Judith Butler, Gender, Radical Democracy: What’s Lacking?

Abstract

While Judith Butler may be recognised foremost as a theorist of gender, this paper seeks to chart the status of democracy in her work.  Butler’s work on gender is firmly located within a “radical democratic” politics, and it is in the name of a notion of radical democracy that Butler’s work proceeds. This paper, then, critically interrogates the nexus of gender and democratic politics in Butler’s work.

This paper is in two parts. The first takes issue with Butler’s account of the relationship of gender and materiality. Butler rejects any appeal to the pre-discursive status of sexual difference.  Instead, configuration of power relations, a particular representation of the outside to discourse becomes reified as material, natural, prediscursive. And her answer to this question is, famously, her performativity thesis, her argument that matter should be seen as the product of “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter” (26). This approach explains her understanding of what is denoted by “sex”: it comes to appear natural, material, only as an effect of reiterative practices.

This rendering of the relationship of matter to discourse, I contend, serves to entrench a radical disjunction between them.  Rather than refiguring ontology as itself forceful, dynamic and wholly political, she reasserts the primacy of the discursive against the material, and treats the realm of signification, because variable, contestable and dynamic, as the proper locus of the political.

The second part of the paper suggests that the problems with Butler’s account of the relationship of gender and materiality persist in her strategy for radical democratic transformation.  For Butler, what acts as the motor of political futurity is that any attempt to describe the pre-discursive “reality” of a particular situation will not be a “true” account, but rather a contingent articulation generated from within the realm of discourse. The contingency and futurity of the political is guaranteed by the referent’s insistent demand to be represented, and the fact that this demand is always responded to imperfectly.  What results is that any rendering of the contents of the outside to signification is generated from within signification.  Because never fully representational, signification is engaged in an endless process of reiteration that, over time, gains the appearance of ontological reality.  It is in the possibility of articulating this process differently that Butler locates the potential for radical democracy.

The paper gestures towards a more radical refiguring of the relationship between matter and the political than Butler’s work allows, suggesting that we must instead acknowledge that matter itself is variable, and that democratic politics, far from being based upon the inevitable absence of the ontological from signification, is an eminently material transformation.