Re-charging Essentialism

Immediately upon launching into the matrix, we find the critical shoal that, while seeming to prompt such a performance of reading, actually seeks to hinder it. The depth charge of essentialism would sink such a surfer.

In writing "performing lesbian" in the face of "queer performativity," I want to directly confront the charge of essentialism. This charge has been leveled against both "lesbian" and "performance." The contention of essentialism implies, without directly stating it, the anxiety around the end of print culture. It actually operates in the service of retaining the dominance of print culture by rewriting, or correcting its traditions. In this process, lesbian and performance, identity and visibility have seemingly been evacuated so that writing and reading may continue to exercise the dominance of print culture.

Briefly, the charge is that identity politics rest on the base that one might "be" a lesbian, thereby invoking an ontological claim. According to the poststructuralist critique, such a notion posits the formation of the subject position as prior to other social constructions — possibly even determining them. Moreover, it charges that identity has been imagined as visible, demanding space in the regime of representation as one of its political projects. Identity and visibility are both made to claim the notion of presence in their constitution of the "live" and the body. In order to evacuate the regime of identity and visibility, the charge of essentialism has attended so diligently to the problems inherent in the claim of "being" that it has obscured the broader, structural function of the term.

What is essentialist, or at least metaphysical, the ruinous worm buried in essentialism, is the kind of argument that is ultimately based on a self-generating self-referentiality, which has, in the eurocentric tradition, historically secured its closed status by an appeal to "ontology." In other words, what is structurally essentialist or metaphysical in an argument is the claim that the system rests, finally, on some self-generating principle — that it cuts loose from outside dependencies — operates outside the historical, material conditions of change. Essentialism procures the metaphysical through a notion of Being as an essence. An essence, as Teresa de Lauretis notes in "The Essence of the Triangle, or Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain," claims the function of "the reality underlying phenomena" or "that internal constitution, on which all the sensible properties depend" (4-5). In other words, an essence functions in a philosophical system as the location where "the buck stops," or where "the thing" is, beyond any other referent "in itself." De Lauretis counters the charge of essentialism by distinguishing a "nominal essence" in contrast to a "real" one; the former would, within a feminist project, proffer an "embodied, situated knowledge," as mutable and historically contextualized (12). She slips the rug out from under or from within the "thing," resting its identity claim as contingent upon volition, on the one hand (the feminist project), and material circumstances, on the other. Her aim is to retain the project of identifying in order to challenge "directly the social-symbolic institution of heterosexuality" (32). Within this critical environment, "performing lesbian" would be taking what de Lauretis calls "the essentialist risk" to perform the identity of lesbian against that of heterosexual. Certainly, this is a familiar and welcome strategy.

De Lauretis redefines essence to counter the essentialist charge. Borrowing her adjustment to recontextualize the issue, I want to reverse the charge — to identify a metaphysical base within the poststructuralist argument. For the assumption that that base is corrected by abandoning a certain kind of materialist critique will have debilitating effects on notions of the body and of nation in the course of dangerous conservative agendas. The loss of discourse's ability to pose an outside referent directly unhinges political coalitions around issues of land, wages, processes of social discrimination, etc. De Lauretis, in defense of such prior commitments, reconfirms an open system, in which signs still retain a sense of referents outside their purely textual ones. Heterosexuality in her argument appears as both a social and a symbolic institution. In poststructuralist arguments, the charge of essentialism has been used to erode this sense of a referent outside the linguistic or discursive system. De Lauretis's gesture of reinstating a configuration of feminist politics against the charge of essentialism, through a study of an actual political collective in Italy — a system that accounts for and is accountable to a social movement — traces the critical space in which I would like to counter the poststructuralist charge that would empty out identity and the order of visibility. For, as we will see, such anti-essentialist systems, while they eschew ontology, may rest on other terms which function to set up a self-generating, self-referential, and in that manner metaphysical argument. The poststructural "corrections" operate in the refined atmosphere of "pure" theory and writing, abandoning earlier materialist discourses that signaled to activist, grassroots coalitions while claiming a less essentialist base.

IA. QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

Debates over the meaning of performativity have been linked to the adoption of the term "queer" in some critical quarters. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes it in "Queer Performativity," Judith Butler's proposal of gender-bending performativity in Gender Trouble has been a central tool for the "recruitment" of graduate students into gay studies (1). The journal glq (a journal of lesbian and gay studies) even dedicated its inaugural issue to a dialogue between Sedgwick and Butler on queer performativity. If queer corrects the tradition of lesbian identity politics, performativity corrects the attendant regimes of the "live" and performance. Looking to Sedgwick's and Butler's articles as concise summaries of the positions, the necessary bond between "queer" and "performativity" may be seen to focus several critical anxieties that the departure from the troubled territories of "lesbian" and "performance" seeks to allay.

Performativity describes a critical strategy seemingly more deconstructive in its account of "performance" as sign. It strips the mask from masquerade that would still retain an actor/subject behind the show. In contrast, queer performativity identifies its operation as iterations of power contested at the sites of gender identification and legal, medical discourses concerning sexual...