Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

French linguist Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic at first appears to offer an account of gender and language that counters Lacan’s. Butler states:

According to Lacan, the paternal law structures all linguistic signification, termed ‘the Symbolic,’ and so becomes a universal organizing principle of culture itself. This law creates the possibility of meaningful language and hence, meaningful experience, through the repression of primary libidinal drives, including the radical dependency of the child on the maternal body (107).

The child repudiates the mother, leaving behind the “libidinal chaos characteristic of that early dependency” (107) to become a subject (doer) who keeps paying forward the repressive law that required repudiation of the maternal body to begin with. The discourse wielded once the subject enters the symbolic is one that suppresses multiple meanings and instead embraces single meanings.

Kristeva counters Lacan by arguing that becoming a subject does not require repudiation of the mother. The semiotic—language that is poetic and that resists single meanings for any one word or concept—arises from the relationship with the maternal body. This poetic language has the potential to subvert the paternal law of repudiation of the mother’s body, according to Kristeva. Butler doesn’t buy Kristeva’s critique, however.