Page 24 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Troubling ‘race’ 17
racial identity behind the expressions of race . . . race is performatively con-
stituted by the very “expressions” which are said to be its results’. What does
it mean for ‘race’ to be performative? What kind of ‘doing’ and ‘expressions’
does this involve? What processes of identification are being proposed? How
do subjects come into being, by what process of subjectification? What are
the possibilities for agency within discourses or in creating new discourses?
Butler herself certainly believes that her concepts can and should be applied
to ‘race’ and opposes those who grant a primacy to sexual identification
above other and, in particular, racial identifications. She argues that: ‘though
there are clearly good historical reasons for keeping “race” and “sexuality”
and “sexual difference” as separate analytic spheres. There are also quite
pressing and significant historical reasons for asking how and where we
might read not only their convergence, but the sites at which one cannot be
constituted save through the other’ (Butler 1993a: 168). 3
So, how can we understand racialised and sexed bodies and identifications?
Butler contends that bodies are materialised as ‘sexed’ through a normative
process: ‘the regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to
constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialise the
body’s sex, to materialise sexual difference in the service of the consolidation
of the heterosexual imperative’ (Butler 1993a: 2). For Butler, ‘sex’ is ‘one
of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at all, that which qualifies
a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility’ (Butler 1993a:
2). This embodiment, through a normative process, is inextricably linked to
subjecthood. This is not merely a matter of social inscription, but involves
psychic processes that govern the formation of the subject and circumscribe
the domain of liveable sociality (Butler 1997a: 21).
Without occupying the site of the subject, the individual has no means by
which to speak or be spoken about. Yet, at the same time, this production of
a subject is a violation, it involves loss and repression, which in turn impacts
on the psyche. The individual is therefore the sum of the subject and the
psyche and is in the process of constantly rearticulating itself as a subject.
This process of the reiteration of the individual as a subject is discussed by
Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power. She describes the ambiguous and
contradictory processes of subject formation. Although it is ‘a power exerted
on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an as-
sumption that constitutes the instruments of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler
1997a: 11). The operation of the psychic involves powerful forces of desire
and repulsion. Subjects develop passionate attachments to their positionality,
even though it inevitably involves foreclosure and the loss of other pos-
sibilities and ways of being. It is normative discourses that shape the kinds of
subjects that emerge and the identifications that they make. For Butler, ‘[t]he
forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm
of “sex” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which pro-
duces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot
emerge’ (Butler 1993a: 3).