Hegemony and Heteronormativity

Revisiting 'The Political' in Queer Politics

María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317122852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book reflects on 'the political' in queer theory and politics by revisiting two of its key categories: hegemony and heteronormativity. It explores the specific insights offered by these categories and the ways in which they augment the analysis of power and domination from a queer perspective, whilst also examining the possibilities for political analysis and strategy-building provided by theories of hegemony and heteronormativity. Moreover, in addressing these issues the book strives to rethink the understanding of the term "queer", so as to avoid narrowing queer politics to a critique of normative heterosexuality and the rigid gender binary. By looking at the interplay between hegemony and heteronormativity, this ground-breaking volume presents new possibilities of reconceptualizing 'the political' from a queer perspective. Investigating the effects of queer politics not only on subjectivities and intimate personal relations, but also on institutions, socio-cultural processes and global politics, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of critical theory, gender and sexuality, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist political theory.

Chapter 1
Revisiting Contingency, Hegemony and Universality

Randi Gressgård

Heteronormativity is most often associated with queer theory, which in turn is strongly associated with Judith Butler’s ground-breaking book Gender Trouble (1999). In this book, she draws attention to the normative conditions under which the categories of sex and gender are formed and tries to rethink sex and gender beyond the binary frame. People who inhabit these categories differently are considered to be disruptive to the heterosexual imperative and as such, they testify to the contingency of sex and gender. In her book Bodies that Matter, Butler focuses attention on the materializing effect of regulatory power, arguing that there is no reference to a pure body that is not at the same time a further formation of that body (1993: 10). There is no easy way to distinguish between what is ‘materially’ true and what is ‘culturally’ true about a sexed body, Butler contends (2004a: 87), since it would be impossible to perceive sex outside of the cultural matrix of power relations (94–5). Queer theory, like theories of hegemony, opposes all claims to stable or natural identity, including gay and other non-heterosexual identities. The production of identities, including gender identities, is contingent and comes at a cost, as all identities involve exclusions. Butler is particularly preoccupied with the exclusionary effects of heterosexual or heterosexist normativity.

Although she does not deploy the term herself, it is evident that the normative force of heterosexuality can be encapsulated by the concept of heteronormativity. As Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver remark, ‘Butler reworks gender within the context of her queer critique of heteronormativity’ (2008: 81), that is, a normativity that ‘produces and maintains the naturalisation of gender’ (83). Needless to say, naturalization of gender is tantamount to depoliticizing those norms and practices that form intelligible gendered subjects, and hence these norms are rendered universal, beyond the purview of contingency and political struggle. In accordance with Butler’s queer perspective, we could regard heteronormativity as the hegemony of heterosexuality. In order to address this relationship between heteronormativity and hegemony, I shall start by elucidating how Butler relates to the concepts of contingency, hegemony and universality. I round off the discussion with a note on how recent theories of hegemony and feminist/queer critiques of heteronormativity can mutually enrich as well as subvert one another.

When I say recent theories of hegemony, I allude to the post-Gramscian theorizing of hegemony that was first articulated in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s influential book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001). In this book, the concept of hegemony becomes a name for the general logic of society as a political institution. They conceive of the political as primary and constitutive of the social and not derivable from any other instance (Critchley and Marchart 2004: 3). Every order is a result of a political struggle for hegemony – a political decision taken on a terrain of differences. Hence, we will never be in a situation where society has found its ultimate ground or achieved totality (Critchley and Marchart 2004: 4). Laclau and Mouffe have subsequently developed this line of reasoning in their separate works. Several other scholars of the left, notably political theorists and feminists, have also taken up their ideas. In their now famous dialogue in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000), Butler, Laclau and Žižek discuss the notion of hegemony, alongside the question of how universality can be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized. They discuss hegemony in relation to universality and contingency, which in turn relates to notions of the political and politics. I therefore believe that it might prove fruitful to take the discussion about universality as a point of departure for addressing the relationships between hegemony and heteronormativity.

