Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 
Kate Nash 
In recent years feminists have made extensive criticisms of the ostensibly universal categories of modern political theory on the grounds that they 
have been constructed from a masculine perspective and as such are necessar-
ily exclusive of the concerns of women.1 This represents a significant break 
with previous feminist work which tried to use, as well as criticise, modern 
political theory. The break builds on a new understanding of sexual difference 
as both more intractable and more positive than earlier feminists had supposed 
(Barrett and Phillips 1992, 4). The argument is that insofar as political theory 
fails to recognise sexual difference, positing its categories as universal, it 
actually smuggles in a masculine norm such that women, with their specifi-
cally female embodiment ad historically constructed feminine concerns, have 
not been, and can not be, represented in its terms. The individual of liberal 
political theory is a prime target of this critique. Supposedly abstract and 
disembodied such that any person is, or at least could be, an individual, it has 
been taken as exemplary of a masculine perspective. It is argued that to be an 
individual in liberal theory one actually has to have a male body and do 
masculine things in the public sphere and furthermore that the category of the 
liberal individual can not be extended to women because it is premised on a 
denial of everything that women represent. It is not just that women happen to 
be different from the men who have traditionally been positioned as individu-
1 The literature on this topic is now extensive. See the following: A. Phillips, »Universal 
Pretensions in Political Thought« in Barrett and Phillips 1992; C. Pateman and E. Gross, 
Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, Allen and Unwin, London 1986; C. 
DiStefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political 
Theory, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1991; S. Benhabib, »The Generalised and the 
Concrete Other« in E. Kittay and D. Meyers (eds.) Women and Moral Theory, Rowman and 
Littlefield, Totowa, New Jersey 1987; C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women, Polity Press, 
Cambridge 1989; I. Young, »Impartiality and the Civic Public« in Throwing Like a Girl and 
Other Essays in Philosophy and Social Theory, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1990; 
M. Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality, Polity Press, 
Cambridge 1991. 
Fil. vest./Acta Phil., XV (2/1994), 45-60. 
46 Kate Nash 
als: the argument is that the individual is meaningful only insofar as it is 
opposed to the feminine. In the words of Carole Pateman: 
»The masculine, public world, the universal world of individualism, rights, 
contract, reason, freedom, equality, impartial law and citizenship ... gains its 
meaning and significance only in contrast with and in opposition to, the 
private world of particularity, natural subjection, inequality, emotion, love, 
partiality - and women and femininity ...« (Pateman 1986, 6) 
The feminist critique of political theory as masculinist has been enormously 
influential in recent years but it is not the only possibility for feminist theory. 
In response to the arguments of these »difference« feminists it is possible to 
argue from a post-structuralist perspective that the problem can not be that 
women are not, and can not be represented in the categories of modern 
political theory since women can not be represented at all. On this argument 
»women« is a fiction. In this paper I want to deal with two different, but 
related, senses in which women may be said to be fictional. Firstly, women can 
not be represented because the category itself is unstable: it »is« not. On the 
Derridean account »women« is a fiction because, like any other identity it is 
never fully present to itself but is always undecidable, disrupted by the way it 
is constituted in relation to other equally unstable terms.2 »Women«, like any 
other apparently self-present category is fictional because it »is« not fully any 
one thing, and certainly not itself. Secondly, women is a fiction which fictions 
reality: it produces »effects of truth«.3 In this sense »women« is fictional 
because it does not represent the truth of the constituency women as they 
really are »out there« in the world. How could it represent a pre-given reality if 
as a term it is constituted only in unstable relations to other terms in discourse? 
Or rather, what is there to say about that reality, and its representation, that is 
not already caught in the term of discourse? But it is a fiction which may 
fiction reality insofar as it is a term which we use to describe ourselves and 
with which we identify. In this sense it is a fiction which constitutes its own 
object, which makes it work as that which we think of and enact as reality. 
