Judith Butler argued that we live in a heterosexual matrix. The argument, which we has become a little cliched, goes like this: Being male or female is not a “truth” at the core of the human being. It is an appearance of the human being, achieved by certain performative acts. One might assume that this would mean that there are many ways in which the human being may appear, but there is an effort (of power, government, culture, or psychological law, depending on who you ask) to limit the appearance of the human being to nothing but male or female. This enforcement of a binary world is masked by the claim that these two contingent appearances are facts of nature. Any possibilities beyond or apart from male and female are rendered impossible and unnatural -- even though they are just one more contingent way of appearing.
There are “political reasons for the substantializing view of gender,” says Butler. “The institution of compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from the feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire.” Why might “power” desire all human beings to appear as substantively male or female, in a binary relation that necessitates heterosexual desire? Butler shies from the question, saying: “Whereas Foucault is ambiguous about the precise character of the regulatory practices that produce the character of sex, and Wittig appears to invest the full responsibility of the construction to sexual reproduction and its instrument, compulsory heterosexuality, yet other discourses converge to produce this categorial fiction for reasons not always clear or consistent with one another.”
These sort of suggestions may have flown when Butler was writing, but they seem implausible now. If “Power” mandates substantive gender and heterosexual desire for the sake of sexual reproduction, a casual observer of the West would have to assume that Power has been whipped. “Power” is a mysterious, slippery concept within such critical writing, but if it lives anywhere it lives in the State, exemplified in institutions like the European Union and the United Nations, both of which have taken up a definition of gender that does very little to enforce the heterosexual matrix. Citing the European Commission, The European Institute for Gender Equality argues that gender identity is “[e]ach person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.” The near-universal acceptance of gay marriage and “alternative family structures” suggests either that Power changed its mind, that Power has been successfully routed, or perhaps that Butler et al were mistaken from the beginning in assuming that the State gave half a damn about maintaining the population in rigid gender categories.
One of the most obvious distinctions of liberal states from preliberal communities is the reduction of a people, considered as a particular community, self-regulated by various relations of kinship and friendship — to a population, considered as “human capital” and a total workforce, the reproduction, shrinkage, growth, health and age distribution of which is of interest to the governing authorities, who operate their populations en masse for the sake of maintaining the peace. Foucault made this point — others have as well. In this sense, the liberal state is best understood as a repetition of the states surrounding ancient Israel, in which the people are operated by a god-king as part of a total mechanism. The book of Samuel describes a future in which Israel apostatizes, placing itself under a human sovereign who manages the Israelites as a numbered population rather than shepherding them as a people. The king “will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers” (1 Samuel 8:12-13).
From the view of population, a people’s sexually differentiated “sons” and “daughters” take on an androgynous character as replaceable participants within a single mechanism ordered towards the will of the sovereign. Population control follows from this reduction of a people to a population, a fact well-noted in the Biblical narrative, where god-kings like Pharaoh, having reduced a people to a workforce, attempt to manage population size according to the interests of the State: “Come, let us deal shrewdly with the [the Israelites], lest they multiply, and if war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us...Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live” (Exodus 1:10 and 1:22). Sexual difference becomes a matter of purely practical import — an evaluation of strength, weakness, and reproductive capacity to be managed according to the ends of the sovereign.
The argument that heterosexuality is enforced by the State because the State needs the power of reproduction rather misses the point. In fact, the State needs a more supple technology for the management of population — not just to increase it, but to increase, decrease, and locally alter it as needed; to save some members for making “implements of war” and others for producing new citizens, and so forth. The ideal biological subject within a “population” is not woman created by God, holding her differentiation as a gift that no power of Earth or Hell could take from her, but a subject whose gendered and sexual actions are most malleable to the suggestions of those who hold power over a mass society.
In this sense, the idea that the flourishing of alternative gender identities and non-binary sexual practices is somehow inimical to the designs of the State is ludicrous. The anthropology which asserts that the human person is, at base, an androgynous unit that only appears to be male, female, or anything else via an effect of power (whether self-wielded, other-imposed, or some inextricable combination of the two); the anthropology of genderfluidity, wherein a fundamentally malleable flux asserts itself as one or two of several hundred fixed identities during the course of its lifetime; this anthropology is the ideal anthropology of the subjects of a mass operated by a sovereign power interested in managing the ebb and flow of its population.
Jemima Repo, in her book The Biopolitics of Gender, takes pains to show how “gender,” understood in this manner, is already being operated by the European Union to influence its population to reproduce and produce in a manner deemed proper to the ends of the State. Thankfully, direct, eugenic coercion has become abominable in recent years, giving way to a eugenics of persuasion. Within neoliberal governments, populations are considered as a mass of utility-maximizing actors, swayed into acting according to their perceived self-interest by incentives and deterrents “input” into a society. Once gender becomes a fixed appearance achieved by performative acts, people can be incentivized to perform certain actions in order to attain and confirm their gender identity. The European Union incentivizes its population to cast off rigid gender roles that prevent them from producing enough for a healthy economy; likewise, it incentivizes reproduction so as to ensure an ideal work-life balance, in which reproductive subjects neither work too much so as not reproduce, nor reproduce so much as not to work. It embraces “alternative family models,” because, through various reproductive technologies, that ideal work-reproduction balance can be achieved without reference to male-female difference or unity.
So it does not seem plausible that we live in a heterosexual matrix, understood as a social order in which the male-female binary and heterosexual desire are made compulsory in order that the State may maintain control over the reproduction of its population. It seems more likely that we live in an androgynous matrix, understood as a social order in which the human person is understood to be, at base, a sexless unit, which needs to take some definite gender appearance through various activities, technologies, and expenditures, in order that the State may maintain an incentivizing-decentivizing relation of power with its population, ordering it towards those sexual acts of reproduction and non-reproduction deemed important to the ends of the State. This would better explain the otherwise odd hodgepodge of ideologies taken up by our nation-states and promoted to their populations, which I would describe as generally genderfluid, pro-natalist, LGBT+ positive, nominally feminist, and family-orientated. What remains consistent throughout these various persuasive campaigns is the promotion of a fundamental anthropology, that of man as an androgyne, sexed and gendered through power. The true genius and merit of the philosophers of gender identity has been their willing service as the intelligentsia of the regime.