Undoing Gender (20 page)

On the other hand, to pursue state legitimation in order to repair these injuries brings with it a host of new problems, if not new heartaches. The failure to secure state recognition for one’s intimate arrangements can be experienced only as a form of derealization if the terms of state legitimation are those that maintain hegemonic control over the norms of recognition, in other words, if the state monopolizes the resources of recognition. Are there not other ways of feeling possible, intelligible, even real, apart from the sphere of state recognition?

Should there not be other ways? It makes sense that the lesbian and gay movement would turn to the state, given the movement’s history: the current drive for gay marriage is in some ways a response to AIDS and, in particular, a shamed response, one in which a gay community seeks to disavow its so-called promiscuity, one in which we appear as healthy and normal and capable of sustaining monogamous relations over time. This, of course, brings me back to the question, a question posed poignantly by Michael Warner, of whether the drive to become recognizable within the existing norms of legitimacy requires that we subscribe to a practice that delegitimates those sexual lives structured outside of the bonds of marriage and the presumptions of monogamy.
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Is this a disavowal that the queer community is willing to make? And with what social consequence? How is it that we give the power of recognition over to the state at the moment that we insist that we are unreal and illegitimate without it? Are there other resources by which we might become recognizable or mobilize to challenge the existing regimes within which the terms of recognizability take place?

One can see the terrain of the dilemma here: on the one hand, living without norms of recognition results in significant suffering and forms of disenfranchisement that confound the very distinctions among psychic, cultural, and material consequences. On the other hand, the demand to be recognized, which is a very powerful political demand, can lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy, to a precipitous foreclosure of the sexual field, and to new ways of supporting and extending state power, if it does not institute a critical challenge to the very norms of recognition supplied and required by state legitimation. Indeed, in making the bid to the state for recognition, we effectively restrict the domain of what will become recognizable as legitimate sexual arrangements, thus fortifying the state as the source for norms of recognition and eclipsing other possibilities in civil society and cultural life. To demand and receive recognition according to norms that legitimate marriage and delegitimate forms of sexual alliance outside of marriage, or to norms that are articulated in a critical relation to marriage, is to displace the site of delegitimation from one part of the queer community to another or, rather, to transform a collective delegitimation into a selective one. Such a practice is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with a radically democratic, sexually progressive movement. What would it mean to exclude from the field of potential legitimation those who are outside of marriage, those who live nonmonogamously, those who live alone, those who are in whatever arrangements they are in that are not the marriage form? I would add a caveat here: we do not always know what we mean by “the state” when we are referring to the kind of “state legitimation” that occurs in marriage. The state is not a simple unity and its parts and operations are not always coordinated with one another. The state is not reducible to law, and power is not reducible to state power. It would be wrong to understand the state as operating with a single set of interests or to gauge its effects as if they are unilaterally successful. I think the state can also be worked and exploited. Moreover, social policy, which involves the implementation of law to local instances, can very often be the site where law is challenged, thrown to a court to adjudicate, and where new kinship arrangements stand a chance of gaining new legitimacy. Of course, certain propositions remain highly controversial: interracial adoption, adoption by single men, by gay male couples, by parties who are unmarried, by kinship structures in which there are more than two adults. So there are reasons to worry about requesting state recognition for intimate alliances, and so becoming part of an extension of state power into the socius. But do these reasons outweigh those we might have for seeking recognition and entitlement through entering legal contract? Contracts work in different ways—and surely differently in the United States and French contexts—to garner state authority and to subject the individuals who enter into contracts to regulatory control. But even if we argue that in France, contracts are conceived as individual entitlements and so less tethered to state control, the very form of individuation is thus sustained by state legitimation, even if, or precisely when, the state appears to be relatively withdrawn from the contractual process itself.

In this way, the norms of the state work very differently in these disparate national contexts. In the United States, the norms of recognition supplied by the state not only often fail to describe or regulate existing social practice but become the site of articulation for a fantasy of normativity that projects and delineates an ideological account of kinship, at the moment when it is undergoing social challenge and dissemination. Thus, it seems that the appeal to the state is at once an appeal to a fantasy already institutionalized by the state and a leave-taking from existing social complexity in the hope of becoming “socially coherent” at last. What this means as well is that there is a site to which we can turn, understood as the state, which will finally render us coherent, a turn that commits us to the fantasy of state power. Jacqueline Rose persuasively argues that “if the state has meaning only ‘partly as something existing,’ if it rests on the belief of individuals that it ‘exists or should exist,’ then it starts to look uncannily like what psychoanalysis would call an ‘as if’ phenomenon.”
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Its regulations do not always seek to order what exists, but to figure social life in certain imaginary ways. The incommensurability between state stipulation and existing social life means that this gap must be covered over for the state to continue to exercise its authority and to exemplify the kind of coherence which it is expected to confer on its subjects. As Rose reminds us, “It is because the state has become so alien and distant from the people it is meant to represent that, according to Engels, it has to rely, more and more desperately, on the sacredness and inviolability of its own laws.”
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So there are two sides to this coin; yet I do not mean to resolve this dilemma in favor of one or the other but to develop a critical practice that is mindful of both. I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship. This latter would also involve a critical relation to the desire for legitimation as such. It is also crucial that we question the assumption that the state furnish these norms, and that we come to think critically about what the state has become during these times or, indeed, how it has become a site for the articulation of a fantasy that seeks to deny or overturn what these times have brought us.