If women is a fiction, so too is the individual. Firstly, as a discursive category 
the individual »is« not. The liberal category of the individual purports to 
1 The instability of identity is a central theme in all Derrida's work. For a general statement see 
J. Derrida, Positions, tr. A. Bass, The Athlone Press, London 1981. 
1 Foucault uses the term fiction in this sense. At the end of an interview on the History of Sexuality 
he says: »1 am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say 
that the truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function 
in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true 
discourse engenders or »manufactures« something that does not as yet exist.« (Foucault 1980, 
183) 
Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 47 
represent what is pre-social or not social in each human being. It can only do 
so, however, in opposition to society, to what it is not. As Derrida has shown, 
since the privileged term of such a binary opposition - in this case the 
individual - is always dependent on the inferior term - society - for its very 
identity, there will be an undecidability, an oscillation of determinate possi-
bilities between the two such that neither can finally be distinguished from the 
other (Derrida 1981, 43). Dependent on society for its very identity the liberal 
category of the individual is ultimately undecidable between the non-social to 
which it would like to refer and the social from which it would like to be 
clearly distinguished. Here we will develop this analysis in a deconstruction of 
the liberal philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Secondly, the individual is a fiction 
insofar as, under certain determinate circumstances, it is productive of our 
understanding of ourselves as individuals: it fictions reality. It is in this respect 
that I take issue with the feminist critique of the liberal individual as always 
and necessarily masculine. Women as well as men have been described and 
have described themselves as individuals, most particularly under the influ-
ence of feminism itself. This is particularly evident in the case of nineteenth 
century feminism which we will look at here. The undecidability if »indi-
vidual« has permitted it to be used to represent women in their specific 
embodied difference from men such that individuals need not always be 
masculine. 
There is a sense in which the feminist critique of the liberal individual as 
masculine anticipates, and refutes, the possibility that women may be de-
scribed as liberal individuals. After all, it is undeniably the case that liberalism 
has been used to describe and to counter women's subjection to men and that to 
do so it has extended its terms beyond the constituency to which it was 
originally applied. While for Locke, although ostensibly every human being 
was to be considered free and equal but in fact only propertied heads of 
households were to be granted political rights, for J. S. Mill humanist prin-
ciples must be extended to women, and to slaves too. In other words, what had 
only ostensibly been universal rights should, in Mill's terms, become genu-
inely universal. According to the feminist critique of liberalism as masculinist, 
however, it is not possible to extend these principles to women as women; 
their inherent masculinity will always prevent their application to women in 
their specifically feminine situation. According to Carole Pateman, then, Mill's 
attempt to extend liberal principles to women fails because, for him, as for 
liberalism generally, the very meaning of the individual links it to men's 
capacities and activities in the public sphere and opposes it to women's 
capacities and activities in the private sphere. Mill uses liberalism to argue 
that, as rational individuals, women should have the same opportunities as 
men for self-determination: they should have the vote and be permitted to 
48 Kate Nash 
follow a profession and interests in the public sphere. However, he assumes 
that most women will not choose actually to work outside the home, they will 
prefer to marry, have children and take on the management of a household, a 
choice which, he argues, will necessarily restrict their activities outside it 
(Mill, 164-5). On Pateman's account women will not then be full individuals 
since for Mill to realise one's potential as »a moral, spiritual and social being« 
an individual must participate in the political and economic activities of the 
public sphere, something women who »choose« the activities of the private 
domestic sphere will not be able to do (Pateman 1989, 129-31). For Pateman a 
women can not be the individual of liberal theory because this individual gets 
its identity as a fully rational being concerned with the universal good only by 
its opposition to the feminine world of care for particular others. According to 
Pateman, for Mill »Women will thus exemplify the selfish, private beings, 
lacking a sense of justice, who result... when individuals have no experience 
of public life« (p. 130). 
