‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment

in the Second Butler1

MARIE-HÉLÈNE BOURCIER

Abstract:
This article takes issue vigorously with what it argues are the disempowering
effects of Judith Butler’s more recent work, for transgendered people in
particular and accordingly for the queer movement in general. In so doing
it contests the way in which the reception of Butler’s work in France has been
mediated by a transphobic psychoanalytic establishment and attacks Butler for
playing along with their self-interested political agenda by retelling, in Paris, for
their ears, an anecdote of a savoury encounter with a transgendered interlocutor
in a subcultural queer space in San Francisco.

Keywords: transgender, trans studies, melancholia, psychoanalysis, Butler,

interpellation, sexual subcultures

The programme articulated in the second Butler derives, to a great

extent, from what could, at best, be called a politics of vulnerability. It
is presupposed that we are all vulnerable, indeed that ‘it is unclear
whether we are still living, or ought to be, whether our lives are
valuable, or can be made to be, whether our genders are real, or
ever can be regarded as such’ (UG, 206). This is supposedly the cost
of challenging gender norms after Undoing Gender. The genealogy of
this language of vulnerability deserves closer inspection, yet for the
moment it suffices to remind ourselves of two things. The very term
‘vulnerability’, when applied to the American nation, to the United
States, took hold several weeks after September 11th . It was cunningly
injected into public discourse by the Bush administration and the
Department of Defense; it became the motto of the commanding
officers at Abu Ghraib. It is also a term which figured in a new
free-market approach to governing poverty, adopted by a range of

Paragraph 35.2 (2012): 233–253

DOI: 10.3366/para.2012.0055
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/para
234 Paragraph
international institutions from the 1980s on, among them the OECD
and the UNDP. Its aim was to redefine the standard of poverty
by using new statistical instruments, including ‘vulnerability’ and
‘precariousness’ (précarité) (as in the Social Vulnerability Index, created
in 2003), in order to allow experts from the richer countries and those
of the North to regulate the human and economic development of
poor countries and emerging economies.
Butler not only transposes uncritically this ‘episteme of
vulnerability’ to sexed and gendered subjects, while ignoring its
biopolitical dimensions and its rootedness in imperialism, but she
widens the ‘we’ of ‘the poor’ such that ‘we’ can not only be
included within it but even substitued for them.2 So it is that we
are led to mourn for vulnerable individuals from wartorn countries
which are unable to mourn for their own, in Frames of War.3 This
lament of vulnerability is altogether anachronistic (melancholic?) if one
thinks about the ways in which gender norms have been successfully
outflanked in recent years, above all in urban LGBTQ subcultures. It
is in this context that ‘we’ are told that ‘everything’ can be resignified,
or culturally retranslated: not only norms, which suddenly seem to
weigh so heavily down upon us, but also the universal and the state: ‘I
think the state can also be worked and exploited.’ (116) Such assertions
suggest that we have now reached the limits of a hypertextualism
which was already an issue in Gender Trouble; it can legitimately be
remarked that there is a difference between saying that signification
and resignification always have a provisional, or performative, character
and using them as a ready recipe on any given occasion.
But is it true that universality is open to resignification; is this
true, especially, in a country such as France, where universalism
is sacred? Is there not a difference between the repetition, or
performative recitation, of this particular buzzword and insulting hate-
speech directed against minorities? Is this accumulation of terms
such as ‘universalism’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘precariousness’ not itself
part of a biopolitical game with which we are all too familiar?
Who is the political subject of this resignification of the universal?
What effects are produced by the way in which the capacity for
action — formerly conceived as an impersonal quality emanting from
minoritarian sites of self-articulation — is transferred over to the neo-
Modern philosopher seeking disciplinary recognition in Old Europe,
the cradle of philosophy? What of the displacement of the terms
‘vulnerability’ and ‘poverty’ and their use in almost metaphorical
fashion? In Gender Trouble gender was undone not by an agent but by
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 235
way of a capacity for action. How is it that we find ourselves instructed,
in Undoing Gender, to reply to metaphysical or ontological questions
such as ‘What does gender want?’ or What does desire want?’ (UG, 2).
The answer, however, is very simple: nothing.
The same question could be asked of the new political goal to
expand the human as of the project to resignify universality: is ‘the
human’ not already one of the most dilated of categories, as well as
one of the foundations of modernity? (UG, 222–5). The consequences
of modifying the capacity for action in this way are very clear. In
Gender Trouble the performativity of fidelity to texts or discourses
is impersonal and reversible, for better and for worse. By contrast,
Undoing Gender is plagued by personalization and the continental
figure of the philosopher who is ready to save the world, or lament
its passing, depending on the circumstances, has made a comeback.
It will be public intellectuals and philosophers who decide whether
resignification is possible and desirable and it is they who will, if
required, go crusading for the vulnerable.4 The futility of such a way
of thinking would be amusing were it not for the fact that it quite
simply erases the work accomplished by minorities and the specificity
of their needs and demands. Is it that identifying as a philosopher rather
than ‘a mere queer theorist’ and switching causes by moving from an
aggressive and euphoric theory of gender to a well-meaning theory of
victimization affords one greater recognition and numerous privileges
which have nothing to do with queer theory and politics?