The Universal and the Particular

On a discursive level, we could conceive of any conceptualization or categorization as a form of universalization pertaining to determinative power. On a sociocultural level, universalization is normally associated with norms that form the basis for (intelligible and recognizable) claims. In this sense, the act of making claims might be regarded as an act of universalization, even when we claim to be particular (for example sexually distinct). In the wake of the so-called ‘political turn’ in the humanities and the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s, it has become somewhat commonplace to assert that a claim, in order to be a meaningful utterance, can be neither purely universal nor absolutely particular, since the universal and the particular mutually constitute one another. While the purely universal would be undifferentiated and thus devoid of content, the absolutely particular would be radically singular. Both would be impossible positions outside the social order of meaning and thus unintelligible.

As for meaningful speech, Butler raises the following question: ‘Do we always know whether a claim is particular or universal?’ (2000a: 33). She suggests that sometimes there is an undecidable coincidence of particular and universal. This argument makes perfect sense as long as we take it to be a reiteration of the aforementioned assumption: a claim is always concrete and thus cannot be purely universal (undifferentiated) and yet neither can it be absolutely particular (singular). However, when we juxtapose Butler’s question, ‘Do we always know whether a claim is universal or particular?’ with her claim that ‘there is sometimes an undecidable coincidence of particular and universal’, then the meaning of her overall argument becomes slightly more blurred. While the question (‘Do we always …’) explicitly refers to universals as concrete claims, the subsequent statement (‘there is sometimes …’) is more general and needs not be limited to concrete claims. The latter might also include non-concrete particularities and non-concrete universals beyond more or less universalized claims.

Butler uses an example from Joan Scott’s book Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996) to clarify her point about the undecidable coincidence of particular and universal (although, as we shall see, she thereby also risks increasing the confusion). Scott illuminates how post-revolutionary French feminists had to make their claims to equal rights on the basis of their difference, while at the same time they were compelled to argue that their claims were a logical extension of universal enfranchisement. In this respect, sexual difference served as a basis for a claim for universal equality. Writes Butler, ‘To argue in favour of sexual difference could mean arguing in favour of particularism, but it could also be – if one accepts the foundational status of sexual difference to all humanity – appealing directly to the universal’ (2000a: 33). The way in which Butler deploys the term ‘particularism’ points, in this context, to a concrete differentiation in terms of a distinct identity. The term ‘universal’ is less obvious, perhaps even counterintuitive, in so far as it too seems to refer to a difference (rather than to equality, as we might expect). In Butler’s statement, by being a constitutive feature of social human life, universality seems to denote an ontological difference which is granted a universal (foundational) status by virtue of being necessary. As she proceeds, however, it becomes clear that sexual difference does not necessarily refer to an ontologically constitutive difference but could just as well refer to identitarian particularity. Writes Butler, ‘[T]he very same term, “sexual difference”, can denote the particular in one political context and the universal in another’ (2000a: 33). This convergence of terms makes it difficult to decide whether by making such a statement about the undecidable coincidence of the particular and universal she means: (1) that a claim for recognition as culturally particular (distinctive) could simultaneously be a claim for universal rights pertaining to equality in accordance with the logic of multiculturalism (see Gressgård 2010) or (2) that there is a constant oscillation between non-concrete (ontological) and concrete (ontic) difference within so-called ‘philosophies of difference’ that distinguish between ontological/constitutive and ontic/social difference, making it virtually impossible to discern between the two meanings.¹ In other words, Butler’s assertion that there is sometimes an undecidable coincidence of particular and universal has by now acquired a double meaning: (1) a claim can be simultaneously particular and universal and (2) particular and universal can be used interchangeably with various meanings. As for the latter, Butler is of course right when she suggests that it is often difficult to judge by the way it is employed whether sexual difference denotes a constitutive outside of the symbolic order or an internal ontic differentiation in terms of a particular gender identity. However, to Butler, this is not an argument in favour of a clearer distinction between ontological and ontic difference alongside a greater lucidity and clarification in the way in which we deploy these concepts. On the contrary, she seems to cite this general confusion in support of a repudiation of the notion of ontological difference, at least when ontological difference denotes a (radical) constitutive outside of the social. Hence, we should look into the rationale of Butler’s disavowal of such a constitutive outside.

No (to) Ontology?