Pateman's reading of Mill clearly brings out the opposition between public and 
private domestic, masculine and feminine in a way that has been neglected by 
political theorists for whom it is only what takes place in the public sphere that 
is of significance. It clearly brings out the dependence of the public sphere on 
the care of women in the home and the difficulties of simply extending liberal 
principles to women on the understanding that all can participate in the public 
sphere on equal terms. However, I want to take issue with her reading on two 
points. Firstly, she reifies the binary oppositions of Mill's texts, treating them 
as if they actually are what they pretend to be: oppositions between mutually 
exclusive and self-present categories. In order to do so she has to neglect the 
inconsistencies of the text, the different, and incompatible ways in which the 
terms of these oppositions are used precisely in order to assure their apparent 
integrity. And secondly, to argue that for Mill the individual is only possible in 
the public sphere she has to ignore what is probably the most central opposi-
tion in his work, that between the individual and society. Focusing on this, 
unstable, opposition will allow us to see how it is that Mill is able to position 
women, even the feminine woman in the private sphere, as an individual. For 
Mill the individual can be either masculine or feminine. 
Let us, then, examine the inconsistencies in Mill's use of the term »women«. 
The women of The Subjection of Women are not simply the opposite of men, 
they are many, incompatible things. There are at least three ways in which 
women are described in the text. Firstly, women are unknown and unknowable 
under the present conditions of their subordination to men: 
» What is now called the nature of women is an artificial thing - the result of 
Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 49 
forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.« (Mill 
1989a, 138-9). 
Secondly, women are essentially the same as men. »Women« are subsumed 
under the generic category »human« and it is argued that like men their desire 
for individual freedom overrides virtually every other consideration: »After 
the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest 
want of human nature.« (Mill 1989a, 212) Finally, women are different from 
men in their current character and capacities. Despite Mill's closely argued 
claim that men can not know women so long as women are subordinate to 
them because in such a situation women are unlikely to reveal their true 
characters (p. 140-3) he nevertheless makes extensive generalisations con-
cerning women's interests (p. 132-3), their concern for the feelings of individu-
als over the general good (p. 204), their intuitive grasp of details (p. 173-5) and 
so on. For Mill there is a feminine character which is clearly distinguishable 
from the masculine. And this feminine character is indeed positioned as 
antithetical to the principles of justice of the public sphere in the way that 
Pateman describes. While participants in the public sphere learn to think in 
terms of considerations wider that their own selfish interests, women in the 
private sphere are taught to be concerned only with members of their families. 
They are taught that: 
»the individuals connected with them are the only ones to whom they owe any 
duty - the only ones whose interest they are called upon to care for; while, as 
far as education is concerned, they are left strangers even to the elementary 
ideas which are presupposed in any intelligent regard for higher interests or 
higher moral objects.« (Mill 1989a, 193) 
And this is in contrast to individuals in the public sphere, who it should be 
noted, may also be women: 
»Whatever it has been said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the 
present, of the ennobling influence offree government - the nerve and spring 
which it gives to all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it 
presents to the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and 
calmer and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the generally loftier 
platform on which it elevates the individual as a moral and spiritual being-is 
every particle as true of women as of men.« (Mill 1989a, 213) 
The question is, then, given the inconsistencies that we have seen in Mill's use 
of the term »women«, is it the case, as Pateman argues, that only the »mascu-
line« woman in the public sphere, the woman who participates in the political 
and economic activities traditionally reserved for men, can be considered a full 
individual? Or are the oppositions of the text less clear cut than Pateman 
50 Kate Nash 
would have it so that the liberal individual is not exclusively positioned as 
masculine in the public sphere but may also be feminine in the private sphere? 
In order to examine this question we will look at what is probably the most 
important, certainly the most obvious, opposition in Mill's work, the opposi-
tion between society and the individual. It is this opposition on which the 
central principle of his liberal philosophy depends: »Over himself, over his 
own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.« (Mill 1989b, 13) Despite the 
masculine pronoun, I will argue that this abstract individual is actually without 
sex and can be embodied in both men and women. 