Trans Trouble
Butler’s decidedly ambivalent relationship to transsexuality, to trans
studies and to what she has recently been calling ‘the transgender’,
is another key element in the politics of disempowerment which lie
beneath Butlerian vulnerability. Trans academics and activists sounded
the alarm over ten years ago: in Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual
and Transgendered People (2000), Viviane Namaste showed how a
constructivist approach which treats the drag queen as exemplary
and sets it up as a paradigm erases the life and experiences of trans
people in society.5 In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
(1998), eight years after Gender Trouble, Jay Prosser, one of the first out
trans academics, criticized the Butlerian conception of performativity
for foreclosing the possibility of transgender identification.6 He also
emphasized the extent to which Butler’s conception of gender in terms
of performance and performativity is hyperdiscursive, somatophobic
and desexualizing in its treatment of sexual practices and sexual
236 Paragraph
orientation. In fact, even after the publication of Bodies that Matter,
in 1993, bodies in general and trans bodies in particular still barely
mattered. The Butlerian body is merely a residue, a discursive product,
just as sex and gender are.

Materiality and Interpellation

Another form of trans materiality, of the production of trans genders
and of trans interpellation is missing from the Butlerian paradigms
of trans genders and bodies. Although Teresa de Lauretis is very
invested in psychoanalysis and takes into consideration the importance
of psychic life when she analyses gender identifications and processes of
subjectivation, this has not prevented her from elaborating a definition
of gender as technology, one which has allowed her to broaden
Foucault’s understanding of that term.7 The definition of technology
offered by de Lauretis allows cultural processes and representations to
be taken account of in the re-production of genders, and these include
visual representations and representations from popular cultures, even
from ‘national-popular’ cultures in Gramsci’s sense, from feminism and
from theory. Unlike Butler’s work, this model of gender as technology
succeeds in grasping the crucial role of the visual.
Foucault was born into a world already saturated with visual
stimulation and mass culture, not to mention with the visual dispositifs
discernible in P. T. Barnum’s circuses and other kinds of freak show, in
universal exhibitions, and in the theatricals of the Salpêtrière, directed
by the hand of the ‘maestro’, Charcot, every Tuesday, not far from
the photographic laboratory which he had had built. Foucault may
well have devised genealogy as a new epistemological method yet,
when he was compiling his own genealogy of female hysteria (which
takes up much of his Collège de France seminar of 1975, entitled The
Abnormal), he left out Albert Londe’s photographs and the work of the
director William Friedkin, intended as it was to ‘tame’ the possessed
woman.8 It is surely not a coincidence that Freud was especially
resistant to all forms of visual technology, especially when, in the
form of cinema, they threatened to take psychoanalysis captive. Should
this be seen as an attempt to protect the private character, indeed the
secrecy, of what took place in the psychoanalytic consulting room, his
own or any other, and so to retain control over the administration of
the dark continents he had ‘discovered’? When asked in 1926 about
plans for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film, The Secrets of a Soul, the ‘father’
of psychoanalysis confronted the threat head-on by declaring: ‘filming
seems to be as unavoidable, it seems, as page-boy [garçonne] haircuts,
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 237
but I won’t have myself trimmed that way and do not wish to be
brought into personal contact with any film.’9 Freud may have escaped
the butch’s scissors while he was alive but there was nothing he could
do about the fact that psychoanalysis and cinema were born at almost
the same moment. There is more to this than Foucault’s Panopticon.