Butler’s argument for relinquishing the category of ontological difference pertains to her refusal of the transcendental notion of the pre-social or pre-political. One of her main ‘targets’ is Laclau (1996), who in Emancipation(s) depicts the concept of hegemony as the relation between the universal and the particular. According to him, a relation is hegemonic when a particular demand, group or identity attempts to incarnate the universal. He posits that any particular claim is implicated in a universal, inasmuch as the universal is the (common structural) condition by which any kind of particular content fails to constitute an identity. This peculiar fracture between the particular and the universal is closely related to what Laclau takes to be an irreducible gap between the ontological and the ontic levels, which amounts to antagonism. To explain this antagonistic relationship in more detail, I find it appropriate to draw on Oliver Marchart’s elucidative account in Laclau: A Critical Reader (2004: 59).

When Marchart sets out to clarify the radical difference between the ontological and the ontic, his point of departure is Laclau’s general logic of signification. Within this logic, the ontological pertains to the limit of the system of differences – the social system of classifications – within which meaning evolves. By virtue of being the limits of the system, these boundaries cannot belong to – or be representable within – the system itself but must be external to it. The boundaries must be radically different from the system’s internal (ontic) differences, because otherwise they would not really be external but internal to the system and there would be no boundaries and hence no system of signification. In short, the relationship between the inside and the outside of the system must be exclusionary for meaning to emerge. However, the radical outside is not only the necessary condition of possibility for systematicity (equivalence) and meaning – it is simultaneously the condition of im possibility of total systematicity and full meaning. As Marchart remarks (2004: 59), the function of the exclusionary boundary consists in introducing an essential ambivalence into the system of differences constituted by the very same boundary. In this sense, the constitutive outside (antagonism) of the system of signification comes into play inside the system as its dislocation or subversion. The antagonistic relationship between the ontological and ontic levels constitutes a mutual subversion of necessity and contingency. Notes Marchart, ‘[N]ecessity can only partially limit the field of contingency, which in turn subverts necessity from inside’ (2004: 60). As a result, Marchart goes on to explain, the demarcation line between the contingent and the necessary is blurred. I think this is a crucial point with respect to Butler’s critical intervention, in so far as it points to a major source of confusion in Laclau’s theory.

The blurring of the boundary or the demarcation line between the contingent and the necessary could be taken to mean that it is not always easy to discern between ontological and ontic difference. It is virtually impossible to decide what is inside and what is outside the system; there is sometimes an undecidable coincidence of particular and universal, and so on. Apparently, Laclau conceives of the inside and the outside as overlapping. Otherwise, as Marchart notes (2004: 61), the system would be either totally open or totally closed. There is a tension – an ‘intertwining’ – which amounts to a hybrid play between inside and outside. The line between inside and outside might well be blurred then, but it is nevertheless necessary inasmuch as it is the very existence of the radical difference between inside and outside that renders such intertwining – such mutual subversion – possible. Needless to say, this also goes for the mutual subversion of necessity and contingency, universal and particular and – as will be highlighted below – ontological and ontic sexual difference.

Butler and other critics, who point to the blurred boundaries in Laclau’s argument as if they constitute a conceptual deficiency, seem to miss this point. However, I think Marchart would agree with Butler’s critique of Laclau in a more restricted sense. A conceptual ambiguity clearly emerges in Laclau’s vocabulary when we pose, as Marchart does (2004: 66), the following question: where do we encounter the radical line between the ontological and the ontic? He responds by stating that the line is obviously not to be drawn between more or less universalized particularities, since even ‘relatively’ universalized content would still remain on the ontic level. Rather, the line runs between those more or less universalized contents on the one hand and the dimension of universality/particularity as such on the other. By virtue of being a dimension, the universal constitutes the impossible but necessary horizon of the possible and always gradual ontic universals. The universal qua limit point is therefore an absolute, an empty place, which signifies a condition of failure. The same holds true for the particular qua dimension: by virtue of being a limit point, it is an empty singularity and hence equally impossible. However, as Marchart emphasizes (2004: 67), the singular and the absolute are intrinsic aspects of the play between particular and universal, and in some cases they can even be said to be identical with the latter. He notes, ‘[T]he singular and the absolute – as impossible limit cases – cannot be easily separated from the aspect of the particular and the universal: this might be the reason why Laclau does not see the need to develop separate concepts’ (Marchart 2004: 66). I want to add to Marchart’s remark that this lack of separate concepts might also be the reason why Butler objects that there is sometimes an undecidable coincidence of particular and universal (2000a), which may be why she in turn perpetuates this confusion in her own account of the matter.

