# Ch. 2 _Gender Regulations_ - Foucault's "regimes of truth": truth is not simply objective knowledge waiting to be discovered. Instead, truths are historically situated, socially constructed, and inherently linked to power. - Power doesn’t just control or limit people—it actively shapes who they become. - Being subject to a rule (subjection) means your identity is created by the rule itself (subjectivation). - When a child is repeatedly told “boys don’t cry,” the child isn’t just controlled rule. Instead, the child’s identity as a “boy” is created and reinforced by this rule. - Subjection: being controlled or regulated by rules/norms of power. - For example, a young girl subjected to gendered expectations to behave "like a girl." - Subjectivation: the process by which subjects are formed through repeated performances and internalization of regulatory norms. For Butler, subjectivation always involves the potential for resistance and resignification. - For example, a young girl subjected to gendered expectations to behave "like a girl" repeatedly performs and eventually internalizes these norms, actively constructing her identity through these performances. However, the girl might embrace certain aspects (e.g., empathy) while actively resisting or reinterpreting others (e.g., submissiveness). >It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from Foucaultian scholarship: (1) regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect; and (2) to become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a subject precisely through being regulated. This second point follows from the first in that the regulatory discourses which form the subject of gender are precisely those that require and induce the subject in question. - Gender regulation isn’t simply another instance of general regulatory power, as Foucault might argue. Instead, the regulation of gender is unique and specific. >I would argue against this subsumption of gender to regulatory power that the regulatory apparatus that governs gender is one that is itself gender-specific. I do not mean to suggest that the regulation of gender is paradigmatic of regulatory power as such, but rather, that gender requires and institutes its own distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime. - A norm is not the same as a rule or law. - Norms may or may not be explicit, but typically are implicit, most noticeable by the effects they produce. >The norm governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and action to become recognizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility on the social and defining the parameters of what will and will not appear within the domain of the social. - Gender is an “apparatus”—a system of social, cultural, medical, psychological, and performative practices—that continually produces and normalizes categories like “masculine” and “feminine.” - To assume that gender is only either "masculine" or "feminine" is to naturalize them, miss that gender is socially and historically contingent, and forecloses and marginalizes other identities outside the binary, such as transgender or nonbinary identities. >Gender is not exactly what one “is” nor is it precisely what one “has.” Gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes. To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance. - Lacanian theory argues there are timeless, universal symbolic laws that govern desire, gender, and sexuality (like incest prohibitions or the symbolic position of the father). - Contemporary cultural studies, by contrast, sees culture as historically situated and changeable. - For Lacan, the dictates of the symbolic law (such as the idea that one can only be a “son” or “daughter” in relation to the father, etc.) precede any individual social arrangements. >In what follows, I hope to show how the notion of culture that becomes transmuted into the “symbolic” for Lacanian psychoanalysis is very different from the notion of culture that remains current within the contemporary field of cultural studies, such that the two enterprises are often understood as hopelessly opposed. I also plan to argue that any claim to establish the rules that “regulate desire” in an inalterable and eternal realm of law has limited use for a theory that seeks to understand the conditions under which the social transformation of gender is possible. - Butler acknowledges the influence of this structuralist legacy but also its limitations. The idea that symbolic norms (like “father” or “mother”) are universal and separate from social practices cannot hold up to scrutiny. These symbolic positions are actually formed and stabilized through repeated social practices. - Alterations in how family systems are formed and conceived require a poststructural critique of psychoanalysis. >Lastly, I hope to show that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche. - Lacanian theory is tautological: it uses the supposed authority of symbolic structures (like the position of the “Father”) to support the theory itself. - “The symbolic order can’t be changed. How do we know? Because it resists every attempt to change it.” >The authority of the theory exposes its own tautological defense within the fact that the symbolic survives every and any contestation of its authority. It is not only a theory, that is, that insists upon masculine and feminine as symbolic positions which are finally beyond all contestation and which set the limit to contestation as such, but one that relies on the very authority it describes to shore up the authority of its own descriptive claims. - We can contest symbolic authority (gender norms, identities, prohibitions) as historically contingent, subject to gradual transformation—without naively accepting radical free choice. >To contest symbolic authority is not necessarily a return to the “ego” or classical liberal notions of freedom, rather to do so is to insist that the norm in its necessary temporality is opened to a displacement and subversion from within. - Lévi-Strauss believes there are universal cultural rules that govern sexual relationships, creating “positions” for people within a society (father, mother, wife, husband). These universal rules appear “indifferent”— timeless and unchanging. >According to Lévi-Strauss the rules that govern sexual exchange and which, accordingly, produce viable subject