Undoing Gender (10 page)

To the extent that gender norms are
reproduced
, they are invoked and cited by bodily practices that also have the capacity to alter norms in the course of their citation. One cannot offer a full narrative account of the citational history of the norm: whereas narrativity does not fully conceal its history, neither does it reveal a single origin.

One important sense of regulation, then, is that persons are regulated by gender, and that this sort of regulation operates as a condition of cultural intelligibility for any person. To veer from the gender norm is to produce the aberrant example that regulatory powers (medical, psychiatric, and legal, to name a few) may quickly exploit to shore up the rationale for their own continuing regulatory zeal. The question remains, though, what departures from the norm constitute something other than an excuse or rationale for the continuing authority of the norm? What departures from the norm disrupt the regulatory process itself?

The question of surgical “correction” for intersexed children is one case in point. There the argument is made that children born with irregular primary sexual characteristics are to be “corrected” in order to fit in, feel more comfortable, achieve normality. Corrective surgery is sometimes performed with parental support and in the name of normalization, and the physical and psychic costs of the surgery have proven to be enormous for those persons who have been submitted, as it were, to the knife of the norm.
¹³
The bodies produced through such a regulatory enforcement of gender are bodies in pain, bearing the marks of violence and suffering. Here the ideality of gendered morphology is quite literally incised in the flesh.

Gender is thus a regulatory norm, but it is also one that is produced in the service of other kinds of regulations. For instance, sexual harassment codes tend to assume, following the reasoning of Catharine MacKinnon, that harassment consists of the systematic sexual subordination of women at the workplace, and that men are generally in the position of harasser, and women, as the harassed. For MacKinnon, this seems to be the consequence of a more fundamental sexual subordination of women. Although these regulations seek to constrain sexually demeaning behavior at the workplace, they also carry within them certain tacit norms of gender. In a sense, the implicit regulation of gender takes place through the explicit regulation of sexuality.

For MacKinnon, the hierarchical structure of heterosexuality in which men are understood to subordinate women is what produces gender: “Stopped as an attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women” (
Feminism Unmodified
6–7).

If gender is the congealed form that the sexualization of inequality takes, then the sexualization of inequality precedes gender, and gender is its effect. But can we even conceptualize the sexualization of inequality without a prior conception of gender? Does it make sense to claim that men subordinate women sexually if we don’t first have an idea of what men and women are? MacKinnon maintains, however, that there is no constitution of gender outside of this form of sexuality and, by implication, outside of this subordinating and exploitative form of sexuality.

In proposing the regulation of sexual harassment through recourse to this kind of analysis of the systematic character of sexual subordination, MacKinnon institutes a regulation of another kind: to have a gender means to have entered already into a heterosexual relationship of subordination; there appear to be no gendered people who are outside of such relationships; there appear to be no non-subordinating heterosexual relations; there appear to be no non-heterosexual relations; there appears to be no same-sex harassment.

This form of reducing gender to sexuality has thus given way to two separate but overlapping concerns within contemporary queer theory. The first move is to separate sexuality from gender, so that to have a gender does not presuppose that one engages sexual practice in any particular way, and to engage in a given sexual practice, anal sex, for instance, does not presuppose that one is a given gender.
¹⁴
The second and related move within queer theory is to argue that gender is not reducible to hierarchical heterosexuality, that it takes different forms when contextualized by queer sexualities, indeed, that its binariness cannot be taken for granted outside the heterosexual frame, that gender itself is internally unstable, that transgendered lives are evidence of the breakdown of any lines of causal determinism between sexuality and gender. The dissonance between gender and sexuality is thus affirmed from two different perspectives; the one seeks to show possibilities for sexuality that are not constrained by gender in order to break the causal reductiveness of arguments that bind them; the other seeks to show possibilities for gender that are not predetermined by forms of hegemonic heterosexuality.
¹⁵

The problem with basing sexual harassment codes on a view of sexuality in which gender is the concealed effect of sexualized subordination within heterosexuality is that certain views of gender and certain views of sexuality are reinforced through the reasoning. In MacKinnon’s theory, gender is produced in the scene of sexual subordination, and sexual harassment is the explicit moment of the institution of heterosexual subordination. What this means, effectively, is that sexual harassment becomes the allegory for the production of gender.

In my view, the sexual harassment codes become themselves the instrument by which gender is thus reproduced.

It is the regulation of gender, argues legal scholar Katherine Franke, that remains not only uninterrogated in this view, but unwittingly abet-ted. Franke writes:

What is wrong with the world MacKinnon describes in her work is not exhausted by the observation that men dominate women, although that is descriptively true in most cases. Rather, the problem is far more systematic. By reducing sexism to only that which is done to women by men, we lose sight of the underlying ideology that makes sexism so powerful… The subordination of women by men is part of a larger social practice that creates gendered bodies—feminine women and masculine men. (“What’s Wrong With Sexual Harassment?” 761–62) The social punishments that follow upon transgressions of gender include the surgical correction of intersexed persons, the medical and psychiatric pathologization and criminalization in several countries including the United States of “gender dysphoric” people, the harassment of gender-troubled persons on the street or in the workplace, employment discrimination, and violence. The prohibition of sexual harassment of women by men that is based on a rationale that assumes heterosexual subordination as the exclusive scene of sexuality and gender thus itself becomes a regulatory means for the production and maintenance of gender norms within heterosexuality.
¹⁶

