We are currently reading Judith Butler’s ‘Undoing Gender’ together. Below is the summary of our last session.
Our conversation opened with a concrete example, a story about an individual whose selected non-binary at the registration of the university but it had later to be altered to “male” to satisfy the formulas of a pension fund. This case immediately exposed the question of regulation and identity, recognition. They chose to just go with ‘male’ to be recognized in the pension fund, which has very practical implications. Is that a problem, and how so? In the first place, why do state documents like passports require a gender marker? What is the importance of gender recognition?
To answer this, we turned to Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. We recognized that the modern nation-state did not introduce population registration out of neutral benevolence; it developed these administrative systems to measure, organize, and manage populations. The state’s drive to register and categorize aims to “improve and protect” life, yet by its very nature, it functions by including certain recognizable bodies while violently excluding or pathologizing others.
This led us into a debate over the law itself and Catharine MacKinnon’s feminist legal critique. MacKinnon argues that gender difference is fundamentally defined by sexual subordination, imprinting the roles of aggressor and victim directly into the legal architecture. Butler is criticaly of this position. But then, how can we construct regulations that do not simply reproduce these constraints? How do we design legal mechanisms that keep human life fluid while still providing concrete material protection? Is that possible?
This question brought us to the pragmatic dilemma faced by non-normative care networks and queer families. When we enter into state-sanctioned arrangements, such as getting married or entering a civil union simply to secure practical social benefits like healthcare, inheritance, VISA, or hospital visitation, are we “hacking” the system, or are we actively reinforcing its legitimacy? Butler draws a distinction between state-sanctioned marriage and the lived reality of kinship. The state demands that we compress complex, expansive support networks into rigid dyadic formulas, rendering non-traditional care structures legally “unreal.”
To understand how real structural change occurs, we brought in insights from the edited volume ‘Women and Social Change in North Africa’. We observed that major social and legal transformations often emerge as the unintended consequences of combined individual actions. When people live their daily realities in ways that disrupt normative scripts, they create a new social baseline. Eventually, the law is forced to catch up and codify the reality that has already taken shape on the ground. This comes to be tied to Butler’s critique of the “Symbolic Order”: what conservative theorists portray as an eternal, unchangeable cultural law is really just fossilized social habit, vulnerable to being reshaped by collective practice.
Finally, discussed Nira Yuval-Davis’s work on belonging: belonging as ‘feeling at home’ is not enough because there is belonging at the political level, requiring official acceptance by the system. We acknowledged that we need to be recognized by the state because state systems heavily dictate the broader social norms of our culture. In turn, those social norms are what make us legible to others in daily life. To understand ourselves, to “give an account of oneself”, we require the mirror of social recognition. Intelligibility is inherently relational: for us to make sense of who we are, we depend on the social terms available to us.
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