Ideology, Subject and Gender: Undoing Representations in the Thought of Teresa De Lauretis and Judith Butler

Abstract

In Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology, the subject is linked to gender rules. However, the answer to the question of why there is a collaboration between ideology, subject, and gender is not found in Althusser. Political subjectivity and political struggle therefore remain trapped in class debates for Althusser. Judith Butler and Teresa De Lauretis, similarly situated in their understanding of subject, gender, and politics, extend Althusser’s perspective on ideology and subject to the construction of gender and understand gender as a kind of ideology. By emphasising the outside of ideology, they disrupt the collaboration between ideology and subject. They extend the economic level, in which Althusser was trapped, to the whole of social life. In this way, they turn life and every encounter in life into a space of possibility for overcoming gender representations and political emancipation.