Butler and Althusser

This difficulty understanding the crucial role of the image and of visual
dispositifs can also manifest itself in a desire to contain the visual. This
is true of the theories of identification, subjection and subjectivation
(assujettissement) in Lacan and Althusser. Lacan quickly does away with
the problem in his Mirror Stage.10 Less well understood perhaps is that
Althusser’s theory of interpellation, with which first-wave American
queer theorists were besotted, proves to be decidedly shaky without
its specular dimension. For this dimension cannot, as it often is in
Butler’s analyses, be reduced to the now famous scene in which the cop
calls you over. In Althusser’s ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, the process
by which individuals are interpellated as subjects implies the specular
structure of ideology and this is constitutive of one of the four levels
of interpellation which he identified.11 For there to be subjectivation
(assujettissement) there must be more than a scene with a cop. For
Althusser, an act of ideological interpellation functions if its frame has
already been established beforehand, well in advance of the scene with
the cop. Accordingly, ideological interpellation must be guaranteed by
an absolute subject, who is the ultimate mirror in which the subject
will recognize him or herself, as well as in acts of recognition involving
other people.
It is very significant that Butler strips these theoretical elements from
her account in the Introduction to Excitable Speech.12 She wrongly
reproaches Althusser for relying only on the scene with the cop.
She asserts that he fails to consider the conditions of the possibility
of this type of performative subjectivation, which precede the scene.
Whether wittingly or unwittingly, in so doing Butler misses the game
of mirrors with the big subject, or in other words the specular character
of ideology, of gender interpellation, or of racial and sexual insult.
Indeed she goes further, by reducing the ‘theatre’ of Althusserian
interpellation (to use Althusser’s term) to a phonic event. This is not a
matter of saying that there is a correct interpretation of Althusser and
that Butler’s confection is false, but of noting that the ultimate logical
conclusion to which the recalcitrant queen of queer theory arrives,
238 Paragraph
after cutting away these elements, is that ideology does not need a
voice in order to articulate itself.
To maintain that the scene with the cop is unnecessary and that
it is possible to do away with the dialogic situation which brings its
two protagonists together is to effect a radical dematerialization in
the very midst of the discursive and performative field. Switch off
the sound; get rid of this public scene; be blind and mute. It is the
very materiality of the interpellation which can and must vanish. And
why should it not? The only problem is that the Butlerian conception
of performativity in its entirety — in the acts of naming which form
part of the gendering process, as in hate speech, insult included —
rests on this type of iteration, re-citation and repetition. There can
be no performative force without such real scenes, irrespective of the
valency of that force, of the direction in which it travels; in other
words, regardless of whether it opens onto possibilities of resistance
or is, on the contrary, coercive. More so still in the case of genders
and of sexual and racial minorities. This reluctance to take account
of the materiality of speech and language is entirely consistent with
the altogether disembodied paradigms of gender proposed by Butler.
The consequences of this unflinching desire to provide an extremely
abstract version of what subjectivation consists in are legion. Not least
among them is a reinforcement of those logics of disempowerment
which block the technologies and counter-biopolitical strategies of the
transgender movement.
To cite merely the example of transmasculinity, many trans men
and boys already draw on performance, performativity and the visual
in a multiplicity of resourceful ways. Some claim the right to invent
different masculinities; others do not. Many reject the burden of
subversion with which first-wave American queer theory saddled
them, according to which transgendered people are better predisposed
to break down the binarism of the dominant sex/gender system
than transsexual people. This is without even mentioning those
feminisms which have sought to discipline transgendered people, trans
men in particular, by making out that they are perfect.13 Most of
the technologies of transmasculinity rely on acts of reappropriation
and resignification which are as visual as they are phonic; Butler’s
conception of performativity, try though it might, can neither silence
them nor render them invisible. Should we not be trying to embrace
the widest possible spectrum of those biopolitical strategies and gender
technologies which issue from what are often politicized subcultural
sites?
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 239
Trans Interpellations
Biopolitical technologies rely heavily on acts of visual and phonic
reappropriation; images speak and we can almost hear their voice.
This is the case in a series of self-portraits by the Anglo-American
trans photographer Loren Cameron from 1996.14 By reworking
the codes and the performative power of anatomical charts and
photographs, Cameron offers a lucid critique of medical discourse
and its pornographic dimension. He controls his image because he
is the one taking the photographs; he is the one who presses the
shutter button. He can show us his body; he can exhibit a different
sexed masculine body, that of a man without ‘the’ dick, without
being objectified. So it became possible, in the 1990s, for those trans
people who wanted to, to figure the ‘before and after’ through self-
representations; this allowed them to depart from the exploitative
way in which sensationalist popular journalism and medical discourse
treat this narrative trope. Loren Cameron counters some very specific
interpellative processes (bird names, insults, as well as the eroticization
of the objectified trans body) with self-portraits which are at once
visual and phonic responses, altogether equal to a successful speech
act.
Many of the strategies deployed by a group of trans activists from
Paris, le Groupe Activiste Trans de Paris (GAT), are also part of this
ongoing process of material resignification. In a video produced by
this group, ‘The Finger of God; We Have Found Lacan’s Cock’,
we find a doctor’s prescription which reads: ‘Patient Jacques Lacan.
Doctor Queer (MD), place: Paris is burning’, the last part being
reference to Jennie Livingston’s film. We could also cite many of
the zaps (direct action protests) undertaken by this group, or by Act
Up-Paris, against self-proclaimed French experts in transsexuality such
as Patricia Mercader, a feminist psychologist, and the psychiatrist
Colette Chiland; or there is the existence of a trans radio programme
(2003–6) entitled Bistouri, oui, oui (Yes, the scalpel, yes).15 These
examples, chosen from many, very clearly show the diversity of
technologies of transmasculinity and transfemininity and the way in
which they are anchored in visual and phonic materiality.
The limitations of Butler’s theory of gender as performance
and performativity should not lead us to throw out the baby of
performativity with the bath water. There is no reason whatsoever
for us to deprive ourselves of the valuable resources of performance
and performativity, in particular when it comes to identitarian
performance. Other ways of theorizing and other practices have
240 Paragraph
demonstrated and will continue to demonstrate their efficacy.
Acknowledging the performative dimension of gender does not,
for one moment, entail an automatic diminution in agency. By not
taking into consideration the empowering character of certain forms
of embodiment, of biopolitical strategies and scenes from daily life,
we run the risk of undoing a myriad of trans possibilities and
missing the multiplicity of ways in which genders are done. The
Butlerian paradigms of gender as performance and melancholy obscure
our vision by disconnecting queer theory from trans, queer and
genderqueer subcultures; again, however, we are not obliged to follow
Butler in her transition from drag queen to drama queen. This shift
simply reminds us that first-wave American queer theory is, like the
various feminisms, also itself a technology of gender.16 From this
perspective it is vital that we aim for the greatest possible critical
reflexivity and that we offer up for critique the uses we make of theory
and fantasy.

Transgendered People: Aggressive Melancholics?

Her failure to take account of the politics and subcultures of the trans
movement perhaps explains the gulf which has opened up between
Butler and trans people, in her bid to become (in an intermittent and
ambivalent manner) both the incarnation of ‘queer theory’ and the
Saint Sebastian of trans studies, as was clear in a lecture she delivered
at Paris 8 on 13 November 2008.17 Falling back on the infallibility
of psychoanalytic dogma hardly helps either; still less the recourse to
that other paradigm of gender, gender as the melancholic remainder
of transgender identification. In Paris, Butler has twice passed round
the story of a woman philosopher interpellated by a poet who shouted
‘Fuck you Judith Butler!’ during a slam poetry event in San Francisco:
at the aforementioned lecture at Paris 8 and in a very significant text
published by a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, ‘Transgender and
“Attitudes of Revolt” ’.18 The story differed, depending on whether it
was addressed to an auditorium of students who had come to listen to
the lecture at Paris 8, or to the Lacanians. Butler said that she attended
the event incognito. In reality, contrary to Butler’s interpretation of
the incident, a MtF poet who is very well known in San Francisco
knew perfectly well what she was doing when she spoke in front of an
informal audience accustomed to such open mic events and familiar
with queer and genderqueer politics and subcultures. Butler admits as
much in the version for the Lacanians, even though she did not in the
lecture itself: ‘several years ago, during a slam poetry event I attended
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 241
in San Francisco, a number of people from the transgender community
spoke publicly: genderqueers, boys, transgendered people, transsexuals,
butches, fems who loved trans men.’ (16)

‘Fuck You Judith Butler!’

