GLOBAL VIOLENCE, SEXUAL POLITICS1
I am enormously honored to be here this evening, and very pleased, if also a bit daunted to be asked to speak to you on this occasion. It is wonderful for me to think that I have made a significant contribution of some sort to the work you do, and perhaps also to the lives you live, but the truth is that I would be nowhere without you. I am not sure I would have stayed in the academy if it were not for this emerging field. It has given me more than I have given it—a home, an incitement, a provocation—so let me take this opportunity to thank you.
I’d like to speak to you this evening on the matter of politics and, specifically, how the struggles of gender and sexual minorities might offer a perspective on current issues that are before us, questions of mourning and violence, which we have to deal with as part of an international community. I’d like to start, and to end, with the question of the human, of who counts as the human, and the related question of whose lives count as lives, and with a question that has preoccupied many of us for years: What makes for a grievable life? I believe that whatever our differences as a community, and there are many, we all have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. And if we’ve lost, then it seems to follow that we have had, that we have desired and loved, and struggled to find the conditions for our desire. We have all lost in recent decades from AIDS, but there are other losses that inflict us, other diseases, and there is the fact as well that we are, as a community, subjected to violence, even if some of us have not been. This means that we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; as a field of desire and physical vulnerability, of a publicity at once assertive and targeted.
I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when one has fully mourned another human being. I’m certain, though, that it does not mean that you have forgotten them, or that something else comes along to take their place. I don’t think it works that way. I think instead that one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance. So there is losing, and there is the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. I don’t think, for instance, you can invoke a protestant ethic when it comes to loss. You can’t say, oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me. I think you get hit by waves, and that you start out the day, with an aim, a project, a plan, and you find yourself foiled. You find yourself fallen. You’re exhausted, and you don’t know why. Something is larger than your own deliberate plan, your own project, your own knowing. Something takes hold of you, and what sense does this make? What is it that claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?
Is it simply the case that we are undergoing something temporary? Or is it rather that, in undergoing what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that the ties are what we are, what we are composed of, and that when we lose them, especially some of them, we do not know who we are, or what to do? Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation, but I think it has and can furnish a sense of political community of a complex order.
It is not just that I might be said to “have” these relations, and sit back and enumerate them to you, explaining what this friendship means, what that lover meant or means to me. On the contrary, it seems that what grief displays is the way in which we are in the thrall of our relations with others in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here, about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling, the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.
This seems so clearly the case with grief, but this can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. So when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do, and as we must, we mean something complicated by it, since it is not precisely a possession, but, rather, a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another, or by virtue of another. It won’t even do to say that I am promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one, or trying to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality. We tend to narrate the history of the movement in such a way that ecstasy figures in the ’60s and ‘70s, and mid-way through the ’80s. But maybe ecstasy is more persistent than that, maybe it is with us all along. To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and this can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still speak to a “we,” or include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage.
I’m arguing, if I am “arguing” at all, that we have an interesting political predicament, since most of the time when we hear about “rights,” we understand them as pertaining to individuals, or when we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or a class. And in that language and in that context, we have to present ourselves as bounded beings, distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, communities defined by sameness. Indeed, we had better be able to use that language to secure legal protections and entitlements. But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are legally to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Though this language might well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it doesn’t do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and fatally, irreversibly implicate us in lives that are not our own.
It is not easy to understand how a political community is wrought from such ties. One speaks, and one speaks for another, to another, and yet there is no way to collapse the distinction between the other and myself. When we say “we” we do nothing more than designate this very problematic. We do not solve it. And perhaps it is, and ought to be, insoluble. I don’t want to forget that there are bodies here, and that bodies are in a certain sense our own, and that we must claim rights of autonomy over them: this is as true for lesbian and gays rights claims in favor of sexual freedom as it is for transsexual and trans-gender claims to self-determination; as it is for intersex claims to be free of coerced medical and psychiatric interventions; as it is for all claims to be free from racist attacks, physical and verbal; as it is for feminism’s claim to reproductive freedom. It is difficult, if not impossible, to make these claims without recourse to autonomy. I am not suggesting that we should cease to make these claims. We have to make them, we must. And I’m not saying that we have to make these claims reluctantly or strategically. They are part of any normative aspiration of a movement that seeks to maximize the protection and the freedoms of sexual and gender minorities, of women, defined with the broadest possible compass, of racial and ethnic minorities, especially as they cut across all the other categories. But is there another normative aspiration that we must also seek to articulate and to defend? Is there a way in which the place of the body in all of these struggles opens up a different conception of politics?
