Biddy Martin

“Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias” (1994)

“Of course, the central issue for many lesbian critics continues to be visibility, the (in)visibilityof the lesbian femme's incongruity and the consequent problems for lesbian representation and lesbian identity. These problems become particularly interesting when, as Tyler suggests, butch-femme roles comment parodically on heterosexuality or on conventional gender roles, but generate that parody at the expense of some other difference. ‘Phallic divestiture by one means,’ according to Tyler, ‘can even be congruent with phallic investiture by another.’ Or, as Butler puts it in her recent work, ‘the symbolic — that register of regulatory ideality — is also and always a racial industry, indeed, the reiterated practice of racializing interpellations’ [Bodies 18]. Whereas Tyler warns against phallic investiture, Butler argues for an investiture that exposes the degree to which symbolic authority barely veils a male Imaginary, that is itself the effect of a changeable Symbolic. That exposure has the potential to redefine both symbolic authority and the desire to be invested with or desired by it. Butler's readings analyze the specific ways in which racial and sexual identities are articulated in and through one another. Whereas Butler focuses on the more positive possibilities of reconfiguration,Tyler suggests that there can be no benign investment in symbolic authority, at least under its current organization. Like Butler, I am convinced of the importance of rendering lesbian desire legible, despite the fact that intelligibility is not innocent. Like Tyler, I am interested in the ways in which racial markers can be used problematically in the effort to mark sexual differences between women and make lesbian desire visible.” (113)

“From the perspectives of those of us who have experienced the pain of being cast as queer in the most negative possible terms, or whose sense of self involves rebelliousness against the normalizing constraints of conventional femininity, the punishments that accrue to femininity itself have, perhaps, become less visible than the punitive consequences of failing to conform, and our defenses against the vulnerabilities and degradations associated with femininity have become stronger. Queer theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible differences from norms that are then exposed to be norms, not natures or inevitabilities. Gender and sexual identities are arranged, in much of this work, around demonstrably defiant deviations and configurations. Surfaces, then, take priority over interiors and depths and even rule conventional approaches to them out of bounds as inevitably disciplinary and constraining. What requires more emphasis, in this context, is that the subordination of women does not follow simply from the failure to conform to convention, but also from the performance or embodiment of it. Reconfiguring gender requires reconfiguring the institutional and discursive conditions that structure and are structured by regulatory norms, but also reconfiguring interiorities, and, in particular, distributions of power, autonomy, attachment, and vulnerability.

I have become more convinced that too thorough an evacuation of interiority, too total a collapse of the boundaries between public and private, and too exclusive an understanding of psychic life as the effect of normalization can impoverish the language we have available for thinking about selves and relationships, even as they apparently enrich our vocabularies for thinking about social construction. There are connections between and among the emphasis on visible differences from norms, the evacuation of interiorities, the reduction of subjectivity to effects of power, and the invisibility or fixity attributed to the femme or to femininity. Women fade again in the face of visible signifiers of difference from norms.” (105-106)

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