In this context, it is important to emphasize that Butler does not do away with ontology as such. As Chambers and Carver note (2008: 170n8), it is the assumption of a prior ontology that Butler wishes to resist, not the actual work of ontology itself. In fact, the language of ontology has come into prominence in her later works, where she alternately insists on the primacy of relationality (vulnerability to others), the precariousness of life and the normative conditions for the production of the subject (see for example Butler 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2009). In Frames of War she argues that these normative conditions produce a historically contingent ontology, ‘such that our capacity to discern and name the “being” of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition’ (Butler 2009: 4). Accordingly, she defies ontology as a set of fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any and all social and political organizations, arguing instead that the ‘being’ of life is constituted through selective means, which implies that we cannot refer to this ‘being’ outside of the operation of power and politics.

Sexual Difference as an Effect of Politics

Clearly, Butler subscribes to the general assumption that claims are neither exclusively universal nor exclusively particular, but at the same time she cautions against locating the universal dimension in the structural features of any and all languages. She regards the separation of the formal analysis of language from its cultural and social syntax, as well as from its semantics, as highly problematic (see Butler 2000a: 34). According to her, far from being an empty place that awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event, the universal is always already filled with content. She seems to be of the opinion that the universal, instead of being ‘located’ in the ontology of language, constitutes a dimension of a particular sociopolitical, normative claim – a claim for universality. And by virtue of being a claim, the universal must be articulated through a certain set of cultural conventions in a recognizable venue (Butler 2000a: 35). In response to Laclau’s notion of the universal as an empty place, she maintains that it is empty only because it has already disavowed or suppressed the content from which it emerges (Butler 2000a: 34). As she sees it, the emptiness is an effect of politics, not grounded in ontology. With this move, Butler turns Laclau’s ‘philosophy of difference’ on its head, as it were. The presupposition that any claim is constituted in and through a suppression of the ontological difference is repudiated in favour of an argument that highlights the social and political – indeed the hegemonic – character of exclusion. Consequently, she calls into question the very defining feature of ‘philosophies of difference’: namely, the assumption that difference constitutes an irreducible heterogeneity on the ontological level that occasions the system of differentiations within the social system of signification on the one hand and – qua ontic difference – constitutes particular differentiations on the other. In her response to this conflation of meanings of difference, Butler poses the following rhetorical question: are the two meanings always distinct? (2000b: 143).

This question is especially directed at Slavoj Žižek (1992), who deploys the concept of sexual difference in accordance with a psychoanalytic scheme. According to Butler, he ‘posits a transcultural structure to social reality that presupposes a sociality based in fictive and idealized kinship positions that presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all humans’ (2000b: 141–2). The symbolic order is thus rendered transculturally (hetero)normative and is secured by an extra-political, universal structure. The problem, as Butler sees it, arises from the quasi-transcendental status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. ‘If he is right,’ notes Butler, ‘then sexual difference, in its most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony’ (2000b: 143). Sexual difference is then distinguished from other struggles within hegemony such as class struggles, because other struggles do not ‘simultaneously name a fundamental … difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity’ (Butler 2000b: 143). While class appears (solely) within the symbolic horizon, sexual difference denotes simultaneously a radical exteriority to the symbolic order and a concrete struggle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface “X”
• Foreword by Lisa Duggan
• Introduction Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The Political’ in Queer Politics
• 1 Revisiting Contingency, Hegemony and Universality
• 2 From the ‘Heterosexual Matrix’ to a ‘Heteronormative Hegemony’: Initiating a Dialogue between Judith Butler and Antonio Gramsci about Queer Theory and Politics
• 3 Tender Tensions – Antagonistic Struggles – Becoming-Bird: Queer Political Interventions into Neoliberal Hegemony
• 4 Normative Dilemmas and the Hegemony of Counter-Hegemony
• 5 How Sam Became a Father, Became a Citizen: Scripts of Neoliberal Inclusion of Disability
• 6 Signifying Theory_Politics/Queer?
• 7 The Pleasures of Compliance: Domination and Compromise Within BDSM Practice
• Index