The Trouble with Gender

MAYBE it’s just me. And I know I benefit from thirty-plus years of hindsight. But I cannot help but read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” together. After all, they came within three years of one another. “Mama’s Baby” was published in 1987; Gender Trouble in 1990. And they share similarities: the focus on embodiment (but, given that these are both feminist texts, that should not surprise anyone); and the critical use of psychoanalysis to expose normative gender dynamics. Gender Trouble and “Mama’s Baby” move in similar conceptual terrain. They engage in similar modes of immanent critique. So, when I read them together, I could not help but feel like they are talking to each other.

But there are differences, too. A conversation is not always premised on agreement. In “Mama’s Baby,” the terms “female” and “male” seem to invoke a space “before” or “beyond” binary gender’s normative constraints, and I am not sure Gender Trouble would ride with that.¹ But the flipside is true, too: “Mama’s Baby” would be suspicious of Gender Trouble’s emphasis on gender as inescapable. Gender Trouble thinks with bodies; “Mama’s Baby” prefers flesh. Although these texts converge at certain points, they also disagree on others.

But I think this space of dis/agreement is fruitful. I think this dis/agreement emphasizes why we need both of these texts—why we still need them. I think these texts still tell us something about the way binary gender enacts violence—the way that it is a kind of violence. Spillers and Butler enacted different kinds of gender trouble, but when read together, they form a dyad of devastating and destabilizing critique of gender and its troubles. When we read Butler and Spillers together, we realize: part of the trouble with gender is that it is not just about gender.

To illustrate this, I want to turn to a recent example of extreme violence. At first glance, it will feel outside the scope of Gender Trouble’s analysis. And I want to be clear up front; this scene includes gun violence. But I hope you will stay with me.

Because it matters.

So, here goes.

***

They were having Bible study. He walked in, sat down next to the Bible study teacher and listened. Sometimes, he would disagree, but for the most part, he was quiet.

They bowed their heads to pray.

He pulled out a gun.

And then he began to shoot.

There were thirteen of them there; by the time he was finished, only four of them would survive—two of whom did so by playing dead, by dissimulating their living flesh into breathless corpses.

Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson lost their lives that night. All because a boy with a bowl cut and what Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah once called a “thick, slow tongue” was on a mission to protect white women—and white existence more generally. “You rape our women,” he said. “And you’re taking over our country. You have to go” (Ghansah 2017).

And the cops, for their part, rewarded him by giving him Burger King. “He was not problematic,” they said (McCormack and De Graaf 2015).

***

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) shooting is often read as an extreme act of anti-Black “racism.” And it is. But that term racism produces an epistemological, ontological, and moral set of logics that parochialize the nature of the violence. In reflecting on this violence, too many of us—particularly those of us who are deemed white—think they can/not understand that kind of violence. If they can, they take a detached perspective; they know why he did it, but they do not agree with his reasoning. If they cannot, they are (performatively) affected; “shock” and “outrage” follow.

These epistemological dynamics invoke ontological ones: “This is not who we are,” we are told (and we also might ask here: who is this “we”?, but I digress). And those ontological claims invoke moral ones; if this is not who “we” are, then “we” certainly cannot be made responsible for it. It turns out, then, that invoking racism can also vindicate you from the charge of racism.

In my mind, Gender Trouble and “Mama’s Baby” keep these structures of vindication and justification at bay. These texts call us to account for our own complicity in such violence—to see that “we” enable the very violence “we” (self-righteously) criticize. Gender Trouble attunes us to binary gender’s epistemological violence; “Mama’s Baby” underscores the ontological effects that this kind of violence entails.² Though they are different, and though they disagree, these two texts are profound reminders that “innocence” is never that innocent.

I therefore want to sit with this scene of violence as a way to sit with Butler and Spillers.³ I want to show that the trouble they make with and for gender is something that should trouble us all; in troubling gender, they both trouble our assumptions about gender. In exposing gender, Butler and Spillers expose us. And in being exposed, we (and perhaps this is a different “we”) might find other ways to relate and live.

***

Roof told his victims that they were raping “our women.” At first glance, this phrase feels empty; some of us might conclude that Roof was just parroting some old-school anti-Black bullshit. But after you work your way through Gender Trouble—after you encounter the text’s continued refusal of “women’s” univocity, the (denied) instability of French structuralism, and the possibilities and pitfalls of psychoanalysis, among other things—you realize: whatever Roof’s psychological constitution, “our women” is not just some gendered designation. It is the invocation of binary gender as a justification for anti-Black violence. Binary gender is given as a reason. It is given as a cause. It is given as a source of motivation. In short, binary gender is given.