At the beginning of the text for the Lacanians, however, Butler tries
hard to erase the context and the materiality of the scene even as
she insists, but in theory, on dialogism and interlocution as essential
constituent parts of the performative scene: ‘I recognize you as a
woman and I recognize you as a man; such speech acts are modes
of address; they establish an “I” and they seek to address a “you”
and this interlocutory scene is perhaps just as important, if not more
so, that the category through which I address myself to you.’ (13)
Yet in the midst of this effort to reflect on enunciation and naming,
Butler never thinks to name ‘the MtF’ in question. She opts instead to
analyse verbal aggression by referring to a ‘similar’ situation recounted
by Julia Kristeva, who interpreted the gesture of a woman who left
one of her lectures at The New School for Social Research, in New
York, slamming the door as she went, as a declaration of love. A
proximity to Kristeva is thus secured. Butler then goes on to elaborate,
in profoundly psychoanalytic terms, the nature of the address, of ‘the
impossible demand’, from which the poet’s speech supposedly sprang
and which appears to be similar in every way to the impossible and
sometimes aggressive complaint of the melancholic woman described
by Freud in 1915.19 During the lecture at Paris 8, Butler could not
resist eroticizing her encounter with ‘the MtF poet of San Francisco’
and sought to show the comic side of the situation from her point of
view. Butler relates how she went to see the poet at the end of the
slam and how she blushed when Butler revealed her identity. The poet
was apparently not indifferent to her charms, which shows along the
way that the philosopher immediately cast this transpoet as a lesbian
attracted to women.
Lacanian psychoanalysts in France love this story because they have
no difficulty in resituating ‘this impossible demand’ in a transferential
context and because they naturally take the anecdote as proof of
the suffering and vulnerability of ‘transsexuals’ (the term they tend
to use arbitrarily for any transgendered person).20 And what a relief
for them to see Butler return to the path of righteousness, to see
that ‘the activist’ of yesteryear (her activism being the reason why
she failed to understand the deep structure of Lacan’s thought and
242 Paragraph
misinterpreted this (queer) master) has calmed down.21 The difficulty
is that, in this text for Parisian Lacanians, Butler uses the transgendered
person (‘the MfF of San Francisco’ included) as her quintessential
example of suffering by gender. From this perspective, the ‘MtF of
San Francisco’ inherits the place within the paradigm once occupied
by the drag queen of Gender Trouble. The paradigm in question is a
very troubled one, distinctly less flamboyant than Priscilla, Queen of
the Desert. The philosopher does not hesitate to describe melancholia
and the kind of speech which issues from it as a ‘transgender’
weapon, simultaneously aggressive and ineffectual. And according
to Lacanian theory and the transphobic texts of French Lacanians,
foremost among them Catherine Millot, trans identification never
succeeds in structuring itself as a language, which excludes it de facto
from the Lacanian Symbolic.22 For Butler, lecturing at Paris 8, trans
identification remained an impossibility; it was foreclosed. The text
which arose out of the seminar with the Lacanians is more cautious
and Butler makes out that she is trying to avoid any form of ‘diagnosis’
and pathologization. What she does is far worse. Under the pretext
of ascribing to melancholy, not without some difficulty, an entirely
social and cultural origin, and at the price of some quite striking
decontextualizations, she arrives unfailingly at the same fatal result for
the transgendered subject.