Mill begins On Liberty with a strong statement of intent. The subject of the 
essay is, he says, »the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately 
exercised by society over the individual.« (Mill 1989b, 5) His intention is to 
determine where this limit should be placed, »how to make the fitting adjust-
ment between individual independence and social control« (p. 9). He is at-
tempting to draw a strict opposition between the individual and society. This 
subject he sees as of the utmost importance since the individual is currently in 
great »danger« from society: »society has now fairly got the better of individu-
ality« (p. 61) and this is an »evil«, both for society and for the individual (p. 
57). The great danger for the individual from contemporary society is a result, 
according to Mill, of democracy or popular sovereignty: it lies in the laws that 
are passed by a popularly elected government and also in public opinion which 
he sees as having a force independently of the law (p. 8). In fact, he begins On 
Liberty by arguing that the power of public opinion over the individual is more 
dangerous than that of the law: »it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating 
much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.« (p. 8) 
Initially, then, in On Liberty, public opinion is posited as most dangerous for 
the individual, as more dangerous than the law. It is to public opinion that the 
sphere of freedom of the individual must be opposed: 
»There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with 
individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against en-
croachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as 
protection against political despotism.« (p. 8-9) 
Almost immediately, however, Mill runs into problems with the opposition he 
wants to make between the individual and society. How is it to be maintained? 
He sets out the principle by which »the dealings of society with the individual« 
are to be governed, whether it is a matter of legal penalties or »the moral 
coercion of public opinion«: 
»That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, indi-
vidually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their 
number, is self-protection.« (p. 13) 
Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 51 
But how is this principle to be effective? How can it be used to maintain a 
separation between the individual and society if public opinion - which is on 
the side of society and oppressive of individuality - in everywhere, leaving no 
means of escape, penetrating every detail of life and »enslaving the soul 
itself«? (p. 8) Mill faces this question directly. The forces against individuality 
are, he argues, formidable - »it is not easy to see how it can stand its ground.« 
(p. 73) It may be that it will not be able to do so: 
»It will do so with increasing difficulty, unless the intelligent part of the public 
can be made to feel its value - to see that it is good there should be differ-
ences...« (p. 73) 
Here we have the claim that the opposition between society and the individual 
can only be made if it is supported by the public, or at least by part of it. 
Individuality is not threatened by the public in this instance, it is sustained by 
it. In this sense, society can not simply be opposed to the individual in the 
definitive way Mill initially intends because the public which is on the side of 
society opposing the individual is also necessary to the opposition of the 
individual to society; it is on the side of society and also on the side of the 
individual as it were. In Derridean terms the »public« is a hymen which is both 
»society« and »individual«; by its play between »identity« and »difference«, 
between the inside and the outside, it makes possible the opposition between 
the society and individual as two rigorously separated, self-identical catego-
ries at the same time as it makes the opposition between them impossible to 
maintain.4 
In order to see how the play of »public« between individual and society makes 
the opposition between them both possible and impossible in Mill's text we 
need to look more closely at how he uses the term. In the first place, as we have 
seen, he uses it in strict opposition to the individual. In this sense »the public« 
is one, unified against the individual: 
4 »Hymen« is an undecidable which Derrida takes from his reading of Mallarme's »La Mimique«. 
It has the double meaning in Latin (as it has been translated from the original Greek) of both 
»membrane« and »marriage«; it means »between« both in the sense of fusion and of separation. 
