Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: The Politics of Post-Structuralism

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ly decentered subjectivity is to distort our understanding of both the decentered subject and the condition of specific oppressed groups. More importantly, Spivak generates a false dualism between a higher theoretical truth-the truth of decentered subjectivity-and what ultimately must then be seen as an enabling practical lie. That is, her conception of a strategic essentialism both guarantees practice and then obligingly acts as a target for a knowing antihumanism ultimately works to disarticulate practice from theory, subordinating the former to the latter. The idea practice only works through what are ultimately dangerous fictions diminishes the extent to which the critique of naturalized identities can itself inform political practice. In terms less ominous than Spivak's, for example, Snitow nonetheless similarly suggests those engaging in political activism are required to foster a forgetfulness of the kind of constructionist critique led them to understand the workings of power in the first place: We begin: The category woman is a fiction; then poststructuralism suggests ways in which human beings live by fictions; then, in its turn, activism requires of feminists we elaborate the fiction woman as if she were not a provisional invention at all but a person we know well, one in need of obvious rights and powers. Activism and theory weave together here, working on what remains the same basic cloth, the stuff of feminism. (19) The problem I have with this formulation lies in the way constructionism belongs to post-structuralism, while activism requires the bracketing of constructionist critique (pace the weaving metaphor).16 In a refusal of these kinds of double gestures, some cultural critics have insisted we derive our politics more directly from constructionist critique. For example, Judith Butler argues for a feminist politics that will take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political (5). For Butler, the affirmation of unified identity is not a political prerequisite; on the contrary, the disruption of naturalized conceptions of identity should serve as This content downloaded from 157.55.39.223 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 05:38:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures 75 the model for political practice as such.17 Butler thus aims to reconcile the normative and the theoretical, and does not insist on their irreducible opposition. Yet Butler's theory remains limited insofar as it fails to account sufficiently for the political ideals and values inform progressive practice, ones extend beyond the recognition of constructedness. Because for Butler, the point is not simply to show all subjectivity is constructed, but also to show it is constructed within a dominant and oppressive heterosexual matrix. And in characterizing the heterosexual matrix as dominant and oppressive, Butler means to emphasize, one can only assume, its failure to recognize and respect other sexualities and subjective practices. But this is a normative claim only cryptically informs her account. Subverting identity constitutes the methodology and the goal of feminist political practice; recognition and respect inform the discussion but are not given theoretical primacy. She introduces the ideas of coalition and dialogue, but only to argue against the possibility of formulating any notion of solidarity, which she in an unwarranted move equates with unity: Despite the clearly democratizing impulse motivates coalition building, the coalitional theorist can inadvertently reinsert herself as sovereign of the process by trying to assert an ideal form for coalitional structures in advance, one will effectively guarantee as the outcome (14). But there's a between giving theoretical explicitness to tacitly supposed intersubjective ideals, and decreeing what unity will be. While I am entirely in accord with Butler's idea we should expect divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the dialogical process of democratization, I think she makes this point only to swerve away from giving theoretical prominence to the intersubjective ideals inform this very point (14). Spivak's own reconsiderations on the topic of strategic essentialism revealingly devolve on the issue of dialogue and intersubjectivity. In an interview with Ellen Rooney for the journal Differences, Spivak expresses surprise as well as regret at the way strategic essentialism has been so widely heralded as a solution to theory's political impasses, suggesting we must shift toward a new terrain, of building for difference (In a Word 128). Over the course of the questioning, Spivak manifests a repeated impatience with the very term essentialism and with the attempt to This content downloaded from 157.55.39.223 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 05:38:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms