Maia Nelles-SagerRevolution Girl Style Now: Queer and Feminist Performance StrategiesKatherine Brewer Ball2/3/15

Proper Objects and the Angry Inch

In her reactionary piece Against Proper Objects, Judith Butler argues against the

“methodological distinction” that places gender under the broader lens of feminist theory, and

sexuality under queer studies (Butler, 1). In other words, she refuses to allow gender to be the

proper object of feminism, and sex and sexuality to be the proper object of queer studies. Indeed,

Butler sees in the rigid separation of the two proper objects an amalgamation or chiasm that

threatens both fields of study. For example, she notes that if gender is feminist study and

sexuality is queer study, then “only by reducing feminism to ‘gender,’ then implicitly conflating

gender with sex, i.e. ‘female or male,’ and then explicitly declaring ‘sex’ to be one of its two

proper objects, can lesbian and gay studies establish itself as the proper successor to feminism”

(Butler, 3). Forcing feminism and queer studies to take proper objects confuses a strong

relationship that exists between the two fields, and for the “world within and between these

domains of study” (Butler, 5).

Butler elaborates that both “gender,” and “sex” or “sexuality” are complex and conflated

terms; confining either as the proper object of one field of study is inappropriate and minimizes

the importance of the terms. Sexuality, for example, is related to gender in feminist study

through the “massive literature within feminism that not only explores the links among gender,

race, and sexuality, but shows how ‘gender’ is produced through these overlapping articulations

of power” (Butler, 5). Each proper object is laden with cultural significance, along with

significance to the movements and fields of study that encompass feminism and queer studies.

Additionally, Butler argues against the introduction to The Lesbian and Gay Studies

Reader, in which the editors “do not supply any grounds for the claim that lesbian and gay

studies can provide by itself a more appropriate framework for the analysis of sexual minorities,”

thus rendering the proper objects inconsequential and perhaps detrimental to feminism and

queer studies. And, although “feminism is the theory of gender oppression,” it is important that

“the critique of sexual oppression” enriches feminism (Butler, 10). Gender, sex, and sexuality all

have a place in both feminism and queer studies.

While feminism concerns itself mainly with gender and queer studies focuses on sex and

sexuality, the fields of study and the objects of study are so important to one another that it

should be impossible—or at least inappropriate—to denote a proper object to either movement.

From this understanding of the two movements and their objects of study, Butler moves on to a

discussion of sexuality and kinship. She argues that because “feminism has become identified

with state-allied regulatory power over sexuality,” feminist positions which have “insisted on

strong alliances with sexual minorities” have become “barely legible as feminist,” perhaps

because of the denotation of gender (and not sexuality) as feminism’s proper object (Butler, 12).

According to Butler, feminism no longer concerns itself with sexuality due to the legislature

consequences of its relations to kinship. The reason it matters that feminism, in Butler’s view, no

longer concerns itself with sexuality, is because in practice it is sexuality as related to kinship

that has legislative consequences. For example, “the moralizing against those at risk for AIDS by

virtue of their sexual practices directly supports the ideological fiction of marriage and the family

as the normalized and privileged domain of sexuality” (Butler, 14).

Butler ends her discussion by insisting “that both feminist and queer studies need to

move beyond and against those methodological demands which force separations in the

interests of canonization and provisional institutional legitimation” (Butler, 21). Both in theory

and in practice, feminism and queer studies should not confine themselves to proper objects of

study.

The argument against a rigid separation of gender into feminism and sexuality into queer

studies is apparent in John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s musical Hedwig and the Angry

Inch. The two characters (Hedwig and her male roadie, Yitzhak) are played (cross-dressed) by a

man and a woman, respectively. By the end of the show each has changed into a character of the

actor or actress’s gender. This performance strategy highlights both gendered and queer aspects

of the show. Hedwig is a transgender woman who finds her true self in becoming a man. Indeed,

the last line of the script reads, “male and female faces merge into a single one” (Mitchell).

However, Hedwig is not a feminist work. Hedwig reaches her climax as a character when the

actor playing her takes off his clothes and reveals himself as a man. Yitzhak reaches his final,

elevated self when the actress playing him dresses as a woman. Yitzhak is introduced as “the

most famous drag queen in Zagreb” (Mitchell). He is consistently treated onstage as Hedwig’s

puppet, and in his final elevating character moment—a moment of objectification—he becomes a

beautiful woman. Hedwig’s queer characterization is bolstered by the conflation of gender and

sexuality. Yitzhak—the only woman onstage—is simply support for Hedwig, both dietetically

and analytically. Hedwig is not a feminist show. Butler’s argument against rigid separation of

gender and sexuality as fields of study finds a perfect example in Hedwig, a show that is positive

toward issues of gender and sexuality under the umbrella of queer studies, but neutral towards

feminist issues. If gender falls under feminism and sexuality under queer studies, Hedwig would

be a specifically feminist show.