But it is not a given. Though we presume its normalcy all the time, that is just it: binary gender derives its normalcy—and therefore its power—from our continued collective and often unthought investment in it. Binary gender makes many people’s lives meaningful. (It certainly contributes to Roof’s sense of self-significance.) But this does not mean binary gender should be presumed. Binary gender is a construction. It is only given to us because we continue to give it significance.

Sex is constructed, too. And it is done through reading bodies (something Roof did not do when killing his victims, but we will return to that in a bit). This act of reading disguises itself, though; in phenomenological terms, sex has now become just one more assumption of what Husserl calls the “natural attitude” (Husserl, 1983, 51-53). And that term “natural” is key; though Gender Trouble does not deploy phenomenology, it exposes the fictive frailty of sex by turning to genetic scientific studies; Butler shows us that science presumes and therefore reproduces heterosexual (and androcentric) norms as naturally occurring realities.

It turns out, then, that “this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender,” and “perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (Butler [1990] 2006, 10). Sex is already gender(ed), which means sex is also given—given as a “natural” justification for binary gender’s presumed normalcy.

Sex is given; gender is given. But they are not givens. Despite the fact that we often presume their respective normalcy and naturalness, neither gender nor sex (which, as we see, is gender) are divinely sanctioned metaphysical gifts.

In fact, thinking gender is this kind of gift is what enables violence. Dylann Roof certainly thinks it is. His decision to shoot up a church in the name of “our women” shows us that “women”—whatever this term meant in his head—was sacred to him, that it gave his life meaning. Binary gender was one of his central discursive reasons for trying to start a “race war”; he used that “thick, slow tongue” of his to enact a form of discursive violence that was outmatched only by the correlative and unspeakable physical violence he carried out.

“Our women” clues us into this; “women” functions as a unit in a binary gendered pair, wherein “men” serve as “women’s” protectors. Roof did what he did in the name of protection. And he was able to do this because “manhood” had already taken hold, because he was enacting a citational performative practice of chauvinistic white manhood. That discursive act, that brutal deployment of language, that performance of and for binary gender’s normative and repressive violence (there is no doubt in my mind that he thought he was protecting his “women”), laid bare the trouble with gender, exposed that gender can and will be violent—lethally so—when it is left unchecked.

And left unchecked it was. Butler tells us that gender is a vector of political and juridical power; Roof’s violent performance of gender was therefore only possible because the structures of juridical power—embodied in the police in this case—sanctioned and encouraged it. Though they would arrest him, and though he would be sentenced to death, the fact remains: they went and got him Burger King. If gender—as a vector of power relations—paradoxically enables and constrains subjects, therefore giving them a sense of meaning within certain constraints, then I am left wondering: does that fast-food trip suggest that the only problem with Roof’s violence is that he went too far?

I ask this because police are also called on to “protect.” Protect and serve, so the motto goes. In this world, then, police function as men; they are called on to carry the repressive “No” of the Father’s law in the name of the alleged “safety” of the “public.” If you are a cop, the protective function of police epistemologically locates you within what Spillers might call the “imagined province” of manhood—irrespective of your gender.

Though Gender Trouble does not explicitly address these issues, sitting with that text as a way to sit with Roof’s violence exposes our assumptions about gender and the police; it calls us to account for the way many of us uncritically rely on these logics and institutions. At least that is what it did for me. I know that without it, I would not be able to see the gendered dimensions of this violence so clearly. I would not be able to see that the trouble with gender is that it is not just about gender, that it can enable violence to the point of death—even and especially when that violence is anti-Black.

***

Sitting with Gender Trouble opens a profound criticism of the epistemological and juridical dynamics of Roof’s anti-Black violence. It exposes the gendered dynamics of police actions; it exposes how limited our sociocultural and sociopolitical world is when it comes to thinking about and addressing the gendered dynamics of extreme violence. Sadly, Dylann Roof is not the only mass shooter. And angeringly, this world still fails to reckon with the fact that most mass shooters are men, and most of their violence has everything to do with gender.⁴ That text is powerful. It hits. And it hits hard.

Nevertheless, the truth is, as much as I need Gender Trouble, I also need “Mama’s Baby.” Although Gender Trouble enables me—enables us—to powerfully expose and criticize the epistemological conditions of Roof’s violence, “Mama’s Baby” offers us a way to sit with the victims and to do so by way of an ontological analysis. I cannot help but notice that six of Roof’s victims—Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, and DePayne Middleton Doctor—were “women,” or at least that’s the language we have used to describe them.⁵

At first glance, Roof’s claim about sexual assault does not make sense. The majority of the people he killed were Black women, and though it would be foolish to assume that sexual assault cannot occur within same-gender relations (or that women cannot enact assault), it would also be foolish to assume that this is what Roof had in mind.