positions on the basis of that regulation of sexuality are distinct from the individuals who abide by those rules and occupy such positions. That human actions are regulated by such laws but do not have the power to transform the substance and aim of their laws appears to be the consequence of a conception of law that is indifferent to the content that it regulates. - Butler draws on a reading of Foucault by French philosopher Pierre Macherey to articulate how norms work . Macherey, as Butler cites, argues that norms “are not independent and self-subsisting entities or abstractions but must be understood as forms of action." - Butler emphasizes that norms are immanent to social activities – they do not descend from above fully formed, but are continuously regenerated by our adherence to them. - Crucially, this view also locates the potential site of change: if a norm exists only in its repeated performance, then altering how one performs or cites that norm can, over time, alter the norm itself. >I mentioned above that the norm cannot be reduced to any of its instances, but I would add: neither can the norm be fully extricated from its instantiations. The norm is not exterior to its field of application. Not only is the norm responsible for producing its field of application, according to Macheray (187), but the norm produces itself in the production of that field. The norm is actively conferring reality; indeed, only by virtue of its repeated power to confer reality is the norm constituted as a norm. - Sexual harassment laws codes based on MacKinnon’s logic (gender produced via heterosexual sexual domination) don’t just protect against harassment; they unintentionally reinforce gender norms by assuming men are always dominant, women always submissive. >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. - Regulation makes certain behaviors seem normal, and also a form of discipline and surveillance that shapes and produces people, not merely a restrictive force. - When enforced as norms, regulations temporarily hide that norms are historically made-up and open to challenge. - Regulations don’t just stop certain actions; they quietly create and enforce ideals of what a “proper,” legible person should be, thereby shaping people and their lives. >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. >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. # Ch. 3 _Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality_ - Butler opens the chapter referencing Foucault's _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." - Justice is also about who is recognized as a full person by society's norms of the body. >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, not 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. - A coherent gender is a presupposition of humanity and informs how we relate to ourselves. People outside gender norms often seek recognition from medical, psychological, or legal authorities. >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. - David Reimer was born Bruce Reimer with XY chromosomes, and at the age of eight months, his penis was severely injured during a botched circumcision. - Following the advisement of psychologist John Money, David had his testicles removed, was renamed Brenda, and was raised as a girl. - Between the ages of 9 to 11, David realized he wasn't a girl. David refused estrogen and vaginoplasty, preferred male activities, and disliked developing breasts. - The case was reviewed by Milton Diamond and David decided to start living as a boy, David, at age fourteen, receiving male hormones shots, having his breasts removed, and having phalloplasty. **Social constructionists** (Money, certain feminists) versus **biological essentialists** (Diamond, Colapinto): 1. The social constructionist view, Money's original thesis. - Gender identity is flexible, shaped primarily by socialization. 2. Biological essentialist view, followed by Diamond (sex researcher who believes in the hormonal basis of gender identity) and Colapinto (journalist critical of Money). - Gender identity is innate, unchangeable, and linked to biology. - Diamond argued that intersexed infants with a Y chromosome, the source of persistent feelings of masculinity, ought to be raised as a boy. - Cheryl Chase, the founder of the Intersex Society, argues that assigning a gender for social reasons is understandable, but that forced surgery is deeply harmful. - Anne Fausto-Sterling supports chase. - Gender identity is complicated and doesn't neatly align with anatomy. - Upon maturing, a child can choose to change genders or elect for medical intervention, emphasizing informed, consensual choices. - Both social constructionism and biological essentialism wrongly insist on rigidly enforcing binary gender norms through coercive interventions. - Money imposes "malleable" gender identity by coercively subjecting people to social conditioning and medical intervention. - Diamond simply assumes identity is "naturally" determined by the presence of a Y chromosome, justifying invasive medical treatment. >Malleability is, as it were, violently imposed. And naturalness is artificially induced. - David's story, in fact, doesn't support neither constructionism nor essentialism. >But my point in recounting this story to you and its appropriation for the purposes of gender theory is to suggest that the story as we have it does not actually supply evidence for either thesis, and to suggest that there may be another way of reading this story, one that neither confirms nor denies the theory of social construction, one that neither affirms nor denies gender essentialism. - Rather, what we must focus on, and what is often ignored, is how David's gender identity was formed and reported under intense medical scrutiny and normative pressures, subjecting him to genital examinations and simulated sexual acts with his own sibling. >Indeed, what I hope to underscore here is the disciplinary framework within which Brenda/David develops a discourse of self-reporting and self-understanding, since it constitutes the grid of intelligibility by which his own humanness is both questioned and asserted. \[...] There was an apparatus of knowledge applied to the person and body of Brenda/David that is rarely, if ever, taken into account as part of what David is responding to when he reports on his feelings of true gender.