2594 words, 13 minute read.
Looking back at Judith Buttler’s “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (that I wrote about here) and at John Paul II’s “Man and Woman He Created Them” (covered here), I am reminded of the advice that Chiara Lubich offered to Giuseppe Maria Zanghí, when he turned to her in disillusionment with the ideas of thinkers that he found lacking and which he recounts as follows:1
“It was Chiara, later, who drew my attention to all the expressions of human inquiry, because, she told me, each of them had been, is in love with the truth and in one way or another had it, touched it. And there is in all a patrimony of suffering, of invocation, of awaiting, which must be respected with humble attention and strong participation. “You must learn from everyone”, she told me, “so that you may know how to approach everyone with love”.”
What struck me when I first read this was that it is a manifesto for dialogue and for engaging with the ideas and worldviews of all. Believing in their love of truth, the authenticity of suffering to which they respond and the sincerity of their desire to overcome it, invites humility, rather than judgment, to be the mode of engagement.
Above all, I was drawn to the realization that all serious thought comes with a heritage of suffering, that it grows from a suffering that calls to it for remedy. And this is apparent both in Buttler’s discursive-constructionist-linguistic approach and in John Paul II’s theological one. It also seems to me that the suffering roots of the two are intertwined and overlapping and that they may be the ideal locus for attempting a reading of the two that understands their shared and distinct positions. I also think that a focus on the suffering to which the two respond may make their mutual recognition of a shared project more accessible. In the following I will draw on passages from Buttler’s book that I have not written about before, as well as underlining the suffering that she sets out in the introduction that was the primary source of a previous blog post here. This will be followed by an analogous perspective on John Paul II’s thought with the aim simply to catalogue, to set out the laments to which both respond.
Buttler starts off by synthesizing Simone de Beauvoir’s position, that “women are the negative of men, the lack against which masculine identity differentiates itself” and points to Luce Irigaray reading that inequality in even starker terms. For “Irigaray both the subject [masculine] and the Other [feminine] are masculine mainstays of a closed phallogocentric signifying economy that achieves its totalizing goal through the exclusion of the feminine altogether”. This wound is an annihilation of the feminine as subject and its exclusion from a totalitarian masculine signifying economy. The very structure of verbal thought denies women the status of subject and relegates them to objects. The masculine, according to Beauvoir, not only negates the feminine but goes beyond it to usurp the universal:
“[T]he “subject” within the existential analytic of misogyny is always already masculine, conflated with the universal, differentiating itself from a feminine “Other” outside the universalizing norms of personhood, hopelessly “particular,” embodied, condemned to immanence.”
And, in Irigaray’s thought, does so to the extent of entirely removing any possibility of the feminine to qualify for subjecthood:
“Women can never “be,” according to this ontology of substances, precisely because they are the relation of difference, the excluded, by which that domain marks itself off. Women are also a “difference” that cannot be understood as the simple negation or “Other” of the always-already-masculine subject. [… T]hey are neither the subject nor its Other, but a difference from the economy of binary opposition, itself a ruse for a monologic elaboration of the masculine. […]
[T]he Other as well as the Same are marked as masculine; the Other is but the negative elaboration of the masculine subject with the result that the female sex is unrepresentable— that is, it is the sex which, within this signifying economy, is not one. But it is not one also in the sense that it eludes the univocal signification characteristic of the Symbolic, and because it is not a substantive identity, but always and only an undetermined relation of difference to the economy which renders it absent.”
This inequality and asymmetry can also present itself in the form of an identification of women with nature and men with culture, which the following consequences, as set out by anthropologists Marilyn Strathern and Carol MacCormack who have argued
“that nature/culture discourse regularly figures nature as female, in need of subordination by a culture that is invariably figured as male, active, and abstract. As in the existential dialectic of misogyny, this is yet another instance in which reason and mind are associated with masculinity and agency, while the body and nature are considered to be the mute facticity of the feminine, awaiting signification from an opposing masculine subject. As in that misogynist dialectic, materiality and meaning are mutually exclusive terms.”
