Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne

11. Theorizing Sex and Gender in Montaigne

Theorizing Sex and Gender in Montaigne Todd W. Reeser post-structuralism, ontology, and gender Montaigne’s Essais are often considered a forerunner to contemporary or post-structuralist thinking on gender. Most notably, his skeptical, antidogmatic lens functions as a kind of built-in gender-bender: by virtue of examining numerous examples of seemingly odd gendered norms from various cultures, an ontology or perceived naturalness of gender can be disbanded .1 Montaigne is also very aware that gender is maintained through binary oppositions, which can nonetheless be destabilized and resisted, and a number of critics have considered gender in Montaigne from this perspective .2 This kind of destabilization defines gender as passage instead of être, evoking something akin to the post-structuralist idea that gender can only be defined by movement. Montaigne’s approach to gender might be seen to correspond to Derridean ideas about sexual undecidability,3 or to have something in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of productive gendered becomings in Mille Plateaux. 218 11 If Montaigne destroys a natural or inevitable link between sex and gender , he also gestures toward an idea not unlike the critical commonplace that gender is performative, without underlying essence. Graduate students often point out that there are moments in Montaigne’s discussion of custom or “habitude” that feel familiar since they evoke for them Butler’s notion of gender performance avant la lettre.4 If the “difference” between men and women is not so great “except for education and custom” (685),5 as explained in the often-cited tail end of “Sur des vers de Virgile” (On some verses of Virgil) (III, 5), “custom” (usage) might recall the way that Erasmus uses it in his adage “Usus est altera natura,” as a series of repetitions that become pleasurable over time.6 Montaigne’s view of the often highly unstable opposition between nature and habit or custom is also important here, for if “[h]abit is a second nature and no less powerful” (772),7 and if we call “the habits and condition of each of us nature” (772),8 how ultimately can the idea of gender as habit be disassociated from the idea of gender as natural?9 In addition, and perhaps more radically, critics have undertaken readings of moments in the Essais and shown not only that Montaigne sees how habit and institution influence gender, but also how culture influences and constructs what is commonly called “sex.” The famous Marie Germain anecdote which appears both in the Journal de voyage and in “De la force de l’imagination” (On the power of the imagination) (I, 21) is the ultimate case in point. Montaigne’s notion of the “imagination”—which constructs the experience of sex and of sex change where it may or may not in fact exist—resembles what Butler calls “gender”: an “apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established.”10 The metaphor of male pregnancy, Platonic in origin, might also be placed in this category: the sexed body is reconstructed in the mind through the medium of sex change for various ends relating to textuality.11 The theoretical question that I would like to pose here is in many ways a logical extension of these post-structuralist inflected critical discussions, namely what to do with certain moments of gendered ontology in Montaigne . For, in the same way that gender slippages and instabilities recur throughout the Essais, there are innumerable cases in which sex and gender are not deferred or fluid, cases where sexual or gendered subjectivity appears as ontological and (re)stabilized, and cases where the body functions as far from blank matter upon which social constructs are inscribed. On one level, the borders of the sexed body might be necessary as a kind theorizing sex and gender in montaigne / 219 of strategic essentialism: to come down on the pro-woman side of the querelle des femmes, there may need to be a stable notion of woman and of man. At other moments, however, the sexed body enables discussion of the so-called “nature” of men and women, some of which are less than flattering .12 What interests me here, however, is not so much fluidity per se, or essentialism, but rather, the textual interactions between deferral and essentialism, textual moments in which gendered or, especially, sexual ontology appears or reappears when it does not seem like it should, in...