merely cultural
Ok, here’s how Butler used “recognition” in “Merely Cultural,” as
pub’d in Social Text, 1997:
Positing a spectrum that spans political economy and culture, she
situates lesbian and gay struggles at the cultural end of this
political spectrum. Homophobia, she argues, has no roots in political
economy, because homosexuals occupy no distinctive position in the
division of labor, are distributed throughout the class structure,
and do not constitute an exploited class. “[Tlhe injustice they
suffer is quintessentially a matter of recognition” (17-18), she
claims, thus construing lesbian and gay struggles as merely matters
of cultural recognition, rather than acknowledging them as struggles
either for equality throughout the political economic sphere or for
an end to material oppression.
[…]
Given the socialist-feminist effort to understand how the
reproduction of persons and the social regulation of sexuality were
part of the very process of production and, hence, part of the
“materialist conception” of political economy, how is it that
suddenly when the focus of critical analy sis turns from the question
of how normative sexuality is reproduced to the queer question of how
that very normativity is confounded by the nonnormative sexualities
it harbors within its own terms-not to mention the sexualities that
thrive and suffer outside those terms-that the link between such an
analysis and the mode of production is suddenly dropped? Is it only a
matter of “cultural” recognition when nonnormative sexualities are
marginalized and debased, or does the possibility of a liveli hood
come into play? And is it possible to distinguish, even analytically,
between a lack of cultural recognition and material oppression, when
the very definition of legal “personhood” is rigorously circumscribed
by cultural norms that are indissociable from their material effects?
Take, for instance, those instances in which lesbians and gays are
rigorously excluded from state-sanctioned notions of the family
(which is, according to both tax and property law, an economic unit);
are stopped at the border; are deemed inadmissable to citizenship;
are selectively denied the status of freedom of speech and freedom of
assembly; are denied the right, as members of the military, to speak
their desires; or are deautho rized by the law to make emergency
medical decisions about dying lovers, or to receive the property of
dead lovers, or to receive from the hospital the bodies of dead
lovers-don’t these examples mark the “holy family” once again
constraining the routes by which property interests are regu lated
and distributed? Is this simply the circulation of vilifying cultural
attitudes or do such disenfranchisements mark a specific operation of
the sexual and gendered distribution of legal and economic entitlements?