The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence; the body can be the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are never quite only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension: it is constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, so that my body is and is not mine. It is given over from the start to the world of others, bearing their imprint, formed within the crucible of social life. Only later, with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own. Indeed, if I seek to deny the fact that against my will, and from the start, my body relates me to others whom I did not choose to be in proximity, if I build a notion of “autonomy” on the basis of the denial of this sphere of a primary and unwilled physical proximity, then do I precisely deny the social and political conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy? If I am struggling for autonomy, I need to be struggling for something else as well: a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others and impressing them as well, in ways that are not fully predictable.
Is there a way that we might struggle for autonomy in many spheres, but also consider the demands that are imposed upon us by living in a world of beings who are, by definition, physically dependent on one another, physically vulnerable to one another? This would be another way of imagining community, and imagining it in such a way that it becomes incumbent upon us to consider very carefully when and where we use violence, for violence is, always, an exploitation of that primary tie, that primary way in which we are, as bodies, outside ourselves, for one another.
If I might then return to the problem of grief, to the moments in which one undergoes something outside of one’s control, finds that one is beside oneself, not at one with oneself, perhaps we can say grief contains within it the possibility of apprehending the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are, from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own. Can this situation, which is so dramatic for us and establishes a very specific political perspective for anyone who works in the field of sexual and gender politics, supply a perspective by which to begin to apprehend the contemporary global situation?
Mourning, fear, anxiety, rage. And in the United States, we are everywhere now surrounded with violence, of having perpetrated it, having suffered it, living in fear of it, planning more of it. Violence is surely a touch of the worst order, in which the human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way, in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another, in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another. To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting upon another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, expunging the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other which is part of bodily life, but this vulnerability becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions. It becomes the basis of claims for non-militaristic political solutions, as a vulnerability that we cannot will away, that we must attend to, even abide by, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself.
I think we have seen, are seeing, various ways of dealing with grief. For instance, William Safire, citing Milton, writes in the New York Times that we must banish melancholy; and President Bush announces on September 21, 2001, that we have finished grieving and that now it is time for resolute action to take the place of grief.2 When grieving is feared, it seeks to resolve itself quickly, to banish itself in the name of an action that is invested with the power to restore the loss or rectify the world. Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution of grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework by which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? The attempt to foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration, is surely also to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings, and find our way.
To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics is not to be resigned to a simple passivity or powerlessness. It is, rather, to allow oneself to extrapolate from our own experience of vulnerability to that experience that others undergo, others whom we may well be able to protect from violence.
There is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, even prior to individuation itself, and by virtue of our embodiment. This makes us vulnerable to violence, but also to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives, at the other.
And there is a further point: we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability, for it precedes the formation of “I,” and this is a condition of being laid bare from the start, with which we cannot argue. Rather, we can argue with it, but we are doubtless foolish, if not dangerous, when we do. Of course, for some this primary scene is one of abandonment or violence or starvation, and in this case, we are referring to bodies given over to nothing, or to brutality, or to no sustenance. But to understand what is dire here, it is still necessary to understand that they are “given over.” Part of understanding the conditions of oppression requires understanding how this primary need is or is not met by the social and economic world. We cannot understand the oppression of children without this conception of what it is to be human, or through what primary vulnerability human life emerges. There is no way to argue away this condition of primary vulnerability, of being given over to the touch of the other, even if, or precisely when, there is no other there, and no support for our lives. Lives are supported and maintained differentially, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable.”
A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated, and we’ve seen it already (December 2001), in the genre of the obituary, where lives are so quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. But this is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we rarely, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of Israeli military with U.S. support, or of any number of Afghani people, children and adults. What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? Do those who support the war consider these as lives at all? Do these lives conform to the notion of the human? And if not, what are the cultural contours of the notion of the human at work here? And how do the contours that we accept as the cultural frame for the human limit the extent to which we can avow loss as loss? This is surely a question that lesbian, gay and bi- studies has asked, in relation to violence against sexual minorities, that transgendered people have asked as they have been singled out for harassment and sometimes murder, that intersexed people have asked, whose formative years have so often been marked by an unwanted violence against their bodies in the name of a normative notion of the human and what the body of the human must be. This is no doubt as well the basis of a profound affinity between movements revolving around gender and sexuality with efforts to counter the normative human morphologies and capacities that condemn or efface those who are physically challenged. And it must also be part of the affinity with anti-racist struggles, given the racial differential that undergirds the culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the present time.
