Gender Theory and its Gnostic Roots, Part II

The second instalment of our look at the gnostic roots of gender theory deals with the thought of the feminist philosopher and 'gender theorist' Judith Butler.

Part One can be read here.

From Catholic Stand

By Antonio J. Galindo Aleman

In our first installment of this article, we addressed the Gnostic roots of the feminist thought of Simone de Beauvoir, who believed that men were ‘mystifiers’ who created rules and social conventions convincing women to accept inferior, submissive roles to men.

Judith Butler and Meaninglessness

Feminist Judith Butler was influenced by the thought of Simone de Beauvoir but, at the same time, she criticized her point of view on women.  The problem that Butler had with Beauvoir’s thought is the relationship that she makes between sex and gender in connection with the facticity of the body.

For Butler, to accept the facticity of the body is contradictory to the belief that there is no meaning in things, because by recognizing the facticity of bodies, she believes that Beauvoir is imposing some kind of meaning on the female body. This is what makes Butler go a step further.

According to Butler, there is nothing given to us, not even the facticity of the body. And here is where she inverts the metaphysics of substance by denying the existence of stable substances. Butler argues that the very concept of substance is a social construction of the heteronormative system that use cultural powers to make you act as you act. This patriarchal system has created a set of concepts and laws, such as sex, gender, heterosexuality, and substance (nature), to force us to perform according to the heteronormative system, using the threat that if you do not follow this law, you will be cast into the world of non-being.

In other words, the fear is that you will be socially excluded and discriminated against if you do not perform according to the sexual roles dictated by culture, which are supposedly based on biological sex. This is why Butler wrote in her book Gender Trouble that “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”(1) This is what she calls performativity.

The Gender Matrix

In this gendered matrix, heterosexuality is imposed and establishes man as superior to women, giving to woman the place of the second sex. Furthermore, Butler argues that this patriarchal system has been constructed based on the fear of homosexuality. This is so because, according to her, following Freud, the primary sexual attraction of every child is directed towards the parent of the same sex, not the opposite sex parent.

According to Butler, this means that homosexual desires are the natural tendency and the real object of sexual desire in every human being, but the cultural powers have been repressing this homosexual desire presenting it as an atrocious and unnatural desire that must be destroyed. It is this lack of acknowledgement and fear of homosexuality that has led culture to develop social structures that sexualized the body, in a heteronormative dictatorship, as male or female, and only if you follow these sexualized structures can you enter the realm of existence.

This is also why Butler believes that “gender is an unconscious and socially-compelled performance, a series of acts and behaviors that create the illusion of an essential identity of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’”(2) Gender is not an essential truth derived from the body’s materiality, as per Beauvoir’s notion of facticity, but rather a regulatory fiction that is imposed on us creating the reality of sex.

It is through this illusion of an essential identity of man and woman that the cultural powers are constantly threatening us with the fear of casting us into the realm of non-being, to awake in us desires to perform according to the heteronormative system in order to be recognized as a real being, and thus not be marginalized and despised.

Demystification and Satan

The solution, then, is to follow a process of cultural demystification through a revolution in which she invites us to act against the heterosexual matrix through “cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities”(3) in order to little by little disrupt heteronormativity because we cannot allow anyone to define us, forcing us to be what we are not.

This performativity against the heterosexual matrix “will denaturalize sex and gender by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.”(4) In other words, we need to carry out a cultural revolution in which we begin acting against heterosexuality to destroy the heterosexual patriarchal dictatorship that presents heterosexuality as the normal thing, which has given birth to the concepts of sex and gender.

From here we can now analyze the gnostic structure that both Beauvoir and Butler follow.

The Demystifying Serpent

As we saw before, in Gnosticism, the Bad God (Yahweh) is, using Beauvoir and Butler’s concepts, the great (male) mystifier who has tried to convince humanity that to follow the commandments is the right thing to do, threatening them with the punishment of death if they do not follow his commandments. Then, it is the serpent (devil) who comes to demystify us by making us aware of this state of slavery and of the divine nature of our freedoms inviting us to rebel against this God and his laws in order to achieve perfect freedom.

Translating this into Beauvoir and Butler’s dualistic vision of the world: there are the mystifiers and the mystified.

The mystifier, instead of Yahweh, is man who has convinced women that to be happy they have to be submissive to man. Thus, women come to be the oppressed ones who cannot enjoy their absolute freedom; in Gnostic terms, they cannot enjoy their divine nature. The solution to this oppression is to go through a process of demystification through a revolution that wakes up men and women from this state of bad faith and to begin enjoying equally their absolute freedoms.

Therefore, Butler’s book, The Second Sex, and her philosophy come to be like the serpent in Gnosticism to awaken in us the knowledge of this state of slavery and the recognition of the divine nature of our freedoms. Freedom signifies a being that is not determined by another. Rebellion against natural and moral law is the only pure act through which you impose your freedom onto the freedom of others.

Distorted Ideas of Slavery and Freedom

Another Gnostic aspect present both in Beauvoir and Butler is the view of the body as a prison to freedom. Beauvoir presents it focusing more on the rejection of the female body. The facticity of women, concretely the potentiality of motherhood, is a handicap to her freedom, and man has used it to convince her that this is her natural role: to be a mother. The solution is to break the bonds of motherhood through abortion in order to destroy the fact that women are more prey to the species.

In Butler’s thought we can see the same Gnostic schema in a more radical way. According to her, the material world does not determine anything about our identity. The problem is that the patriarchal heteronormative power has created a gendered matrix full of laws that carry the threat, as it was said earlier, of being cast out into the world of non-being if one fails to comply.

From a Gnostic perspective, the patriarchal powers come to be like the Bad God of the Old Testament that has created heterosexual laws to impose on us, threatening us with the fear of being cast out into the world of non-being. Butler’s philosophy, acting like the serpent of Genesis, makes us aware of our divine nature that is enslaved by this patriarchal culture.

In their minds, this is why we need a revolution to break the heterosexual matrix by doing all kinds of immoral actions as Gnosticism believes. In fact, we must promote immoral actions such as transsexuality and homosexuality, to denaturalize sex and gender, and to disrupt the heteronormative matrix that has created heterosexual bodies.

In the Gnostic mindset, it is not true that if you do not follow the commandments you will die. It is not true that if you do not follow the heterosexual order you will be cast out into the world of non-being. On the contrary, the more you break them the more you liberate your divine nature.

As we can see, the thoughts of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler are strongly influenced by Gnosticism. I believe that in order to successfully fight against this destructive ideology we must know the roots of it found in Gnosticism, which carries the first lie of the Devil to humanity: that by sinning we become like gods. But instead of bringing us a better life, it actually kills us.

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(1) Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989), 45.

(2) Favale, Abigail. “The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender.” https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-eclipse-of-sex-by-the-rise-of-gender/.

(3) Gender Trouble, 137.

(4) Ibid., 138.