As we return to the French debate, then, it seems important to remember that the debate about laws is at once a debate about what kinds of sexual arrangements and forms of kinship can be admitted to exist or deemed to be possible, and what the limits of imaginability might be. For many who opposed the PACS, or who, minimally, voiced skeptical views about it, the very status of culture was called into question by the variability of legitimated sexual alliance. Immigration and gay parenting were figured as challenging the fundamentals of a culture that had already been transformed, but that sought to deny the transformation it had already undergone.
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To understand this we have to consider how the term “culture” operates, and how, in the French context, the term became invoked in these debates to designate not the culturally variable formations of human life, but the universal conditions for human intelligibility.

Natural, Cultural, State Law

Although Agacinski, the French philosopher, is not a Lacanian and, indeed, hardly a psychoanalyst, we do see in her commentary, which was prominent in the French debate, a certain anthropological belief that is shared by many Lacanian followers and other psychoanalytic practitioners in France and elsewhere.
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The belief is that culture itself requires that a man and a woman produce a child, and that the child have this dual point of reference for its own initiation into the symbolic order, where the symbolic order consists of a set of rules that order and support our sense of reality and cultural intelligibility.

She writes that gay parenting is both unnatural and a threat to culture in the sense that sexual difference, which is, in her view, irrefutably biological, gains its significance in the cultural sphere as the foundation of life in procreation: “This foundation (of sexual difference) is generation; this is the difference between the paternal and maternal roles. There must be the masculine and the feminine to give life.” Over and against this life-giving heterosexuality at the foundation of culture is the specter of homosexual parenting, a practice that not only departs from nature and from culture but also centers on the dangerous and artificial fabrication of the human and is figured as a kind of violence or destruction. She writes: “It takes a certain ‘violence,’ if one is homosexual, to want a child [
Il faut une certaine ‘violence’, quand on est homosexuel, pour vouloir un enfant
]… I think that there is no absolute right to a child, since the right implies an increasingly artificial fabrication of children. In the interests of the child, one cannot efface its double origin.” The “double origin” is its invariable beginning with a man and woman, a man who occupies the place of the father, and a woman who occupies the place of the mother. “This mixed origin, which is natural,” she writes, “is also a cultural and symbolic foundation.”
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The argument that there must be a father and a mother as a double point of reference for the child’s origin rests on a set of presumptions which resonate with the Lévi-Straussian position in
The Elementary
Structures of Kinship
in 1949. Although Agacinski is not a Lévi-Straussian, her framework nevertheless borrows from a set of structuralist premises about culture that have been revived and redeployed in the context of the present debate. My point is less to hold the views of Lévi-Strauss responsible for the terms of the present debate than to ask what purpose the reanimation of these views serves within the contemporary political horizon, considering that in anthropology, the Lévi-Straussian views promulgated in the late 1940s are generally considered surpassed and are no longer owned in the same form by Lévi-Strauss himself.
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For Lévi-Strauss, the Oedipal drama was not to be construed as a developmental moment or phase. It consists instead of a prohibition that is at work in the inception of language, one that works at all times to facilitate the transition from nature to culture for all emerging subjects. Indeed, the bar that prohibits the sexual union with the mother is not arrived at in time, but is, in some sense,
there
as a precondition of individuation, a presumption and support of cultural intelligibility itself. No subject emerges without this bar or prohibition as its condition, and no cultural intelligibility can be claimed without first passing through this founding structure. Indeed, the mother is disallowed because she belongs to the father, so if this prohibition is fundamental, and it is understood, then the father and the mother exist as logically necessary features of the prohibition itself. Now, psychoanalysis will explain that the father and the mother do not have to actually exist; they can be positions or imaginary figures, but that they have to figure structurally in some way. Agacinski’s point is also ambiguous in this way, but she will insist that they must have existed, and that their existence has to be understood by the child as essential to his or her origin.

To understand how this prohibition becomes foundational to a conception of culture is to follow the way in which the Oedipal complex in Freud becomes recast as an inaugural structure of language and the subject in Lacan, something I cannot do in this context and probably have done too many times before.
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What I want to underscore here is the use of Oedipus to establish a certain conception of culture that has rather narrow consequences for both formations of gender and sexual arrangements and that implicitly figures culture as a whole, a unity, one that has a stake in reproducing itself, and its singular wholeness through the reproduction of the child. When Agacinski argues, for instance, that for every child to emerge in nonpsychotic way, there must be a father and a mother, she appears at first not to be making the empirical point that a father and mother must be present and known through all phases of child rearing. She means something more ideal: that there must at least be a psychic point of reference for mother and father and a narrative effort to recuperate the male and female parent, even if one or the other is never present and never known. But if this were guaranteed without the social arrangement of heterosexuality, she would have no reason to oppose lesbian and gay adoption.

So it would appear that social arrangements support and maintain the symbolic structure, even as the symbolic structure legitimates the social arrangement. For Agacinski, heterosexual coitus, regardless of the parent or parents who rear the child, is understood as the origin of the child, and that origin will have a symbolic importance.