But the truth is, it does not matter. Whatever Roof’s thoughts were, the fact remains that that “you,” that second-person subject of direct address in “you rape our women,” rendered those lives in that church “not at all gender-related, gender-specific” (Spillers 1987, 68). This is because those lives were ungendered, which is to say, those lives were flesh.⁶ Spillers says this because she begins in the hold of the Middle Passage, where bodies were stolen.⁷

[Black peoples’] New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. (Spillers 1987, 67)

Gender Trouble shows us how “the body” is a construction; there is no body “before” discourse, no pre- or ungendered body awaiting gendered signification. Bodies are therefore sites of dynamic contestation that gain their intelligibility as bodies only through the cultural, political, and epistemological constructs of gender, particularly the pervasive and pernicious coupling of “female” and “male.”

Spillers seems to agree on the body’s constructed existence. Her claim that the body is a “territory of cultural and political maneuver” resonates deeply with Butler’s claims. But the hold hits differently. And I do not mean this in a nice way. “The female in ‘Middle Passage,’ as the apparently smaller physical mass (my emphasis), occupies ‘less room’ in a directly translatable money economy. But she is, nevertheless, quantifiable by the same rules of accounting as her male counterpart” (Spillers 1987, 72). In the hold, where a body is cargo, “female” and “male” designate body size. Nothing more, nothing less.

Spillers therefore shows sex to be a construction, too—but she does so through the brutal mathematics of the slave trade. “Under these conditions,” Spillers wrote, “one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into ‘account’ as quantities” (Spillers’s emphasis; Spillers 1987, 72). The Black body was—and, if we were to be honest, still is—the object of a theft. It was/is siphoned for its economic productivity. This “mathematics of the unliving,” as Katherine McKittrick might call it, therefore renders sex—and therefore the Black body—economic matters (McKittrick 2014, 17).

But—and here is the ontological point—the body is not all there is. Spillers tells us that “before the ‘body,’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape the brush of discourse nor the reflexes of iconography” (Spillers 1987, 67). Although the Middle Passage marked a theft of the body, Spillers emphasizes that this violence was a “high [crime] against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding” (Spillers 1987, 67). Flesh is a “primary narrative” that speaks to the “seared, divided, ripped-apartness” of Black personhood; it announces what precedes and remains upon the Black body’s theft.

Disclosing the brutality that Black flesh endures also announces an ontological rupture at the heart of dominant gender symbolics. In other words, Black flesh, particularly Black female flesh, is ungendered. It does not regain what was lost.

The African female subject... is not only the target of rape—in one sense, an interiorized violation of body and mind—but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar province of male brutality and torture inflicted by other males. (Spillers 1987, 68)

This ungendering violence against Black flesh produces a “hieroglyphics” whose meanings are never fully captured by the dominant symbolic order.

What I am trying to get at is this: in the ungendered space of Black flesh, any Black body will do—which means that Roof’s victims did not need to be gendered as men to suffer the “externalized” violence of murder in the name of chauvinistic protection. The gender of Roof’s victims did not matter. Those nine lives established Roof’s existence as a human, a subject endowed with rights that the state could not help but respect. Again: they took him to Burger King. Flesh, Black flesh, constitutes that abject realm from and through which the “human” gains its coherence. You’re taking over our country. And you have to go.

That “you” is ungendered.

And that ungendering was necessary for Roof’s claim—and his life—to make sense.

***

Butler asks: “Are there ever humans who are not, as it were, always already gendered?” (Butler [1990] 2006, 151). Epistemologically, we would have to say no: Gender Trouble compellingly establishes binary gender as a structure of knowledge to which we must refer, even if we live outside or beyond that binary. To know a human is to know binary gender, and this knowledge maintains the violence of the human as a normative category.

In this regard, Roof did what he did in the name of binary gender; “our women” serves as an epistemological anchor. He knows he is a man, so he protected his “women”—which is to say, he protected an epistemological concept of “women” that kept his own gendered identity intact. Butler—or at least the Butler of Gender Trouble—might tell us: no, there are no ungendered humans. And epistemologically, they would be right.

But the truth is, Roof did not need to know the gendered identities of his victims. In the space of Black flesh, any Black body will do. What Spillers shows us is how ungendered flesh just might occupy an ontological space beyond the human, a modality of life unintelligible to, and therefore excluded from, the domain of the “human” and its variegated gendered dynamics of power. From this perspective, Roof’s violence constitutes a profound act of dehumanization. Or, put differently, it confirms what Spillers’s work helps us to understand: maybe we (and by “we,” I mean Black people here) were never human. If Butler gives an epistemological no to their question, then Spillers’s work provides an ontological yes.