From Pathologization to Pathos

Drive out pathologization and pathos returns with a vengeance. The
MtF of San Francisco suffers by gender; quite unawares to her, this is
supposedly the underlying meaning of her ‘Fuck you Judith Butler!’
Butler will set about trying to understand the origins of this suffering
in cultural and sociological terms (suffering which will nevertheless
turn out to derive simply from Freudian melancholy), in such a way
as to deflect the accusation of pathologization in the ‘psychological’
sense. Even as she contests the idea of the mutual impermeability of the
psychic and the social, the interior and the exterior, Butler continually
renews their separation. In fact Butler’s text is forever oscillating
between the psychological and the sociological, indeed between ‘the
psychological girl/boy’ and ‘the sociological girl/boy’. As it does, more
than any other it is the ‘interior/exterior’ opposition which becomes
reified as it is mapped ‘naturally’ on to the ‘psychological/sociological’
opposition. Sometimes the contents of the two spheres swap over
such that the spheres themselves become indistinct. The ‘sociological’
outside can be on the inside: ‘I did not want to say that gender is only
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 243
outside and that we must, therefore, in our theorizations of gender,
evacuate the interior. I wanted rather to say that the outside is also the
inside, that what we refer to as “interior” is a particular way in which
the cultural norm takes on form as psychic reality, very often as psychic
identification’ (SGM, 2).
It could be asked, moreover, whether the attempt to separate
suffering with a social origin from suffering with a psychic origin,
with which the text begins, is helpful. What exactly are the
mutually excluding conceptions of psychic and social identification
which Butler has in mind here? Once again, the opposition which
she reestablishes between psychological interiority as the site of
identification and ‘the exterior’ as the site of social constraint, in order
to acquit herself of the accusation of pathologization, proves to be
porous. This is also the case when she decides that we are thrown into
‘the exterior’ beyond the psyche at the moment when self-naming
is completed by an act of address and thereby acquires a dialogic
dimension: ‘in fact two acts take place: the first is an act of self-naming
but the second is a form of address, an address to a “you” which is
asked to consider this person a boy. At that moment we can no longer
speak of an exclusively psychic reality as something which is effected
internally and which exists separately from a sociological identity
or a sociological scene of interlocution’ (SGM, 23). Sociological
exteriority and the address to another person thus supposedly coincide
as though the act of self-naming arose from an unmediated interior
monologue, which is highly unlikely.
Finally, when the attempt to re-sociologize and depsychologize
the scene becomes an assertion both of the indissociable relationship
and of the non-correspondence, of interiority/the psychological, on
one hand, and exteriority/the socio-cultural, on the other, it has
to be said that the sociological supplement soon reveals itself to be
unequal to the task. It is, as it were, introjected or absorbed as
though it were a supplementary mediation which must be taken into
consideration; thus the psychological once again becomes the sole
site of the identificatory process. After a first movement in which
the process of transgender identification is re-sociologized we are
very quickly invited to overcome what Butler calls ‘the sociological
referent’ (presupposing an opposition between the reference and the
signifier?) which is held to be fixed (as opposed to the plasticity of
the psyche?). The sociological, when understood in this way, bears a
striking resemblance to the Lacanian Symbolic. Understood in these
terms, the sociological is neither more nor less than the existence
244 Paragraph
of psychic and cultural reality, a reality which Freud never denied
and which provided him with the matter from which he fashioned
his ‘complexes’, so many mythologies of Hellenistic inspiration. This
amounts to thinking that the unconscious is structured like a language,
by language, and that certain identificatory phases are and must
be guaranteed by access to the Symbolic, as Lacan asserted.23 And
although psychologizing pathologization has been avoided, Butler
merrily psychoanalyses ‘the case’ of the MtF of San Francisco. To
consider the address which was made to her as a metonymn for
the splitting or the suffering of the transgendered subject is very
reminiscent of the kind of dream interpretation practised by the early
Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, which relies almost entirely on
condensations and displacements, on metaphorical and metonymic
substitutions (SE IV & V).
Let us suppose that the origin of transgender suffering is external,
or at any rate social and cultural. On this understanding, the wretched
norms of gender bear down with all their force on the MtF of San
Francisco, to the point where she is rendered unintelligible. They
‘torture’. Why does the same phenomenon of social and cultural
constraint described in Gender Trouble not have the same effects on
the MtF of San Francisco as on the drag queen and why does it not
entail the same possibilities of resistance? How have we gone from
the gender euphoria produced by the dissonance of the drag queen
to a veritable gender dysphoria in the utterance of the MtF of San
Francisco? What has changed between 1990, when Gender Trouble first
appeared, and 2008 or 2009? No explanation is given by Butler. And
when it comes to accounting for melancholia in cultural terms, she
becomes extensively reliant on a Freud who is almost tacked on, a
Freud, in this essay of 1915, who is hardly interested in culture at all.
The mechanism of ungrievable loss is set in motion and stands ready to
go on autopilot. For what, after all, is the object of the transgendered
subject’s loss?
Is this, in an updated, cultural, understanding of melancholia, ‘the
cultural consequence of forbidden mourning’, as in the case of the
American soldiers killed in Iraq and whose coffins are no longer shown
(on television) (SGM, 26)? Even though we still do not know exactly
what the transgendered melancholic has lost, this loss is hypostasized
and becomes fit to stand in for loss itself: ‘the melancholic’ (that is, the
transgendered person) embodies this loss (SGM, 29). Instead of finding
out what has been lost we learn that the melancholic displays ‘attitudes
of revolt’, that s/he seeks to break a bond while continuing to maintain
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 245
it, that s/he addresses someone who is not there (a ‘self-denying
address’), that s/he exhibits a propensity towards ‘public self-laceration’
and complaint (SGM, 28). In short, while the transgendered subject
is unaware of what causes their suffering, s/he has the performance
of melancholia down to a tee. Butler certainly tries to establish
a connection between melancholia and social exclusion in general,
of which exclusion due to the presentation of a ‘non-normative’
gender would be merely one example among others, and sees such
exclusion as leading to the subject’s being deprived, unrecognized or
misrecognized. Yet the question must be asked whether, if the structure
of melancholia is so widespread, it can really be the exemplary
structure of transgender identification. If what we are talking about
is gender dissonance then how can we assume, even for a moment,
after several decades of transgender revolution, that the MfF of San
Francisco is unaware of what has been denied her and what she has
therefore lost forever?