It should be added that violence is not an abstraction. If one learns nonviolence, one finds that it is an ongoing struggle, a practice, an arduous ethical demand. Non-violence doesn’t mean doing away with rage: it is the ethical practice of cultivating one’s rage into articulation. And if I had to say what drove me to queer theory it was probably this ethical problematic, one that pertains to rage and to desire. I haven’t been able to do very well without either. They are my resources, and they carry with them a set of risks.
So what is the relation between violence and dehumanization, between violence and the unreality that can attach to those who become the victims of violence, and where does the notion of the ungrievable life come in? Some would argue that at the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized; they fit no dominant frame for the human, and their dehumanization occurs first, at this level. This level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. Two hundred thousand Iraqi children were killed in the Gulf War and its aftermath:3 do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children? There is no obituary for the war casualties that the U.S. inflicts, and there cannot be. For there to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that would qualify for recognition. Though we might argue that it would be impractical to include obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed, the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy. As a result, we have to think of the obituary as an act of nation building. And the matter is not so simple, since if the life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note; it is already the unburied, the unburiable. It’s not that the death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. It vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but into the ellipses by which discourse proceeds.
The queer lives that vanished on September 11th are not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity currently being built in the obituary pages. But this should come as no surprise, when we think as well about how many deaths from AIDS were publicly ungrievable losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.
So it is not just that a discourse exists in which there is no frame and no story and no name for such a life, and that violence might be said to realize or apply this discourse. Rather, violence against those who are already not quite lives, who are living in a state of suspension between life and death, leaves a mark that is no mark. If there is a discourse, it is a silent and melancholic writing in which there have been no lives, and no losses, there has been no common physical condition, no vulnerability that serves as the basis for an apprehension of our commonality, and there has been no sundering of that commonality. None of this takes place on the order of the event. None of this takes place. Don’t get me wrong: it may be reported, there may be a story, there may even be a picture of the face of this or that leader of a terrorist gang who is dramatically personified for us. But even these personifications are not humanizations; they become, like the face of bin Laden, visual icons of the only apparently human, what the media wants to portray as the deceptively human. In the images he supplies, and the media absorbs and distributes, he smiles, but implicit in the presentation is that this is no smile; that his eyes seem kind, but he is most certainly not kind: such an image is the lure of surface, the personification of a lie, the appearance of a face that distorts the very expressivity of the face. And it wouldn’t matter if it were just bin Laden, but he is standing for, he is representing, he is being generalized into the Islamic menace, the true meaning of Islam, the terror that lies behind every Islamic charity, the lie that Islam is, for the government, and for the media, which so quickly and consistently forgets the difference between the various practices of Islam and its extremist version or, rather, takes the former to be the lie behind which the latter hides.
I began these remarks this evening with a suggestion that perhaps the interrelated movements and modes of inquiry that collect here might need; to consider autonomy as one dimension of its normative aspiration, one value to realize when we ask ourselves, in what direction ought we to proceed, and what kinds of values ought we to be realizing? I also suggested that the way in which the body figures in gender and sexuality studies, and in the struggles for a less oppressive world for the otherwise gendered and for sexual minorities of all kinds, is precisely to underscore the value of being beside oneself, of being a porous boundary, given over to others, finding oneself in a trajectory of desire that takes one out of oneself, resituates one irreversibly in the field of others. The particular sociality that belongs to bodily life, to sexual life, and to becoming gendered (which is always, to a certain extent, becoming gendered for others) establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others. We are, as bodies, always for something more than, and other than, ourselves. To articulate this as an entitlement is not always easy, but perhaps not impossible. It would be to suggest, for instance, that “association” is not luxury, but one of the very conditions and prerogatives of freedom. Indeed, the kinds of associations we maintain importantly have many forms, and it will not do to extol the marriage norm as the new ideal for this movement. It should certainly be there as an option, but to instate as the exclusive site of sexuality or legitimacy is precisely to constrain the sociality of the body. And though it is clear that it is crucial to expand our notions of kinship beyond the heterosexual frame, especially in light of seriously damaging judicial decisions against second parent adoptions in recent years, it would be a mistake to reduce kinship to family, or to assume that all community ties are extrapolations of kinship relations.