As such it describes the neither/nor of the mime with which Mallarme is concerned in this text; 
neither original, nor imitation »it is located between present acts that don't take place.« (Derrida 
1981b, 220) In this respect it works like other undecidables - like pharmakon, supplement, 
differance and others, which have a double contradictory meaning - to describe the way in 
which apparent self-presence is produced out of a play of identity and difference. In fact, 
Derrida suggests, the double meaning of »hymen« is useful only for economy; it could be 
replaced by »identity« or »difference« (that is by both of them together - perhaps it would be 
better to write »identity/difference«) with no loss except that of economic condensation or 
accumulation: »It is the »between«, whether it names fusion or separation, that carries the force 
of the operation.« (p. 220) 
52 Kate Nash 
»The ... tendencies of the times cause the public to be more disposed than at 
former periods to prescribe general rules of conduct, and endeavour to make 
everyone conform to the approved standard.« (1989b, 69) 
In a second usage, however, the public is not unified; it may include different 
individuals within it. It is in this sense that Mill uses it to oppose the individual 
to society from the side of the individual. He says that the forces hostile to 
individuality can only be opposed if: 
»the intelligent part of the public can be made to feel its value - to see that it is 
good there should be differences... If the claims of Individuality are ever to be 
asserted, the time is now, while much is still wanting to complete the enforced 
assimilation... The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves 
grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one 
uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, 
immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind speedily become 
unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unable to see 
it.« (p. 73-4) 
In this use of »public«, then, individuals are not separate from it, opposed to it 
as they are to society. They are part of the public, included within it; the public 
includes the individuals which it opposes to society. 
It is this second sense of »public« that Mill uses when he proposes in The 
Subjection of Women that the individuality of women in the private domestic 
sphere can be supported by public opinion. Here he uses public opinion on the 
side of the individual and opposes it to the law which, in this instance, stands 
for society against the individual. The point he wants to make is that freeing 
women as individuals will not lead to irreconcilable conflict in the household, 
as he anticipates conservatives will fear: 
»But how, it will be asked, can any society exist without government? In a 
family, as in a state, some one person must be the ultimate ruler. Who shall 
decide when married people differ in opinion? Both cannot have their way, yet 
a decision one way or the other must be come to. «(Mill 1989a, 155) 
Mill deals with the problem of differences in opinion in the private domestic 
sphere if both men and women are self-determining, not by agreeing with 
previous liberals, notably Locke, that ultimately women must submit to their 
husbands, but by arguing that it is not actually a real problem because »by 
general custom« there is a division of labour in the home which is such that 
each will have their tasks and will make the decisions needed accordingly: 
each will be »absolute in the executive branch of their own department« and 
any overall change »of system and principle« will require the consent of both 
(p. 156). Here Mill uses public opinion as supportive of he individual in 
Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 53 
opposition to law which stands for society. He argues that the division of 
labour between the sexes must not be established by the law since that would 
pre-empt the freedom of the individual to live according to their own »capaci-
ties and suitabilities« (p. 156). But it is acceptable to him that a traditional or 
customary division of labour should be maintained by public opinion: 
»When the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings, the 
common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife 
superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most 
suitable division of labour between two persons... But the utmost latitude 
ought to exist for the adaptation of general rules to individual suitabilities; 
and there ought to be nothing to prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any 
other pursuit, from obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage; due 
provision being made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might 
become inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of mis-
tress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly directed on the 
subject, might with perfect safety be left to be regulated by opinion, without 
any interference of law.« (p. 164-5) 
Here, then, opinion is no longer on the side of society opposed to the indi-
vidual; it is on the side of the individual and opposed to the law which is now 
seen as dangerous in the way that public opinion was in On Liberty. The 
»tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling« that elsewhere Mill sees as 
especially damaging to women's individuality (1989a, 8) is here replaced by a 
public opinion which is supportive of that individuality against the state. 
Public opinion is, then, an undecidable in Mill's text. Sometimes it is used on 
the side of society opposed to the individual, sometimes it is used on the side 
of the individual, to support it against society as it is represented in the law. 
Most notably from our point of view here public opinion supports a division of 
labour which allows for individuality but which also marks a difference 
between men and women. The individual is unsexed for Mill, but the public 
opinion which supports it in the domestic division of labour is not. On the 
contrary, Mill's use of public opinion, as we have seen, distinguishes »duties 
and functions« for the sexes that will permit them to complement each other, 
to live together without conflict. In this respect public opinion distinguishes 
between men and women, masculine and feminine. It is here, in the public 
opinion that is, as we have seen, undecidable between individual and society, 
that the undecidability of women between unsexed individual and feminine 
woman in the home comes into play. 
