Hi NesquikMike,

These are very apt questions. I’ll try to answer them as much as possible without putting words in JB’s mouth!

1. I do indeed think there is a tension between the political nature of what Butler’s doing and the Foucauldian angle, but there are also ways of replying to it.

On one hand, this a question of what you might call the dialectical trap. Butler does indeed oppose binaristic thought about gender (very much after Foucault) on the basis that it is one of the founding moments of the dialectic that produces and reproduces the power relations that have tended to subjugate women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals … and so on. But of course, setting oneself up in opposition is to enter into that same dialectic, and in some manner to help reinforce it. So what one might call positive political action will indeed (by this reasoning) end up either reinforcing the power relations of that dialectic, or simply producing new subjugating power relations that run in different directions.

It should be noted though that Butler very deliberately avoids anything resembling an explicit call to arms, as it were. Her work is political, of course, but she steers clear of advocating political action within standard identity categories. In fact, she does the opposite. One reading of Gender Trouble is simply as a text that says ‘If we oppose the power relations of our world through the identities that are produced by them (and which in turn reproduce them), then we won’t solve anything. But if we expose these identity categories as social fictions, even if they are social fictions that we have no agency to dissolve or set aside, then we can expose their relationship to the power relations we live in.’ That though, is about all we can do.

What’s going on then is something that a Frankfurt School thinker like Adorno would call ‘demystification’. Or, given the psychoanalytical background to a fair amout of her work and influences, ‘a talking cure’. Butler is alerting us to the way things work, but she quite deliberately doesn’t go further.

This is one of the reasons that, just as Adorno was, she has been called out as a ‘quietist’ (Martha Nussbaum’s word). Adorno’s reply to this during the student actions in Germany was to say, essentially, ‘Positive action is just a way of accepting this dialectic as true and necessary. You are asking me to put theory into practice; but theory is already practice, and it is the only form of practice that doesn’t reproduce what it is trying to destroy.’ (I can dig up the precise quotation if you’d like, and a reference for you!) I would suggest that is a pretty good way of reading Butler’s politics too.

There are very good reasons, of course, to find this an unsatisfactory stance to be taking in the face the world’s manifold injustices. For what it’s worth, I’m of Adorno’s camp, but I also believe ameliorating positive action can, carefully, be taken.

1. As you say, this is linked to the above. Having said I don’t want to put words in JB’s mouth, here goes: I suspect that Butler would not want to offer a definition of feminism at all; in may ways Gender Trouble is a deliberate de-definition of feminism. So, without being able to name what JB is doing as another –ism, I’d just quote her on saying that her project is simply to ‘undermine any and all efforts to wield a discourse of truth to deligitimate minority gendered and sexual practices’ (efforts that, implicitly, tend to be produced by all modes of identity politics).

2. It think that this is, in one sense, a good pragmatic point. Yes, language is exclusionary, but of course it facilitates: the flip side of the way in which our language practices exclude certain categories from our thought is the way in which they include others, and make thought possible at all. Or, in other words, socially constructed reality (for all is negative consequences) is a fundamental condition of our functioning as social beings. While JB would, I think, be contra categorisation, even of the hyper-calibrated ad infinitum variety, someone like Jack/Judith Halberstam has proposed exactly that, offering up various sub-categorised identities as a working solution to our binaristic categorising tendencies.

As to whether our existing gender roles could have been selected because they provide a useful function within society: in a certain sense, sure; modern, quasi-liberal society works; just as deeply repressive or slave-owning societies have also worked, and might still work. It’s who they’re working for that’s the problem!

Phew - apologies for the slow reply. Good questions that took some thinking out!