Kinship ties that bind persons to one another may well be no more or less than the intensification of community ties, may or may not be based on enduring or exclusive sexual relations, may well consist of ex-lovers, non-lovers, friends, community members. In this sense, then, the relations of kinship arrive at boundaries that call into question the differentiation of kinship from community, or that, perhaps, call for a different conception of friendship. These modes of association constitute a breakdown of traditional kinship that not only displaces the central place of biological and sexual relations from its definition, but also gives sexuality a separate domain from that of kinship, allowing as well for the durable tie to be thought outside of the conjugal frame, and opening sexuality to a number of social articulations that do not always imply binding relations or conjugal ties. That not all of our relations last or are meant to, however, does not mean that we are immune to grief. On the contrary, sexuality outside the field of monogamy well may open us to a different sense of community, intensifying the question of where one finds enduring ties, and so may become the condition for an attunement to losses that exceed the private realm.
So in response to the question of what political perspectives might be derived from the resources of this complex notion of community, we might supply a perspective on violence, on the public distribution of legitimate grief, and on the public or, rather, national allocation of grievable lives. We can also, I think, consider what politics comes from grief, and what politics comes from its hasty foreclosure. If revenge is the quick way to escape from the feeling of loss, it allows for this only by instigating a cycle of revenge that redoubles the loss in the end. Perhaps we should be providing queer readings of Aeschylus for the nation-state. But perhaps we also wonder whether perspectives emerging from sexuality and gender studies have political implications right now. Are we secondary, or beside the point?
It is crucial to make our claims for autonomy, our claims for rights of association, and our claims on reality, all the more active and vigilant, precisely because the nation-state is being produced again and again along lines of consensus that centralize the heterosexual family, property and national boundaries, and that degrade not only civil liberties and the practice of dissent, but freedom itself, as democratic values. Reality is being made and remade during these times in dramatic and consequential ways. And for those who know what it is to be treated as unreal, it is all the more important that the unreal speak, in reality’s name, if only to disrupt and to compel its reshaping in another direction.
The question of who and what is considered real and true is apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as Foucault makes plain, a question of power. Having or bearing “truth” and “reality” is an enormously powerful prerogative within the social world, one way which power dissimulates as ontology. According to Foucault, one of the first tasks of a radical critique is to discern the relation “between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge.”4 Here we are confronted with the limits of what is knowable, limits that exercise a certain force, but are not grounded in any necessity, limits that can only be tread or interrogated by risking a certain security within an available ontology: “[N]othing can exist as an element of knowledge if, on the one hand, it . . . does not conform to a set of rules and constraints characteristic, for example, of a given type of scientific discourse in a given period, and if, on the other hand, it does not possess the effects of coercion or simply the incentives peculiar to what is scientifically validated or simply rational or simply generally accepted, etc.”5 Knowledge and power are not finally separable, but work together to establish a set of subtle and explicit criteria for thinking the world: “It is therefore not a matter of describing what knowledge is and what power is and how one would repress the other or how the other would abuse the one, but rather, a nexus of knowledge-power has to be described so that we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system.”6
What this means is that one looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted, and for the limits of those conditions, the moments that point to their contingency and their transformability. In Foucault’s terms, “schematically speaking, we have perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it.”7 To intervene in the name of transformation means precisely to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality, and to use, as it were, one’s unreality to make an otherwise impossible or illegible claim. I think that when those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay claim to reality, or enter into its domain, something other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take place. The norms themselves can become rattled, display their instability, become open to a resignification.
I think we have seen this in recent years as the new gender politics has offered numerous challenges from transgendered and transsexual peoples, and as the intersex movement has gained some place in public life. My earlier example of drag was no doubt too simple and too quick to come close to doing justice to this terrain.8 But one of the criticisms of it, namely, that butch, femme, and transgendered lives are not essential to refashioning politics, not only failed to acknowledge the violence that the otherwise gendered suffer in the public world, but failed as well to recognize that embodiment is crucial to politics. Indeed, if we consider that embodiment cannot really proceed without a relation to a norm, or a set of norms, that that relation can be transformative, and that fantasy is part of that very relation, then it is not possible to demean transgendered lives as so many individuals living out their private fantasies and having no real impact on political life.