Within the terms of this undecidability femininity is not, and can not be 
necessarily and always opposed to individuality. It is true that for Mill men are 
more likely to develop their individuality than women - they are more self-
54 Kate Nash 
regarding and less constrained by the demands of others (1989b, 193 and 189-
91); they would seem to have more scope to exercise their individual freedom 
since they have more choice in their occupations and more freedom to pursue 
their own interests and beliefs than women in the domestic sphere (even if on 
Mill's account, women initially choose housewifery as an occupation); and as 
individuals in the public sphere they are much more able to cultivate the public 
spiritedness which seems to denote a kind of »higher« individuality than 
women confined to domestic duties. But the individual is not always tied to a 
masculine way of life, the feminine woman may also be an individual on Mill's 
scheme. The implications of his treatment of women as both feminine and 
individuals in public opinion are drawn out in two important points he makes 
concerning women's status in the private domestic sphere. Firstly, as individu-
als women in the home must have »the same rights, and should receive the 
protection of law in the same manner, as all other persons« (Mill 1989a, 104-
5). As self-determining individuals they must not be subject to the »almost 
despotic power« of husbands (p. 105). In this case it is the rights of women in 
their position as feminine women in the domestic sphere who are also the 
rational and free individuals of his philosophy that are to be protected: as 
feminine women they may also be free and equal individuals. And secondly, 
he argues that the reform of society that is necessary in order to make it more 
just - not least as regards the rights of women - requires a reformed family. 
Although men may adopt in principle what Mill calls »the law of justice«, that 
the weak should have equal right with the strong, because of the way they 
learn that superiority in the home is their birthright they will be working 
against it »in their inmost sentiments« (Mill 1989b, 196-9). According to Mill, 
rather than being a »school of despotism« the family should be a »school of the 
virtues of freedom« (1989b, 160), it should teach its members to live together 
according to the moral rule that should govern human society in general: 
»the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming 
nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to every one else... The 
family, justly constituted would be the real school of the virtues of freedom.« 
(p. 160) 
It would seem that what the family should teach is the practice of living 
together according to Mill's first principle, as laid out in On Liberty that the 
freedom of the individual should not be interfered with so long as his/her 
actions do not harm others (Mill 1989a, 13). To this end, women must have 
equal rights to freedom in the home, and must exercise their judgement to 
ensure that their rights and those of other members of the family are not 
infringed. In both cases, contra the feminist critiques of liberalism as essen-
tially masculinist, the individual is genuinely unsexed, it is not exclusively 
masculine: the feminine woman in the home may also be an individual. 
Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 55 
We have seen, then, how in Mill's liberalism the individual is fictional in the 
first sense in which we are using it here: it »is« not in the Derridean sense since 
it can not fully constitute itself as a determinate category. Dependent on 
»society« and on the undecidability of »public« which keeps both the indi-
vidual and society in their hierarchically opposed places it can never achieve 
self-presence as itself. And we have seen how women, distinguished from men 
in their duties and functions in public opinion, thereby participate in the 
undecidability of »public« and in the fictive being of the individual. Both 
»women« and the »individual« are, on this account, fictions: neither »is« 
itself, fully present to itself; constituted only in their illusory being by their 
relations to other illusory beings neither can ever - necessarily - be anything 
but fictional. But what is the relationship between fictional in this sense and 
fictional in the second sense in which we are using it here, the sense in which 
fiction »fictions« reality by producing »effects of truth«? Here I want to 
discuss and compare two versions of this relationship, that of Judith Butler on 
performativity and that of Laclau and Mouffe on hegemony. Both theories 
understand identity as fictional in the Derridean sense and both see the neces-
sary instability of identities as a condition of possibility of fictioning reality 
but the latter is, I want to argue, more satisfactory in theorising the determinate 
condition under which this may be realised. 