My Name is Nobody
The strangest thing about Butler’s text is doubtless this attempt at
re-sociologization which neglects to consider the subcultural benefits
of a city such as San Francisco, as of queer culture in general, and
which thus fails to consider in its analysis the contexts informing the
concrete situation of enunciation which will be transformed into an
anecdote by the author. Nobody from that rather savvy San Francisco
audience was worthy to appear in the acknowledgments. This is not
all. Butler’s analysis of the ‘case’ of the MtF of San Francisco achieves
the opposite of its stated goal; although supposedly reaching for a
cultural explanation of transgender melancholy it consists of a series
of failures to depathologize and depsychologize. Once again, even if
we relativize the psychoanalytic presuppositions which hold Butler’s
theory of trans melancholia together — which is practically impossible,
so riddled is the text with traditional ‘psychoanalisms’ — Butler’s
interpretation leads to a pathologization of the transgender demand
which is extremely pernicious because it involves the attribution of
victim status. When the text is trying to be ever so slightly culturalist
then it stipulates, for the MtF poet of San Francisco, pathologization by
a culture which exerts an unequalled power over her, a power which
can barely be resisted since when she does speak her speech is doomed
to failure and inaudibility.
Far from succeeding in her attempt to depsychologize, Butler
adds several further unnecessary layers of pathologization. The first
246 Paragraph
comes with her interpretation of the raging anger of the MtF of
San Francisco. By positing the existence of a single and arbitrary
connection between these emotions of rage, anger and suffering which
form part of sexual politics in general and various forms of feminism in
particular, Butler erases whole swathes of the history of performativity.
Yet rage, as an emotion in the field of sexual politics, has some recent
antecedents. It was valued as a source of empowerment by feminists
and lesbian feminists to the point where it became, in 1970, the
centrepiece of a feminist manifesto, the Woman-Identified Woman of the
Radicalesbians, which opened with these now famous words: ‘What is
a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of
explosion.’24 Butler refers to the imposition of an impossible mourning
for the first victims of HIV but how can she not be aware that rage
and anger also figured in the pantheon of Act Up’s values since its
foundation in New York? The kind of performativity in question has
nothing to do with a crisis of anger afflicting the transgendered person,
a crisis which is no more than a crisis of address, or ‘an open wound’.
The anger of Act Up saved many a life and nobody seriously doubts
whether it was heard and proved its efficacy. That politicization of
rage and anger neither led to, nor arose from, some fantastic state of
incommunicability.
The second level of pathologization is added by Butler’s dramatizing
and selective reading of Freud, in which the 1915 essay is taken to
be authoritative whereas Freud himself is careful to say there that the
definition of melancholia is ‘fluctuating’ and that he lacks a sufficiently
sophisticated empirical means of investigation (SE XIV, 243). Without
offering any explanation why, Butler opts spontaneously for the ‘hard’
version, for the pathology of mourning which is melancholia. It is
true that in melancholia the symptomatology is harder to bear, is
more desperate, for ‘the patient’, if not for the analyst who knows
more than the melancholic. By contrast with the person who is in
mourning, thanks to those attitudes of ‘rebellion’ which are very
understandable, according to Freud, in the case of the melancholic,
or of melancholia, both the loss and its object are hidden from
awareness. Another major difference is that the melancholic suffers
from a disturbed sense of self which becomes manifest in a highly
reflexive manner: ‘self-reproach’, ‘self-beratement’, ‘self-denigration’,
‘self-accusation’, which, even though they are all directed at a love
object, according to Freud nevertheless take the form of an attack on
the self in which the ego undervalues and rages against itself (SE XIV,
237–60).
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 247
It is clear, however, that ‘Fuck you Judith Butler!’ displays none of
these characteristics of turning against the self. Quite the opposite. No
more than it does of ‘shame’, a term Butler adds to her clinical portrait
but which not even Freud would throw into the mix: ‘They are
not ashamed and do not die themselves, since everything derogatory
that they say about themselves is at bottom said about someone else.’
(SE XIV, 248) The MtF of San Francisco did not take the crooked
path of (self-)accusatory complaint when she targeted the philosopher.
Moreover, she neither undervalued nor pitied herself. Her melancholic
complaint is wholly a product of the reconstruction undertaken by the
addressee of her insult, who is reduced to an affirmation, which takes
the form of a disavowal, that she could be the lost love object of the
MtF. This, in addition to the accompanying narcissistic satisfaction,
is what allows Butler to hold on simultaneously to both the amorous,
Kristevan, understanding of melancholy and to her own understanding
of melancholy as related to gender; it moreover allows this latter
theoretical construction to become the MtF of San Francisco’s even
more ideal lost love object. The Christlike paraphrase of Freud’s
definition of melancholy which Butler offers (‘melancholy is a form
of address which cannot reach its addressee, which never could and
never will; an open apostrophe, apostrophe as open wound’) should be
taken for what it is: a pious wish which respects neither the enunciative
bearing of trans speech nor the interlocutory situation in which the
philosopher found herself (SGM, 30).
Butler speaks of ‘politics’ only to conjure a timid promise which
has already come true on numerous occasions. In the twentieth, as
in the twenty-first century, in San Francisco as in many other places,
there is nothing singular or exceptional about the speech act of that
MtF poet. It is simply that any adequate description of her act of
speaking out requires reference to be made to the fact that she is ‘living
a psychic reality which is socially informed and mediated’ (SGM, 24).
This is not a matter of sociology but rather of politics; it is called doing
politics. All this presupposes is that we keep reminding ourselves of
the constraints imposed by a sex/gender system which is inadequate,
binary and prescriptive, but also of the memory and the knowledge of
how to resist that system. Instead, Butler superimposes a sort of primal
performative scene, which is both personalized and diminishing, a sort
of Mirror Stage with a two-way mirror, a scenario in which neither
party listens to the other. The addressee (it is as though there were
only one, Butler herself) manages to be both on the run and fully
present. The staging of this anecdote of the transgendered melancholic
248 Paragraph
participates in the structure of the ‘double bind’. Not only is MtF’s
address, in keeping with Freudian dogma from 1915, destined to fail
‘because melancholia is a form of address which cannot reach its
addressee’, but the addressee in question (conceived reductively to
be Butler alone) is gifted with the peculiar power to be everywhere
at the same time (SGM, 31). When she is there she is not there,
either because her notoriety exceeds her person or because nobody
recognizes her even though she teaches at the other end of the San
Francisco Bay Bridge, at Berkeley. We end up in a situation, which
would be comic were it not so asymmetrical in terms of power and
notoriety, in which there is an encounter between two people, neither
of whom is ‘recognizable’: the MtF who is defined as not recognizable
by Butler, in a manner which is entirely excessive and unrealistic,
by virtue of her demand for an impossible gender, and the invisible
celebrity, Butler in person, who does not understand when she is told
to go fuck herself.
What is more, Butler ends up inhabiting the very structure of
melancholic enunciation she has described. The fact that she has
not been recognized seems to be the condition of the possibility
of articulating this complaint of transgender melancholy, as well as
of its failure. No doubt this manner of occupying the place of the
absent addressee is a way of escaping the utterance of the MtF of San
Francisco, who was simply echoing a familiar and growing body of
criticism of Butler by trans people. Melancholy may well be more
cultural than it is psychic (even if this reversal does not stand, as we
have seen, and gives way to a new form of pathologization), yet it must
be remarked that with an exceptional lack of political receptiveness
Butler, finding herself at a site of queer culture, chose to embody the
dominant culture, the culture which refuses to read and listen. This
gives rise to a further contradiction: Butler is not unaware of what
trans studies hold against queer theory, a body of theory of which
she is the metonym, yet she still chooses to occupy the place of the
dominant culture of gender, faithful in this regard to that structure of
melancholia for which she is also a metaphor. Indeed this is what the
MtF of San Francisco is saying to her; this is what Butler refuses to hear
even when everyone else has understood perfectly well: clear off . . .
This way of staging the MtF’s utterance enacts the dematerialization
of Althusserian interpellation analysed above. In this instance we can
say that the sound has been definitively muted and the interpellation
destroyed. What remains is Butler coming to a communicative
understanding with the Lacanians to whom the text is addressed; for
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 249
they, far more than trans or queer people, are its addressees. This no
doubt explains the regrettable absence of any reference to critical work
on psychoanalysis within trans studies, work which is more precise,
more adequate and less narcissistic, or to non-pathologizing clinical
approaches adopted by practitioners who may themselves be trans, or
not, for example those promoted by the organization Gay and Lesbian
Affirmative Psychotherapy.25
Butler’s way of conceiving of the simultaneously psychic and social
exclusion of trans people is entirely in keeping with Millot’s attempts to
define trans people in terms of their ‘incredible’ propensity to demand,
which is qualified by the highly ambiguous term ‘fantastic’ in Butler’s
text.26 It follows logically from Butler’s ‘turn’, her turn away from
Gender Trouble, in which we find a proliferation of genders all made
possible by the malleability of norms by contrast to the fixity of the law,
her turn towards a reification of gender norms which create suffering
and render mourning impossible. This undoes the averred possibility
of identification with multiple genders, for trans people among others,
and tips ‘us’ over into disempowerment.

