Amnesia or Memory, Gender Trouble or Sexual Identity

The issue of sexual identity has always been controversial in society and in academia. The question is whether we are supposed to assert our identity in its difference or to work on the deconstruction of all identities that are but constructs and confines set up to oppress us.

M. Jacqui Alexander, a lesbian Caribbean woman, recommends memory as a suitable tool to rewrite history or “her stories”, communicate and give visibility to what has been made invisible by the prevailing structures.

Forgetting, according to Alexander, may be double is the case of the unbearable, that is to forget a thing and to forget the forgetting itself, and that is what she calls “trauma and forgetting”. Hence, to remember violence and violation, there is a need for confidence and safety: “To trust and remember”, she writes.

Memory can be embodied in material things, even the memory of violence, which can take material form, as in the violation of sex and spirit. This explains the call to work on the body, in a healing gesture against the violence inflicted on it. “The yearning to be healed”, as Alexander explains, involves the strategy of touching to decolonize the body and the spirit. Thus, the resistance should go on as a resistance against the forgetting, “a rememory of deep forgettings”

Sex and sexuality, according to Alexander, have been governed by the dominant ideology, that roots them in “sin, shame, and general disavowal of the Sacred”. Spirit and spirituality have been made confined to religion. A process of fragmentation or colonization has been imposed in the form of hierarchical divisions: body/ spirit, sacred/ secular, male/ female. It is a notion that paves the way, as Alexander says, to oppression. Hence, she calls for the infringement of divisions and hierarchies.

Decolonization is translated into a yearning for wholeness, for belonging to subvert the fragmentation. In fact, as human beings, we should have a consciousness about interdependence; what Alexander calls “a sacred connection to one another”.

As Alexander speaks of belonging, memory and remembrance to construct an identity, other feminists like Judith Butler call for the opposite.

Butler, in her book “Gender Trouble”, works a kind of “bricolage” when she uses the Freudian psychoanalysis to problematize gender as an essence.

In fact, she asks the question of why a person is perceived as a female or male, to show that gender is not a social construct but a performance, a face-paint we put to disguise. Cultural configurations of gender are playing a hegemonic role shaping the culture as it is, today. Hence she proposes a subversive action which she coins “gender trouble”, that is a kind of confusion and proliferation of genders and consequently of identity.

Identity then becomes free-floating, not in connection with an essence. According to Butler, then, there no “authentic inner core”, as apposed to what other feminists believe when they speak of self-consciousness and digging into the self to grasp one’s identity. Identity, for Butler, is nothing but an effect, a result of performance and that is the basis of Queer Theory. David Halperin writes: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant...It is an identity without an essence.”

This suggests that the confines of any identity may be reinvented by its owner and that identities are not fixed and do not determine who we are.

Yet, Butler sees identity categories worthy when they serve as potential sites of resistance. Butler supports silence since she perceives sexuality as that which cannot be fixed or pinned down. In fact, silence is opposed to publicness that leads to the domination of the other. For her, identity categories are regulatory, and for this reason, she opts for “unknowability”. Butler takes bodies as gender indeterminate then she tries, by scrutinizing and destabilizing them, to show that they are shaped by gender, race, class, sexuality, performatives etc...

Honestly, I do not feel comfortable with the idea of Butler as I think that the awareness of the self and of the difference is necessary to face the pre-established patriarchal structures and confines. Our consciousness of being queer and our assertion of this reality in front of dominant order, which has always denied its existence, are essential. For me, we need to get back our voice and speak up in order to let people see that we exist.

-Faithinlove-