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“Unstable Subjects”: Gender and Agency in Caryl Churchill's “UNSTABLE SUBJECTS”: GENDER AND AGENCY IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S CLOUD 9 Except where reference is made to the work of others, the work described in this thesis is my own or was done in collaboration with my advisory committee. This thesis does not contain proprietary or classified information. _____________________________ Laura Leigh Whitaker Certificate of Approval: __________________ ___________________ Penny Ingram Marc Silverstein Associate Professor Professor English English __________________ ___________________ Patrick Morrow George T. Flowers Professor Interim Dean English Graduate School “UNSTABLE SUBJECTS”: GENDER AND AGENCY IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S CLOUD 9 Laura Leigh Whitaker A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Auburn, Alabama May 10, 2007 “UNSTABLE SUBJECTS”: GENDER AND AGENCY IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S CLOUD 9 Laura Leigh Whitaker Permission is granted to Auburn University to make copies of this thesis at its discretion, upon request of individuals or institutions at their expense. The author reserves all publication rights. ________________ Signature of Author ________________ Date of Graduation iii THESIS ABSTRACT “UNSTABLE SUBJECTS”: GENDER AND AGENCY IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S CLOUD 9 Laura Leigh Whitaker Master of Arts, May 10, 2007 (B.A. Mercer University, 2005) 68 typed pages Directed by Marc Silverstein The work of Judith Butler raises important questions about subjectivity, and calls for a reconception of the subject as unstable. This instability is the result of the disruption of the sequence of desire following from gender, following from sex. It is also a result of the notion that all subjects are constituted through a heterosexual matrix, a matrix by which the point of entry is normative gender behavior. To vary one’s behavior in the face of this matrix is to risk being thrust “outside,” but also, paradoxically, to gain agency as a political subject. Butler argues that the only way for the subject to exercise agency is through the variance of performance within constituting discourses, and also the occupation of multiple roles. Though Butler insists on the agency of the destabilized subject, she has never explained precisely how this agency is possible to the satisfaction iv of her critics. Thus, in order to investigate Butler’s notion of agency for the destabilized subject, her ideas surrounding this theme are contextualized within Cloud 9, which is perhaps Caryl Churchill’s best known work. Through cross-casting and the challenging of gender normative behavior, Cloud 9 sheds some light on Butler’s concept of agency. By reading Butler through Cloud 9 and, Cloud 9 through Butler, one is able to interrogate the process by which the destabilized subject gains and exercises agency. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank Dr. Marc Silverstein for his invaluable direction and advice throughout this project. Thanks are also due to Dr. Penny Ingram and Dr. Patrick Morrow for their interest in and advice concerning this project, and also for serving as committee members. Finally, thanks to Ken and Leigh Whitaker for their constant love and support, and to Andrew Howard, for his unwavering love, support, patience, and understanding throughout this process. vi MLA Style used throughout Chicago Manual of Style consulted Microsoft Word used for all word processing vii Unstable Subjects: Gender and Agency in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine Introduction The section of Gender Trouble entitled “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire” is the location of one of Judith Butler’s most important discussions of the relationship between sex, gender, and the political subject. Here, Butler troubles the conception of the subject in terms of both gender and sex, arguing that perhaps the lines drawn for gender and sex are themselves illusory. Furthermore, Butler posits the existence of a heterosexual matrix, undergirded by the most hegemonic of ideals, as responsible for producing and perpetuating social and cultural norms bound up with gender intelligibility: The cultural matrix through which gender has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of “identities” cannot exist—that is, those in which gender does not “follow” from either sex or gender. “Follow” in this context is a political relation of entailment instituted by the cultural laws that establish and regulate the shape and meaning of sexuality. (Gender Trouble 17) It is the cultural laws that produce a matrix which regulates, among other things, gender intelligibility that Butler finds so limiting and constricting, and moves to challenge. As her essay progresses, Butler insists that neither sex nor gender can serve as the basis for identity, as both are constructed in Butler’s opinion; sex and gender are artificial concepts used as tools to force subjects into categories for representation within a juridical system characterized by phallogocentric and necessarily exclusionary politics and language that serve as both judge and jury. Instead, Butler works to deconstruct the idea that gender 1 follows sex, arguing that one is always already the other. She asserts her position that there is no metaphysics of substantive sex, gender, or desire: if one cannot be a gender or a sex, then one can have no stable subject position. This argument has major implications for understanding—or reconceiving—standard notions of subjectivity through gender: if gender and sex are constructs, sex being the “political surface upon which gender acts”; if the source of agency cannot be found in the socially prescribed position of the subject, according to Butler; and if there does not exist a metaphysics of the substantive in relation to sex and/or gender, then how does one act with intentionality at all in a society undergirded by a hegemonic, patriarchal, and strictly heterosexual matrix? Butler would respond that the agency of the subject is found it its ability to occupy multiple subject positions since the subject can hold no actual position, and should only be perceived as a “free-floating” artifice” (Gender Trouble 6). Thus, Butler’s discussion of the political subject, a subject constituted by both social and politicized forces, raises many questions and calls for a deeper interrogation of the ideas associated with it, such as agency.1 Again, Butler argues that the precarious position of the subject as unstable is a condition of representational and identity politics as convenient, contrived pigeonholes where those who are deemed alike either by their perceived gender, sex, or respective desires, and who are “inside” based on their inhabiting the “domain of the subject,” are stashed for hegemony’s sake (Bodies that Matter 3). The question becomes then, how can the subject act of its own accord if the subject is always already what the regulatory matrix has interpellated it to be? How can it have any agency at all if its very existence is the function of a firmly ensconced 1 Every reference to agency in this paper is a reference both to political and personal agency. 2 political and ideological system that allows little or no room for deviation from a predetermined set of stylistic acts, without the threat of becoming powerless and obsolete, an “unintelligible” subject constituting the “outside”?2 Butler’s contentions about the destabilized subject and the problems and questions this notion creates and raises have led scholars to criticize Butler’s ideas on sex, gender, agency, and subjectivity: if subjectivity—which follows from neither sex nor gender—is permanently deferred, how does the always already destabilized subject gain and exercise agency? Where does it come from and how does the subject gain it? Also, is agency attainable only by those who exist in the “domain of the subject,” those who constitute the “inside” by their normative existence? (Bodies that Matter 3). Before proceeding with a discussion of the agency question in Butler, it is important first to clarify what Butler means by agency. In the introduction to Bodies that Matter, Butler discusses some of her more controversial ideas such as constructivism and the performance of gender. She acknowledges much of the criticism of these notions and also discusses in more detail how she defines them. For Butler, the agency of the subject is something complicated by her theories of constructivism and performativity, but especially constructivism: There are defenders and critics of construction, who construe that position along structuralist lines. They often claim that there are structures that construct the subject, impersonal forces, such as Culture or Discourse or Power, where these terms occupy the grammatical site of the subject after the “human” has been dislodged from its place. In such a view, the 2 Butler’s concept of the abject is largely influenced by her work on the theories of Julia Kristeva. 3 grammatical and metaphysical place of the subject is retained even as the candidate that occupies that place appears to rotate. As a result, construction is still understood as a unilateral process initiated by a prior subject, fortifying that presumption of the metaphysics of the subject there where there is activity, there lurks behind it an initiating and willful subject. (Bodies that Matter 9) Here, Butler addresses those who question the construction of the subject in terms of free will; if a subject has the free will to act with intentionality, then some small part of it must be prediscursive, something outside the constituting
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