Furthermore, while much poststructuralist feminism owes a particular debt to Freudian psychoanalysis, many Italian feminists, Cavarero included, reject this tradition, despite having been influenced by Irigaray. For Anglo-American readers this may be seen to contribute to Cavarero’s over-idealization of the maternal and failure to acknowledge the ambivalence and antagonism in the mother-child relationship.25 On this reading Cavarero overlooks the possibility of disavowal or refusal in characterizing the apparent opposition between inclination and rectitude. Indeed, these concerns are at the crux of Honig’s intervention, which reads Cavarero’s feminism alongside Freud to emphasize the more sinister side of maternal care.
Yet, could we read sexual difference theory as complementary to the “postmodern” project of undermining the binary between construction and essentialism?26 Indeed, both approaches begin by denying that there is something that “women really are.”27 Further, as Bock and James argue, sexual difference theory opposes the threefold assumptions upon which the essentialism debate rests. First, “the over-neat distinction between biology and culture that underpins the Anglo-American division between sex and gender and incorporates a vision of women’s bodies as separable from culture”; second, that we could avoid essentialism by assuming that women are fundamentally different from men, which is no less essentialist than assuming that women are fundamentally the same; and third, that we cannot know of “any essence of woman which is independent of their past and present conditions.”28 This could be seen to demonstrate that the theory of sexual difference shares with so-called postmodern feminism a refusal of sameness and a refusal of neutrality.
Although sexual difference theory insists on the difference that is women’s experience, which is always taken to be different from men’s, the refusal to engage in a debate about what women are reveals that this focus on bodily difference was not intended as an attempt to tie a body to its biology. It conversely sought to “address the problem of how to avoid fixity, and the danger of tying women to their essential natures, rooted in biology or the psyche, while still insisting on the salience of the sexed body to subjectivity.”29 Hence Italian sexual difference theory came to be characterized by the significance of feminist materiality as a beginning point to account for the privileging of a presumptively masculine figure at the heart of the philosophical imaginary of the Western tradition. This led many Italian feminists to emphasize on the one hand the necessity of separatist movements to create the conditions from which an alternative symbolic order could be constructed and, on the other, the focus on the imagery of the maternal as a key battleground for establishing this alternative symbolic.
With regard to the relationship between Cavarero’s feminism and the work of Judith Butler, it is true that Butler’s work was challenged by many sexual difference theorists, including Cavarero. However, the objections were largely premised on a misreading of Butler’s theory of performativity as assuming that sexual identity could be chosen at will. Butler’s argument that gender is constructed did not imply voluntarism. Social construction is constitutive of the whole realm of subjectivity, not just one individual experience. Thus, gender cannot be dispensed with at will, since our very social existence as meaningful beings requires us to operate, at least to some degree, within the confines of gender norms.
Responding to the exclusions within both feminism and lesbian and gay politics of the ’70s and ’80s, Butler’s motivation was to understand why, while we seem to need gender identity, it will always exclude. As such, she wanted to avoid mobilizing around a new theorization of identity, however radical, and instead sought to loosen the way that gender identity affects us. She argued that the potential for resistance and change does not lie in a refusal of identity, nor an alternative identity, but instead in the renegotiation and subversion of norms. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, as well as the work of Jacques Derrida, Butler argued that gender is produced by repetition. She acknowledged that perfect repetition is never possible, since our gender identities are always to some extent a parody of an idealized norm. Yet it is precisely because of the impossibility of perfect repetition that Butler finds a space in which gender norms can be challenged. By repeating norms in a “wrong” manner, it may be possible to loosen the strictures of what counts as either male or female and the constraints that gender identity imposes on our lives. This is not to dissolve sexual difference or to multiply sexual difference in a way that completely dissolves woman as a subject position; rather, it could help de-binarize sex/gender and decenter its restrictive and controlling social function. Would it be too much of a stretch to argue that in this way Butler’s work could be seen to develop the project of sexual difference theory even further, as she opens up the idea of that which is not man, beyond what is usually referred to as woman?
Reservations about Butler’s work do remain for theorists of sexual difference, particularly regarding whether it indirectly diluted feminist struggle and prioritized sexuality as the dominant mode of relationality, thus displacing care or dependency.30 However, Butler’s position among Italian feminists was considerably enhanced by Cavarero, who engaged with Butler’s argument as early as 1996, when she wrote the Preface to the Italian edition of Bodies That Matter. Furthermore, Butler’s work on vulnerability and precarity, developed in part in conversation with Cavarero (see Bernini’s étude, later in this volume), addressed many of these initial concerns and helped to emphasize that both were circling the same issues from different perspectives: how to resist liberal individualism and avoid androcentrism without prioritizing certain sexual identifications over others.
Honig’s relation to these two thinkers charts a rather different trajectory. Like Butler’s work on performativity, Honig’s reading of Arendt was also inspired by the performative in Austin. While Butler’s extension of the theory of performativity to sex/gender inspired Honig’s radical reading of political action in Arendt,31 rather than simply apply Butler’s theory Honig has developed a unique feminist theory of her own, navigating the tension between her poststructuralist approach and her longstanding sympathy for Cavarero’s sexual difference project. Indeed, Honig’s “agonistic sorority”32 operates in the very space between—in fact, the space opened up by—this “postmodern”/sexual difference debate.
For Honig, recognition of the complex dilemmas we encounter in political theory are exemplified by, though not limited to, debates around sex and gender. Her interest is in the way that any such agonistic struggle “exposes the remainders of the system”33 by revealing how systems of knowledge or power minoritize those who do not fit their parameters. Instead of opting to resolve disagreement, Honig seeks to radicalize it,34 holding disagreement open and exploring it—itself a political gesture that refuses the closure so often sought by political theory. With respect to the feminist debate that concerns us here, Honig emphasizes that each position has opened something up in its agonistic rival that may elevate or extend those who confront it, and open new unimagined possibilities for worldbuilding.35
By tracing the development of Cavarero’s feminism in this section we have seen how her perceived initial distance from Butler has lessened over time, and that Honig’s agonistic feminism provides us with a way to productively map their differences. We will see in the next section that Honig’s more direct engagement with agonism leads to her effort to take an alternative path to Cavarero’s heterotopian feminism.