But maybe it does not matter if they were human or not. As Zakiyyah Jackson tells us, Black(ened) people’s inclusion into the human does not entail protections—it only heightens the intensity of what she calls the “plasticization” of Black flesh (Jackson 2020, 11).⁸ In this regard, ungendered Black flesh is stretched and warped to give coherence to the human—and therefore to binary gender, to “our women.” Human or not, Black flesh remains ungendered. And people like Dylann Roof capitalize on this ungendered status to enact unspeakable violence in order to sustain binary gender’s normative coherence. Six of Roof’s victims were women. And that did not matter. Not to him, anyway.

Naming Black people’s—and particularly, Black women’s—ungendered existence does not nullify Butler’s analysis. Neither does it invalidate their discussion of the body as a dynamic and constrained site of political and cultural logics. And though I cannot go into detail about this in this particular article, I want to note along with Marquis Bey, Siobhan Kelly, and others that Spillers’s work still operates in relation to binary gender. In this regard, Gender Trouble’s pluralizing of gender allows us to think about violence against Black trans people in ways that “Mama’s Baby” may not.⁹ As Blake Garland-Tirado powerfully points out, the epistemological logics of gender will not simply send a Black trans woman like Eisha Love to jail; it will send her to the men’s jail, legislating her life in ways that are frighteningly similar to the way Herculine was made to live.¹⁰

My point is that we need—I need—both Butler and Spillers to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. Thinking with Spillers on flesh situates and further sharpens their analyses. When they claim “those bodily figures who do not fit into either gender fall outside the human, indeed, constitute the domain of the dehumanized, and the abject against which the human itself is constituted” (Butler, [1990] 2006, 151). we are able to see “those bodily figures who do not fit” as the flesh—and in the case of the Emanuel Nine, the Black flesh—that they are.

***

I know I am far beyond the parameters of both of these texts. But I have been told that my work is a form of what Foucault might call a “history of the present”; I think with theorists, philosophers, and historians so that I might better understand our contemporary world and its myriad violence.

I decided to focus on Dylann Roof because, to be honest, his violence has not ended. And it is not just his violence. I write to you in the wake of the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings, where police did little to nothing to stem the tide of violence. They sat by as the Uvalde shooter did his deadly work; they “de-escalated” the Buffalo shooter only after he killed ten Black people in the name of protecting the “white population.” There are so many shootings happening that the press now determines which ones to cover based on the scope of their violence. I am angry at the fact that this violence is still happening.

And I am pissed that we live in a country that refuses to do anything of substance to mitigate this violence.

Perhaps this anger, this pissed-offness, is a kind of melancholy. That would track. This article is, after all, a work in mourning, a kind of melancholic reflection on the critical capacities afforded us by Butler and Spillers. In this regard, it would not be too far off from Adríán Emmanuel Hernandez-Acosta’s reflections on melancholy in this roundable. Hernandez-Acosta tells us that “how we relate to the losses that form us, or... at what rhythm and pace we relate to those losses makes all the difference.” In this regard, thinking with flesh and gender (and sex)—which is to say, thinking with Spillers and Butler—in relation to contemporary violence like the Emanuel AME shooting or the Buffalo shooting or the Uvalde shooting is a kind of melancholic work, a modality of tarrying (as the Black church say) with the losses that form me, form us.

I am sure mentioning these shootings will “date” this article; talking about contemporary events usually shortens the “shelf-life” of academic writing. Hernandez-Acosta also attunes our attention to the temporality of loss, to a “seemingly endless succession that turns into simultaneity” that characterizes Black life (which is to say, Black death). Or, as I state in Black Life Matter: “The brutally undeniable, long-standing, and enduring reality is that black lives have been, are, and will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of American religion. This hasn’t changed. Black death is part of the game. It is the game” (Gray, 2022, 114). This “game,” that succession of interminable Black deaths, did not begin with Dylann Roof. And it did not end with the Buffalo shooter. That succession continues in a list of names marked by the incessant violence enacted against Black flesh in the name of gender/sex and its various normative effects.¹¹

Perhaps, then, I wrote this article in and out of a melancholic mourning. Perhaps I wrote this as an act of catharsis. I hope the latter is not the case. But to be honest, I don’t know.

What I do know is this: Gender Trouble and “Mama’s Baby” have shaped the way I think about the world. And though I do not have time to fully elaborate, what these texts also do is provide constructive possibilities for upturning this myriad violence. “Subvert gender by playing it against itself,” Butler encourages; “Embrace the monstrosity of ungendered black life,” Spillers counsels. Though they come from different perspectives and histories, they nevertheless trouble gender at its foundations. And in so doing, they open generative ways of thinking against and beyond what we have been given.

In the late ’80s, Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers set out to make trouble.

They’ve been doing it ever since.

And I, for one, am glad for it.

REFERENCES

Footnotes

Author notes