At the outset of this essay, I suggested several ways to understand the problem of “regulation.” A regulation is that which
makes regular
, but it is also, following Foucault, a mode of
discipline and surveillance
within late modern forms of power; it does not merely constrict and negate and is, therefore, not merely a juridical form of power. Insofar as regulations operate by way of norms, they become key moments in which the ideality of the norm is reconstituted, its historicity and vulnerability temporarily put out of play. As an operation of power, regulation can take a legal form, but its legal dimension does not exhaust the sphere of its efficaciousness. As that which relies on categories that render individuals socially interchangeable with one another, regulation is thus bound up with the process of
normalization
. Statutes that govern who the beneficiaries of welfare entitlements will be are actively engaged in producing the norm of the welfare recipient. Those that regulate gay speech in the military are actively engaged in producing and maintaining the norm of what a man or what a woman will be, what speech will be, where sexuality will and will not be. State regulations on lesbian and gay adoption as well as single-parent adoptions not only restrict that activity, but refer to and reinforce an ideal of what parents should be, for example, that they should be partnered, and what counts as a legitimate partner. Hence, regulations that seek merely to curb certain specified activities (sexual harassment, welfare fraud, sexual speech) perform another activity that, for the most part, remains unmarked: the production of the parameters of personhood, that is, making persons according to abstract norms that at once condition and exceed the lives they make—and break.

3. Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality

I would like to take my point of departure from a question of power, the power of regulation, a power that determines, more or less, what we are, what we can be.
¹
I am not speaking of power only in a juridical or positive sense, but I am referring to the workings of a certain regulatory regime, one that informs the law, and also exceeds the law. When we ask, what are the conditions of intelligibility by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized, by which some subject becomes the subject of human love, we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all. So I propose to broach the relationship between variable orders of intelligibility and the genesis and knowability of the human.

And it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly define intelligibility.

This is what Foucault describes as the politics of truth, a politics that pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? This is what Foucault describes as “the desubjugation of the subject in the play of… the politics of truth” (“What is Critique?” 39).

Another way of putting this is the following: “what, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” This question does not quite broach the question of what it is not to be, or what it is to occupy the place of not-being within the field of being. What it is to live, breathe, attempt to love neither as fully negated nor as fully acknowledged as being. This relationship, between intelligibility and the human is an urgent one; it carries a certain theoretical urgency, precisely at those points where the human is encountered at the limits of intelligibility itself. I would like to suggest that this interrogation has something important to do with justice. Justice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated or how societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisions about what a person is, and what social norms must be honored and expressed for “personhood” to become allocated, how we do or do not recognize animate others as persons depending on whether or not we recognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other. The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered being, a criterion that posits coherent gender as a presupposition of humanness, is not only one which, justly or unjustly, governs the recognizability of the human, but one that informs the ways we do or do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire, and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender and, hence, the unrecognizability of one’s personhood.

I want to consider a legal and psychiatric case of a person who was determined without difficulty to be a boy at the time of birth, then determined again within a few months to be a girl, who decided in his teenage years to become a man. This is the story of David Reimer, whose situation is referred to as “the Joan/John case,” one that was brought to public attention by the BBC and in various popular, psychological, and medical journals. I base my analysis on several documents: an article written by Dr. Milton Diamond, an endocrinologist, and the popular book
As Nature Made Him
, written by John Colapinto, a journalist for
Rolling Stone
, as well as several publications by John Money, and critical commentaries offered by Anne Fausto-Sterling and Suzanne Kessler in their important recent books.
²
David Reimer has now talked openly to the media and has chosen to live outside the pseudonym reserved for him by Milton Diamond and his colleagues. David became “Brenda” at a certain point in his childhood which I discuss below, and so instead of referring to him as Joan and John, neither of which is his name, I will use the name he uses.

David was born with XY chromosomes and at the age of eight months, his penis was accidentally burned and severed in the course of a surgical operation to rectify phimosis, a condition in which the foreskin thwarts urination. This is a relatively risk-free procedure, but the doctor who performed it on David was using a new machine, apparently one that he hadn’t used before, one that his colleagues declared was unnecessary for the job. He had trouble making the machine work, so he increased the power to the machine to the point that it effectively burned away a major portion of the penis. The parents were, of course, appalled and shocked, and they were, according to their own description, unclear how to proceed. Then one evening, about a year after this event, they were watching television, and there they encountered John Money, talking about transsexual and intersexual surgery, offering the view that if a child underwent surgery and started socialization as a gender different from the one originally assigned at birth, the child could develop normally, adapt perfectly well to the new gender, and live a happy life. The parents wrote to Money and he invited them to Baltimore, and so David was subsequently seen at Johns Hopkins University, at which point the strong recommendation was made by Dr. John Money that David be raised as a girl. The parents agreed, and the doctors removed the testicles, made some preliminary preparation for surgery to create a vagina, but decided to wait until Brenda, the newly named child, was older to complete the task.