998: 11). Transgender and transsexual narratives work against the poststructuralist celebration of the fluidity and contingency of identity; they do so by forcing remembrance of the “ongoing foundational power” that gender categories continue to maintain. Citing the fluid, fictional, and transient dimensions of sexuality that he charges poststructuralists with celebrating, Prosser argues that transsexual narratives demand redress of poststructuralism’s evasion of materiality, accomplished in its favoring of discourse. On this account, discourse on the body has not adequately taken up notions of materiality and flesh; in the poststructuralist tradition, the body has been instead been rendered as the locus for the operation of language, power, and science. For these reasons, Prosser takes issue with the claim – which he associates with Butler and Beauvoir – that sex is “really gender all along,” a contention that seems at odds with transsexual narratives insofar as they resist departure from the literality of material sex. As these narratives frequently invoke the importance of a correspondence between material sex and gender identity, along with a concomitant desire to “belong” to one’s body, they disrupt and complicate several theses of recent queer and feminist theory. For these reasons, it may be fair to argue that Prosser is reviving existentialist concerns about the limits of embodied agency and the importance of narratives on materiality. Perhaps more importantly, Prosser seems to be stressing the phenomenological importance of feeling as though one belongs to, and inhabits, one’s body.
Critics have taken issue with Prosser’s analysis and those like it. Gayle Salamon (2004) is critical of Prosser’s desire to return to the “simplicity of materiality” as this move seems to presuppose the feasibility of an appeal to a body beyond discourse. While Salamon would in no way contest the claim that the experience of embodied subjectivity is essential to subject formation, there is nothing in this claim that prescribes or enables a return to a body beyond discourse. Prosser’s worry that “the materiality of language in contemporary thought has taken the place of the materiality of the body” is grounded in what is a fundamentally untenable breach between the body designated in theoretical discourse and some “real” materiality that is said to subtend it. Phenomenology can help to make sense of the experience of this distinction, however, and therein lies its relevance to the most contemporary debates concerning sexual identity. Even as phenomenology is itself a theoretical discourse, it offers resources for thinking through what it would mean to experience a difference between one’s “real” body and the body as it is discursively or culturally represented. Even though the implied schism here is itself a discursive one, phenomenology enables the validation of experiential narratives that testify to its power.
References and Further Reading
Bartky, S. L. (1990) Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. London and New York: Routledge.
Beauvoir, S. de (1989) The Second Sex (trans. H. M. Parshley). New York: Vintage Books (original work published 1949).
—— (1996) Ethics of Ambiguity (trans. B. Frechtman). New York: Citadel Press (original work published 1948).
Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Butler, J. (1989) Sexual ideology and phenomenological description. In J. Allen and I. M. Young (eds.), The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy (pp. 85–100). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—— (1990) Gender Trouble. London and New York: Routledge.
—— (1993) Bodies That Matter. London and New York: Routledge.
—— (2004) Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge.
Chanter, T. (2000) Abjection and ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir’s legacy. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 14(2), 138–55.
Deutscher, P. (1997) Yielding Gender. New York and London: Routledge.
Diprose, R. (1994) The Bodies of Women. New York and London: Routledge.
—— (2002) Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin White Masks (trans. C. L. Markmann). New York: Grove Press (original work published 1952).
Gatens, M. (1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality. London and New York: Routledge.
Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Sydney: Allen & Unwin; Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Irigaray, L. (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference (trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kruks, S. (2001) Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith). New York and London: Routledge (original work published 1945).
—— (1968) The Visible and the Invisible (trans. A. Lingis). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Prosser, J. (1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rubin, H. (1998) Phenomenology in trans studies. GLQ: The Transgender Issue, 14(2). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Salamon, G. (2004) The bodily ego and the contested domain of the material. Differences: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15(3), 95–122.
Sartre, J-P. (1956) Being and Nothingness (trans. H. Barnes). New York: Simon & Schuster (original work published 1943).
Schrift, A. (2001) Judith Butler: Une nouvelle existentialiste? (Judith Butler: A new existentialist)? Philosophy Today, 12, 35–50.
Weiss, G. (1999) Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York and London: Routledge.
Zakin, E. (2000) Differences in equality: Beauvoir’s unsettling of the universal. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 14(2), 104–120.