I would insist not only that the struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, but also that the foreclosure of fantasy is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons. Fantasy is not the opposite of reality: it is what reality forecloses, and it operates to delimit and to challenge the limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.
How does drag or, indeed, much more than drag, how do butch, femme, transgender, transsexual enter into the political field? They do this, I would suggest, by making us not only question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how the norms that govern contemporary notions of reality can be questioned, and new modes of reality instituted. They show that we can do this, in our very embodiment, and as a consequence of being a body in the mode of becoming, which in becoming otherwise exceeds the norm, reworks the norm, makes us see how realities to which we thought we were confined are not written in stone. Although some people have asked me what is finally the use of simply increasing possibilities for gender, I would suggest that possibility is not a luxury: it is as crucial as bread. I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those for whom the very issue of survival is most urgent. If the answer to the question, is life possible, is yes, that is surely something. It cannot be taken for granted. That is an affirmation which, for many, is an accomplishment, one that is fundamentally conditioned by reality being structured or restructured in such a way that that very affirmation becomes possible.
This is one way in which the matter is and continues to be political, but there is something more. What the perhaps naive example of drag sought to do in Gender Trouble was to make us question the means by which reality is made, and to consider the way in which being called real, being called unreal, can be not only a means of social control, but also dehumanizing violence. I would put it this way: to be called unreal, and to have that call, as it were, institutionalized as a form of differential treatment, is to become the other against whom (or against which) the human is made. It is the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality. To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed, but consider that it is more fundamental than that. To be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject, as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. To be oppressed you must first become intelligible. To find that you are fundamentally unintelligible—indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find you to be an impossibility—is to find that you have not yet achieved access to the human; it is to find yourself speaking only and always as if you were human, but with the sense that you are not, it is to find that your language is hollow, that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in your favor.
The point about drag is not simply to produce a pleasurable and subversive spectacle, but to allegorize the spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is both reproduced and contested. And this has consequences for how gender presentations are criminalized, pathologized, how subjects who cross genders risk internment and imprisonment, why violence against transgendered subjects is not recognized as violence, why it is sometimes inflicted by the very states that should be offering such subjects protection from violence.
I take this to be essential to politics. As I mentioned, I am sometimes asked the following question: so what if new forms of gender are possible? How does this affect the ways that we live, the concrete needs of the human community? And how are we to distinguish between forms of gender possibility that are valuable and those that are not? First, I would say that it is not a question merely of producing a new future for genders that do not yet exist. The genders I have in mind have existed for a long time, but they have not been admitted into the terms that govern reality. So it is a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always lived. Because the norms governing reality have not admitted these forms to be real, we will, of necessity, call them new. But I hope we will, at least, laugh knowingly when and if we do. If we think this is a theory of mere indulgence, then consider that the question of survival provides the necessary background for Gender Trouble, specifically, the question of how to create a world in which those who understand their gender and their desire to be non-normative can live and thrive not only without the threat of violence from the outside, but without the pervasive sense of their own unreality which can and has led to suicide, both suicidal life and quite literal suicide. Lastly, I would ask what place the thinking of the possible has within political theorizing. One can object and say, ah, but you are trying only to make gender complexity possible, but that does not tell us which forms are good or bad—it does not supply the measure, the gauge, the norm. And that is right. It does not supply the measure, the gauge, the norm. But there is a normative aspiration here, and it has to do with the ability to live and breathe and move, and would no doubt belong somewhere in what is called a philosophy of freedom. The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity.
The desire to kill someone, or killing someone, for not conforming to the gender norm by which he or she is “supposed” to live suggests that life itself requires this norm, and that to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death. The person who threatens this life with violence emerges from the anxious and rigid belief that a sense of world and a sense of self will be radically undermined if such an uncategorizable being is permitted to live within the social world. The negation, through violence, of that body is a vain and brutal effort to restore order, to renew the social world on the basis of intelligible gender, and to refuse the challenge to rethink that world as something other than natural or necessary. This is not far removed from the threat of death, or the actual murder, of transsexuals in various countries, and of gay men who read as “feminine” or gay women who read as “masculine.” I can give you many examples, and they are graphic, and they are widespread, sometimes countered by local police, sometimes aided and abetted by local police.9 They are sometimes denounced by governments and international agencies, sometimes not included as legible or “real” crimes against humanity by those very institutions.
