The trouble with Gender in a Linguistic World

It was to my complete and utter surprise that Helen Keller formed an experience of the world as intricate as mine - and that statement alone may allude to the fact that as an "abled" person, my understanding of the disabled experience is flawed and doesn't understand the complexities of such a life. Keller's observations of the world, even through her loss of senses, is elegant, eloquent, and an insightful look at discourse in the way that Burke himself sought to study representation and symbolic action. Burke and Keller's observations parallel in uncannily similar ways - their philosophies both call a need to analytically restructure the symbol systems we have created that define our realities instead of simply critiquing the "realities" themselves. Keller asserts, "We cannot be free until we know the nature of our bondage and examine the chains that bind us" (341, Keller). Similarly, Butler's theory on gender follows a structure much like Keller and Burke's: "Feminist critique ought to also understand how the category of "women" is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought" (4, Butler).

The cultural systems we have built are largely linguistic - this is something argued not only by Burke, but Butler as well. Burke asserts, "...just how overwhelmingly much of our reality has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so "down to earth" as the relative position of seas and our continents? What is our reality for today beyond this clutter of symbols..."(345, Burke). Butler's notions rely on this same claim, that our "seemingly down to earth" construction of sex and gender relies heavily on the idea that "The performative invocation of a non-historical "before" becomes the foundational premise that guarantees a pre-social ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed and thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract" (4, Butler). Herein, gender is the result of a performative action due to a cultural discourse we have adopted and continue to perpetuate as true. Butler argues that gender is not constituted clearly or from one thing, but intersects with many aspects of categorization and life - class, race, etc. Additionally, her argument coherently extends from the latter with the idea that the representative term "women" denotes a "common identity." That the term itself cannot be all inclusive of an identity of an individual. The term thereby limits women with its representation, and doesn't allow for an open set of options, genders, and sexes. This brings to mind Helen Keller's limitations mentioned in Ann George's "Mr. Burke, Meet Hellen Keller," as her identity as disabled limited her readers from seeing her arguments as legitimate. She write about "able bodied" experience as if she has experienced them on her own, and she has - she has experienced them through the linguistic system we have constructed. "The brain of the race is so permeated with color that it dyes even the speech of the blind" (345, Keller). What an incredible and true testament to the power of our structured symbol systems! Keller's identity as "blind" limited her perception just as much as a person's identity as "woman" can limit her under a term that is impossible to separate from its cultural history and implications.

Butler furthers her point: "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). Butler's point that sex and gender are both formed from casting the terms as solidified, unified concepts in a "precursive domain" has formed a binary that has built into our language, our representative terms, that are almost impossible to separate ourselves from. Here, Butler mirror's everything both Keller and Burke have written about, and prove to us that representation is everything.