젠더 트러블과 성차의 윤리 = Gender Trouble and the Ethics of Sexual Difference

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay attempts to elucidate the meaning of sexual difference from the perspective of psychoanalysis and argues for its ontological and ethical possibility for women’s liberation. Judith Butler erases sex and sexual difference, claiming that sex is not biologically given but always already socially constructed. She replaces sex by gender, and makes “gender trouble” with the binary gender identity accepted as the norm in the heterosexist society. She attempts to show that “unmourned” melancholic homosexual love is already incorporated and identified in heterosexual gender, so that no clear line can be drawn between homosexual and heterosexual identities. Unlike Butler, Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray keep the category of sexual difference. Their concept of sexual difference means not so much the gender identity, the so­called masculinity or femininity that the Symbolic order confers on the subject, as the failure of that very identity, through which unconscious sexuality called the Real by Lacan erupts. Sexual difference indicates one’s relation to the failure of the Symbolic which is not neutral but sexually divided. The feminine jouissance in Lacan and the disruptive excess of the feminine in Irigaray indicate the repressed remainder in the masculine symbolic order. Though making trouble with gender identity constructed by the symbol order, I argue, Butler eliminates sexual difference located in the Real. The ethics of the feminine represented by Antigone signifies individual woman’s attachment to her own singular desire, which remains “other” even to herself and cannot be totalized under the universal category of Woman.