To Queer, Yes, But Starting Out From Where?

Far from being the sworn enemies of queer theory and politics,
the critical positions arising out of trans studies are invaluable. Two
such contributions to queer theory and politics could well constitute
their next big challenges: what could be called ‘sexual disorientation’
and the question of ‘the directionality of our queering’, to cite Jin
Haritaworn.27
How we can avoid ‘queering from above’ and how we can avoid
identifying with first-wave American ‘queer theory’ have become
pressing questions. According to Haritaworn our sexual situation
is linked to our epistemic position and the fact that white queer
theory constructed heterosexuality as enemy number one is itself
is a mark of a certain ‘heterocentrism’. Haritaworn criticizes the
way in which heterosexuality occupies the privileged position of
queer’s principal Other, as though heterosexuality were a single-issue
discourse, because this ignores racialized and minoritized forms of
heterosexuality. Twenty years after first-wave American queer theory
(de Lauretis) first called for intersectionality, the harvest has been
meagre to say the least. By drawing on empirical research on Thai
multiracialities in Britain and Gemany and by positioning himself as
queer, as a trans witness and researcher, Haritaworn pursues the self-
appointed task of elaborating a queer methodology and positionality
250 Paragraph
‘which can both tell the difference and ultimately make a difference’
(section 4, 6. unpaginated). The difference that means, for example,
as in the case of a gay Thai man living in London interviewed as part
of Haritaworn’s study, that outlandish dancing on a podium does not
simply signify a camp aesthetic but points back to a Thai mother who
was a sex-worker, a whore ‘who might have done podium dancing
not to express her sexuality but to make a living’ (section 3, 2.
unpaginated).
It is true that first-wave American queer theory shifted the emphasis
from homosexuality to the deconstruction of the opposition between
heterosexuality and homosexuality (at least in the work of Butler
and Sedgwick). In so doing it left gay and straight sexual orientation
untouched. It was a given that gay people would be attracted by boys
and lesbians by girls. So sexual orientation was fixed. Yet BDSM and
queer transcultures do not respect this alignment. We knew full well
that what is termed ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ ‘reassignment’ had nothing to do
with sexual orientation, but who could have anticipated that lesbians,
trans men, some trans women and some gay men, would have sexual
and emotional relationships with each another? This multiplication of
sexual possibilities is an evolution within trans and queer subcultures
which is not to be found in gay culture. Today, ‘gender trouble’ is
accompanied by a sexual ‘troubling’, a ‘sexual disorientation’, or at
least it is when queers, trans people and sex-workers mix. For reasons
which remain to be elucidated, queer transmasculinity has fuelled these
major developments. If queer theory and queer subcultures want to
move forward in their grasp of sexualities and sexual politics then they
have as much to learn from trans studies as from trans bodies. This will
involve some major realignments, although I am no more able than
you are to foretell precisely what these will entail.
Translated by Oliver Davis