Continuing with an anthropological analysis, Buttler refers to Lévi-Strauss’ The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which argues that:
“the object of exchange that both consolidates and differentiates kinship relations is women, given as gifts from one patrilineal clan to another through the institution of marriage. The bride, the gift, the object of exchange constitutes “a sign and a value” that opens a channel of exchange that not only serves the functional purpose of facilitating trade but performs the symbolic or ritualistic purpose of consolidating the internal bonds, the collective identity, of each clan differentiated through the act. In other words, the bride functions as a relational term between groups of men; she does not have an identity, and neither does she exchange one identity for another. She reflects masculine identity precisely through being the site of its absence.”
The denial of subject status to women, which also removes their personal identity, degrades their participation in family relationships to the role of mere tokens by which groups of men relate to each other. What struck me when I first read the above perspective on kinship relations was how they are a perversion of the relationships among the Persons of the Trinity. In both cases there are three that participate in a relational structure and in both cases there are identities, subjects and exchanges. In the case of the Trinity, the Father, as subject and without ceasing to be subject, freely gives himself to the Son, who in return and with full subjecthood freely reciprocates the gift in such a way that the mutual self-exchange of Father and Son is the Person of the Holy Spirit who has equal subject- and personhood as the Father and the Son. It is a dynamic of three free persons of equal subjecthood that makes them one. The traces of this dynamic and subject-affirming structure can be seen in Butler’s account of Lévi-Strauss’ theory, but only as ruins ravaged by distortion and perversion. Where there are three subjects in the Trinity, here there are only two: two groups of men, with full identities and distinct subjecthoods. Where the relating of subjects takes place through and in a fully equal third subject in the Trinity, here the third is denied her subject- and personhood and rendered an object, used and exploited by the other two, who deprive themselves of true relationships by relating to each other through exploiting a third. The self-giving loves of the Father and the Son are perverted into selfish appropriation; the glory of the Holy Spirit is perverted into the objectification and depersonalization of women.
Butler then continues the same paragraph with spelling out the brutal consequences the these relationships in Lévi-Strauss’ thought:
“Clan members, invariably male, invoke the prerogative of identity through marriage, a repeated act of symbolic differentiation. Exogamy distinguishes and binds patronymically specific kinds of men. Patrilineality is secured through the ritualistic expulsion of women and, reciprocally, the ritualistic importation of women. As wives, women not only secure the reproduction of the name (the functional purpose), but effect a symbolic intercourse between clans of men. As the site of a patronymic exchange, women are and are not the patronymic sign, excluded from the signifier, the very patronym they bear. The woman in marriage qualifies not as an identity, but only as a relational term that both distinguishes and binds the various clans to a common but internally differentiated patrilineal identity.”
Buttler then spells out a further wound caused by such inequality, which not only impacts individual women, but also the relationships among women:
The relation of reciprocity established between men, however, is the condition of a relation of radical nonreciprocity between men and women and a relation, as it were, of nonrelation between women.
The wounds caused by the hegemony of a masculinist signifying economy are deep when viewed from the perspective of women in a heterosexual context and, according to Monique Wittig, even deeper when it comes to homosexual persons, whose very existence, or even potential existence, is denied and invalidated:
“A woman, [Wittig] argues, only exists as a term that stabilizes and consolidates a binary and oppositional relation to a man; that relation, she argues, is heterosexuality.A lesbian, she claims, in refusing heterosexuality is no longer defined in terms of that oppositional relation. Indeed, a lesbian, she maintains, transcends the binary opposition between woman and man; a lesbian is neither a woman nor a man. But further, a lesbian has no sex; she is beyond the categories of sex. Through the lesbian refusal of those categories, the lesbian exposes (pronouns are a problem here) the contingent cultural constitution of those categories and the tacit yet abiding presumption of the heterosexual matrix.”