I understand this violence to emerge from a profound desire to keep the order of binary gender natural or necessary, to make of it a structure, either natural or cultural, or both, that no “human” can oppose, and still remain human. If someone opposes these norms, and not just by having a point of view on them, but if someone opposes these norms, and this opposition is incorporated into the body, the corporeal style, of this person, and that stylized opposition is legible, then it seems that violence emerges precisely as the demand to counter that opposition. But this is not a simple difference in point of views. To counter that opposition by violence is to say, effectively, that this body, this challenge, to an accepted version of the world is and shall be unthinkable. It is an effort to expunge what renders the gendered order of intelligibility contingent, frail, open to fundamental transformation. But if we oppose this violence, then we oppose it in the name of what? What is the alternative to this violence, and for what transformation of the social world do I call?
The ethical task that emerges is to find a way in which we might encounter the difference that calls our grids of intelligibility into question without trying to foreclose the challenge that the difference delivers. This is to learn to live in the anxiety of that challenge, to feel the surety of one’s epistemological and ontological anchor go, but to be willing, in the name of the human, to allow the human to become something other than what it is traditionally assumed to be. It means that we must learn to live, and to embrace, the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not to know in advance what precise form our humanness does and will take, but to be open to its permutations, in the name of non-violence. Emanuel Levinas has taught us, wisely, that the question we pose to the Other is simple and unanswerable: “who are you?”10 The violent response is the one which does not ask, and does not seek to know. It wants to shore up what it knows, to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, their contingency, their malleability. The non-violent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other, in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be.
But the fact that we cannot predict or control what permutations of the human might arise does not mean that we must value all possible permutations of the human; it doesn’t mean that we cannot struggle for the realization of certain values, democratic and non-violent, international and anti-racist. The point is only that to struggle for those values is precisely to avow that one’s own position is not sufficient to elaborate the spectrum of the human, that one must enter into a collective work in which one’s own status as a subject must, for democratic reasons, become disoriented, exposed to what it does not know.
The point is not to apply social norms to lived social instances, to order and define them, nor is it to find justificatory mechanisms for the grounding of social norms that are extra-social (even as they operate under the name of the “social”). There are times when both of these activities do and must take place: we level judgments against criminals for illegal acts, and so subject them to a normalizing procedure; we consider our grounds for action in collective contexts, and try to find modes of deliberation and reflection about which we can agree. But neither of these is all we do with norms. Through recourse to norms, the sphere of the humanly intelligible is circumscribed, and this circumscription is consequential for any ethics and any conception of social transformation. We might say, “we must know the fundamentals of the human in order to act in such a way that we preserve and promote human life as we know it.” But what if the very categories of the human have excluded those who should be operating within its terms, who do not accept the modes of reasoning and justifying “validity claims” that have been proffered by Western forms of rationalism? Have we ever yet known the “human”? And what might it take to approach that knowing? Should we be wary of knowing it too soon or of any final or definitive knowing? If we take the field of the human for granted, then we fail to think critically—and ethically—about the consequential ways that the human is being produced, reproduced, de-produced. This latter inquiry does not exhaust the field of ethics, but I cannot imagine a responsible ethics or theory of social transformation operating without it.
Let me suggest here as a way of offering a closing discussion that the necessity of keeping our notion of the “human” open to a future articulation is essential to the project of international human rights discourse and politics. We see this time and again when the very notion of the “human” is presupposed; it is defined in advance, and in terms that are distinctively Western, very often American, and therefore parochial. The paradox emerges that the “human” at issue in human rights is already known, already defined, and yet it is supposed to be the ground for a set of rights and obligations that are international. How we move from the local to the international is a major question for international politics, but it takes a specific form for international lesbian, gay, bi-, trans- and intersex struggles as well as for feminism. And I would suggest to you that an anti-imperialist or, minimally, non-imperialist conception of international human rights must call into question what is meant by the human, and learn from the various ways and means by which it is defined across cultural venues. This means that local conceptions of what is “human” or, indeed, of what the basic conditions and needs of human life are, must be subjected to reinterpretation, since there are historical and cultural circumstances in which the “human” is defined differently, and its basic needs and, hence, basic entitlements are also defined differently.