NOTES
1 By ‘the second Butler’ I am referring to work of the period after Undoing
Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004 — hereafter abbreviated
as UG), published in French as Défaire le genre (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006),
although there are signs of this approach in earlier works such as Antigone’s
Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press,
2000). This analysis forms part of a wider project of critical reflection on the
work of Judith Butler, one which will eventually be the subject of a book in
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 251
its own right. Earlier versions have been presented at a number of conferences
and seminars and my argument has been refined in the light of the ensuing
discussions: in particular, at the ‘Queer in Europe’ conference organized by
Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett at the University of Exeter (September
2008); at the second and third years of the estudios queer symposium, organized
by Agustin Villalpando and Lars Ivar Owesen-Lein Borge at the University
of the Cloister of Sor Juana, in Mexico City (2008 and 2009); at the Simone
de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University, in 2010, as part of the Lillian
Robinson Lectures; finally, at Mireille Calle-Gruber’s seminar at Paris 3. I am
grateful to Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett for offering me the opportunity
to present my work at their conference and for publishing part of that paper in
their special issue of Sexualities: Marie-Hélène Bourcier, ‘Cultural translation,
politics of disempowerment and the reinvention of queer power and politics’,
Sexualities 15:1 (February 2012), special issue: European Culture / European
Queer, edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, 93–109. The present
article is a continuation of that discussion.
2 The expression ‘episteme of vulnerability’ is borrowed from Hélène Thomas,
Les Vulnérables: La démocratie contre les pauvres (Broissieux: Editions du
Croquant, 2010).
3 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009);
published in French as Ce qui fait une vie. Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil
(Paris: La Découverte/Zones, 2010).
4 See, for example, the conditions for realizing the universal which Slavoj Žižek
set for queer politics in The Ticklish Subject, The Absent Centre of Political
Ontology (London & New York: Verso, 1999). Žižek was critical of Butler
for not having respected the demands of universality; now they should both
be in agreement.
5 Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered
People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
6 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
7 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The Technology of Gender’, Technologies of Gender: Essays
in Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1987), 37–94.
8 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, edited
by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (New York: Picador, 2003).
9 Freud and Ferenczi, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi,
vol. 3 (1920–33), edited by Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, letter of 14
August 1925.
10 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock,
1977), 3–9.
252 Paragraph
11 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards
an Investigation)’, in On Ideology (London: Routledge, 2008), 1–60.
12 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (Routledege: New
York and London, 1997).
13 On the constraining effect of this injunction see Marie-Hélène Bourcier,
‘Technotesto: biopolitiques des masculinités tr(s)ans homme’, Cahiers du
Genre 45 (2008), Les Fleurs du mâle, masculinités sans hommes?, 59–84.
14 Loren Cameron, Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (San Francisco: Cleis,
1996).
15 The programme’s archives can be consulted at http://bistouriouioui.free.fr/.
16 See Bourcier, ‘Technotesto’.
17 Ironically, during this lecture trans studies were only mentioned by Judith
Butler for this very reason; the philosopher did not, however, answer
questions from members of the audience who were interested in such
studies. It is also worth mentioning that the term ‘transgender’, which
figured initially in the title of the lecture organized by the Department of
Women’s and Gender Studies (le départment d’Études féminines et de Genre)
was subsequently withdrawn in favour of the more general title ‘Gender,
Psychoanalysis and Politics’. Omitting this word ‘enabled’ the number of trans
people in the audience to be reduced. This encounter was organized by Anne
Berger, professor at Paris 8 and daughter of Hélène Cixous, who founded this
department of ‘women’s’, but certainly not ‘feminist’, studies in the 1980s.
This department was essentially devoted to the study of her own work from
a Lacano-Derridean perspective. Until recently Anne Berger continued to
further this mission of celebrating the timeless works of one of the greatest
French writers (her mother) and lately declared herself a specialist in queer
theory. When informed of them, she was not receptive to the consequences
of this change to the lecture’s title (which Butler had requested), a change
which made the lecture a ‘no show’ for trans people.
18 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte” ’ in Sexualités, genres et
mélancholies: S’entretenir avec Judith Butler, edited by Monique David-Ménard
(Paris: Campagne Première, 2009), 13–36, hereafter abbreviated as SGM.
19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James
Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), XIV, 237–60
(248). Hereafter references to Freud will be given in the main body of the
text according to SE volume and page number.
20 Alain Lemosof, ‘Roc de queer’, in SGM, 99–122.
21 Not quite enough, however, since she ‘still seems too fixed in her opposition
to the heteronormative symbolic order’, an opposition which is ‘intensely
activist’ and which ‘brings with it, in my view, certain contradictions’
(Lemosof, ‘Roc de queer’, SGM, 116 and n. 1).
 ‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment 253
22 On Catherine Millot’s Horsexe: Essays on Transsexuality, translated by Kenneth
Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1991) see also Marie-Hélène Bourcier,
‘Zap la psy, on a retrouvé la bite à Lacan’, Queer Zones 2: Sexpolitiques (Paris:
La Fabrique, 2005), 251–71.
23 Summarizing her approach, Butler says that she is trying ‘to understand what
it means to assert an identification in language’ (SGM, 22).
24 The text can be consulted in Duke University’s online archive of the history
of feminism: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/womid/ (consulted 10
September 2011).
25 Gay and Lesbian Affirmative Psychotherapy (http://www.glapnyc.org/). In
2010 the GLAP organized a conference in New York entitled ‘In Translation:
Clinical Dialogues Spanning the Transgender Spectrum’, the proceedings of
which have been published in a special issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian
Mental Health 15:2 (2011).
26 Butler, ‘Le transgenre et “les attitudes de révolte” ’, SGM, 24. All the
more ambiguous given that Butler borrowed the adjective and the entire
formulation from the psychoanalyst Ken Corbett.
27 Jin Haritaworn, ‘Shifting Positionalities: Empirical Reflections on a
Queer/Trans of Colour Methodology’, Sociological Research On Line 13:1
(2008), abstract, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/1/13.html.
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