In summary, the wounds exposed by feminism as represented in Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” derive from a fundamental inequality between men and women, where only men are true subjects and women are merely passive objects. Women are excluded and objectified, reduced to facilitating relations among men and, due to their non-subjecthood, even the possibility of relations among them are impossible.
In Pope John Paul II’s “Man and Woman He Created Them” we can find the same fundamental wound of the deprivation of personhood and of objectification, albeit seen as a danger in both how men can mistreat women and how women can mistreat men, the latter being a danger also noted by Butler:
“Concupiscence2 […] attacks precisely this “sincere gift”: it deprives the human being, one could say, of the dignity of the gift, which is expressed by their body through femininity and masculinity, and in some sense “depersonalizes” the human being, making them an object “for the other.” Instead of being “together with the other”—a subject in unity, or better, in the sacramental “unity of the body”—the human being becomes an object for the human being, the female for the male and vice versa.”
The fundamental and equal subjecthood of men and women is also underlined by John Paul II in the reading of the Genesis account of creation, which is sometimes interpreted as being masculinist. He counters such a reading by pointing to how this text speaks about humans before versus after the fall – i.e., where the “before” is the intended state and the “after” is the wounded, perverted state:3
“The ethos of the gift delineates in part the problem of the “subjectivity” of the human being, who is a subject made in the image and likeness of God. In the creation account (see Gen 2:23–25), “the woman” is certainly not just “an object” for the man, although both remain before one another in the whole fullness of their objectivity as creatures, as “bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh,” as male and female, both of them naked. Only the nakedness that turns the woman into an “object” for the man, or vice versa, is a source of shame. The fact that “they did not feel shame” means that the woman was not an “object” for the man, nor he for her. Inner innocence as “purity of heart” made it impossible somehow for one to be reduced by the other to the level of a mere object. If “they did not feel shame,” this means that they were united by the consciousness of the gift, that they had reciprocal awareness of the spousal meaning of their bodies, in which the freedom of the gift is expressed and the whole inner richness of the person as subject is shown. This reciprocal interpenetration of the “I” of the human persons, of the man and the woman, seems to exclude subjectively any “reduction to an object.” […]
And even through the veil of shame, the human being was continually to discover themselves in it as the guardian of the mystery of the subject, that is, of the freedom of the gift, in order to defend this freedom from any reduction to the position of a mere object.”
Elsewhere John Paul II also speaks about the breakdown of subjecthood, and relationships based on mutual self-giving, by saying that “[t]he relationship of the gift changes into a relationship of appropriation.”
While the wounds of gender equality that Butler focuses on are those where the feminine is objectified by the masculine, John Paul II mostly presents them in both directions. I believe, this is motivated by his reflection being centered on the potential that both men and women have for mutual fulfillment and oppression alike, rather than on an analysis of a pervasive cultural asymmetry. Interestingly, the instances where he focuses on women being reduced to objects by men have their roots in Jesus himself focusing on it, as opposed to talking about both directions:
“It is, in fact, one thing to have the consciousness that the value of sex is part of the whole richness of values with which a feminine being appears to a man; it is quite another thing to “reduce” the whole personal richness of femininity to this one value, that is, to sex as the fitting object of the satisfaction of one’s own sexuality. One can apply the same reasoning to what masculinity is for a woman, although the words of Matthew 5:27–284 refer directly only to the other relation. […]
In the situation described by Christ, this dimension exists one-sidedly between the man, who is a subject, and the woman, who has become an object.”
At a fundamental level there is strong alignment though between Judith Butler and John Paul II in terms of the shared aim that every person is to be a fully-fledged subject and a denunciation of any form of objectification. How both propose to go about it is something to look into next.
1 Zanghí, G. M. (2008) Gesù abbandonato maestro di pensiero, Città Nuova, Rome, pp. 14–15.
2 “Concupisence” here refers to an “inclination to sin”, i.e., the potential for a human person to act out of self-interest and with disregard for their own good and the good of others.
3 Please, see this previous post about what John Paul II means by referring to Genesis as being a mythical text and about adjustments made to the English translation of his book in the quotes I use here.
4 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28)
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