Gender & Racial Trouble

Within Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, she attempts to disrupt gender as a means of identity. She argues that politics complicate this identification further by acting as a facet. Politics are a result of cultural imposition, and is used to signify gender. Furthermore, politics confuse Butler’s gender when split into various categories, such as ethnicity, sexuality and class. Similar to Butler, Louis Gates Jr. critiques the effects of politics and ethnicity through displays of biological and social oppression. Butler and Gates discuss the significance of politics in disrupting gender and racial identity.

              Bulter examines feminist politics throughout her text; she questions its role in classification. “The question of “the subject” is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not “show” once the juridical structure of politics has been established” (Butler 3). Gender uses juridical structures to establish its meaning. In other words, gender is on a spectrum, a spectrum of power; men have the greatest amount of power, thus feminism explores the effects that has on a woman’s identity. Politics seems to merely skim the division between gender roles, however, Butler exhibits that gender identification is not black or white,

“If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities” (4).

             There is a grey area between male and female. As Butler mentions, there are many facets that constitute how a “subject” can be properly identified. Though Gates emphasizes race as biological earlier on in his essay, he develops many overlaps between the political effects in both one’s ethnicity and gender. “Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which–more often than not–also have fundamentally opposed economic interests” (Gates 5). Imagine if Gates had replaced ‘race’ with ‘gender’. To some extent, race and gender can overlap and be viewed as a construct of the social system. For example, Gates discusses the first African-American woman to be published, Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley’s struggle eludes how being African-American and a woman can hinder identification. Whereas author’s like Rene Descartes’ work “was privileged, or valorized, above all other human characteristics” (8).

            Gender and race can be viewed as culturally constructed. Like Butler states, “What sense does it make to extend representation to subjects who are constructed through the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject?” (8). Butler and Gates examine the power that oppresses the identification that is so socially skewed. “When the relevant “culture” that “constructs” gender is terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny” (11). With this in mind, politics still have the power to re-evaluate and re-distribute the power that so severely dominates.