I do not mean to be offering a reductively relativist argument. I think that a reductive relativism would say that we cannot speak of the human or of international human rights, since there are only and always local and provisional understandings of these terms, and that the generalizations themselves do violence to the specificity of the meanings in question. This is not my view. I’m not ready to rest there. Indeed, I think we are compelled to speak of the human, and of the international, and to find out in particular how “human rights” do and do not work, say, in favor of women, of what “women” are, and what they are not. But to speak in this way, and to call for social transformations in the name of women, we must also be part of a critical democratic project, one which understands that the category of the human has been used differentially and with exclusionary aims, that not all humans have been included within its terms, that the category of women has been used differentially and with exclusionary aims, and that not all women have been included within its terms, and that women have not been fully incorporated into the human, and that both categories are still in process, underway, unfulfilled. This means that we must follow a double path in politics: we must use this language, and use it to assert an entitlement to conditions of life in ways that are sensitive to the questions of sexuality and gender. We must also subject our very categories to critical scrutiny, find out the limits of their inclusivity, the presuppositions they include, the ways in which they must be expanded to encompass the diversity of what it is to be human and gendered. When the U.N. conference at Beijing met a few years ago, and we heard there a discourse on “women’s human rights” or when we have heard from the Inter-national Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, many of us detected a paradox. Women’s human rights? Lesbian and gay human rights? But think about what this coupling actually does. It performs the “human” as contingent, suggests that it has been so in the past, and continues to be in the present, defining a variable and restricted population, which may or may not include lesbians and gays, may not include women. It says that such groups have their own set of human rights, that what “human” comes to mean when we think about the human-ness of women is perhaps different than what “human” has meant when it has functioned as presumptively male. It also says that these terms are defined variably, in relation to one another. And we could certainly make a similar argument about race. Which populations have qualified as the “human” and which have not? What is the history of this category? Where are we in its history at this time?
I would suggest that in this last process, we can only rearticulate or resignify the basic categories of ontology, of being human, of being gendered, of being recognizably sexual, to the extent that we submit ourselves to a process of cultural translation. The point here is not to assimilate foreign or unfamiliar notions of gender or humanness into our own, as if it is simply a matter of incorporation. It is also a process of yielding our most fundamental categories, that is, seeing how and why they yield to a rupture and a resignification when they encounter what is unknown or not yet known. It is crucial to recognize that the notion of the human will only be built over time in and by the process of cultural translation, where it is not a translation between two languages which stay enclosed, distinct, unified. But rather, translation will compel each language to change in order to apprehend the other, and this apprehension, at the limit of what is familiar, parochial, and already known, will be the occasion for both an ethical and social transformation. It will constitute a loss, a disorientation, but also a gain.
When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life. There are at least two senses of life: one that refers to the minimum biological form of living, and another, that intervenes at the start, which establishes minimum conditions for a livable life in order to qualify for the category of human.11 This does not imply that we can disregard the merely living in favor of the “livable life,” but rather that we must ask, as we asked about gender violence, what humans require in order to maintain and reproduce the conditions of their own livability. And what do our politics need to be such that we are, in whatever way is possible, both conceptualizing the possibility of the livable life and arranging for its institutional support?
There will always be disagreement about what this means, and those who claim that a single political direction is necessitated by virtue of this commitment will be mistaken. But this is only because to live is to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future. To assume responsibility for a future, however, is not to know its direction fully in advance, since the future, especially the future with and for others, requires a certain openness and unknowingness. A certain agonism and contestation will and must also be in play. They must be in play for politics to become democratic. Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, like a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, when we impose what is right for everyone and without finding a way to enter into community, and to discover there the “right” in the midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is “right” and what is “good” consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, in knowing unknowingness at the core of what we know, and what we need, and in recognizing the sign of life—and its prospects—in the contestations which are ours to undergo with one another.
NOTES
1. A revised version of this essay was published as “Violence, Mourning, Politics” in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, no. 1 (2003): 9–7.
2. William Safire, “All Is Not Changed,” New York Times, September 27, 2001, A: 21.
3. Richard Garfield, “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children from 1990 Through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions,” in Occasional Papers (Notre Dame, IN: The Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, March 1999).
4. Ibid., 50
5. Ibid., 52.
6. Ibid., 52–3.
7. Ibid., 54.
8. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
9. Consult The Inter-national Gay and Lesbian Rights Commission (www.iglhrc.org) for a comprehensive archive of violence done internationally against sexual minorities.
10. See Adriana Cavarrero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. P. Kottman (New York: Routledge, 2000).
11. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).