For Butler the link between fiction and reality is »performativity« which she 
defines as »that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that 
it regulates and constrains...« (Butler 1993, 2). This formulation draws on 
Derrida's essay »Signature, Event, Context« in which he discusses the concept 
of the performative in the work of John Austin. On Derrida's reading of Austin 
some speech acts are performative insofar as making a statement with serious 
intent in a specified context does more than simply communicate meaning or 
state facts, it is to act, to produce or transform a situation in the world (Derrida 
1988, 13-14). Saying the words, »1 do« in a marriage ceremony, for example, 
is performative. Derrida is in agreement with Austin on the performativity of 
speech acts but he takes issue with the theory on the grounds that since it is 
necessary to the structure of language that words can be repeated in different 
contexts and with different intentions Austin's performatives always depend 
on »citation«, on the possibility of non-serious speech acts which will invari-
ably risk »contaminating« the serious (p. 15-18). It is as if, in saying the words 
»1 do« there were always echoes of other contexts in which these words have 
been used which can not definitively be excluded from the occasion - making 
it comic, for example, or reminiscent of a scene in a film or play. Butler's 
formulation of »performativity« follows Derrida's work closely. For her 
performativity involves the enactment or production of that which is named in 
ongoing social practices (Butler 1993, 12-13). And for Butler, as for Derrida, 
56 Kate Nash 
the necessary structure of language as citation means that there is a constant 
risk of failure of the identities that are constituted in performativity: that which 
is named is never fully self-present, never fully itself and so risks subversion in 
each instance of its repetition. As she puts it with regard to gender identity: 
»The injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures, a variety of 
incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunc-
tion by which they are generated.« (Butler 1990, 145) 
Butler's concept of performativity covers both senses of fiction with which we 
are dealing here: identities enacted in performativity are fictional in the first 
sense because they are never fully themselves, never self-present; and they are 
fictional in the second sense because they produce effects of truth, they 
produce reality for the agents who enact them. For Butler these two senses of 
fiction are closely linked. It is because identities are fictional in the first sense, 
because they are necessarily split, that new possibilities can be enacted, new 
realities fictioned. As Butler puts it: 
»It is this constitutive failure of the performative, this slippage between discur-
sive command and its appropriated effect, which provides the linguistic occa-
sion and index for a consequential disobedience.«(Butter 1993, 122) 
For Butler, then, following Derrida, there is a necessary tension in performativity 
between the repetition of social norms as constraining - performativity as »the 
forced repetition of norms« (p. 94) - and as subversive - performativity as »a 
reciting of the signifier that must commit a disloyalty against identity.« (p. 
220) It is necessarily a tension since it is integral to the concept of performativity 
that naming simultaneously produces and offers the possibility of subverting 
social practices. But the problem with Butler's account, I want to suggest, is 
that it does not give sufficient weight to the possibility of the failure of 
subversion, a failure which is also integral to the concept of performativity: if 
every norm is at risk of subversion, every subversion is also at risk of failing to 
subvert the norm on which it depends. In fact it is not at all clear on Butler's 
account how we are to identify a successful subversion. It has been suggested 
that for Butler the permanent problematisation of identity is her »regulative 
ideal« (Smith 1994). But while this may be true of her earlier work in Gender 
Trouble, it is less true of Bodies that Matter where she explicitly states that the 
aim of political resignification is the production of »the new« (Butler 1993, 
220), though without elaborating on how we are to distinguish »the old«, from 
»the new« on a theory of performativity as citation. The production of the new 
is, then, an important criterion by which the success of subversion can be 
judged and using this criterion we must assume that subversion succeeds when 
it becomes a norm since, by definition, it is norms, and not the subversive 
Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 57 
»risk« which they necessarily harbour which enact the »normal« everyday 
practices of social life. If, however, it is the case that for Butler successful 
subversion requires the institution of new norms, it is also the case that she 
does not address the question of the conditions under which it might be 
possible to transform the necessary risk of subversion in every repetition into 
the enactment of these new social conventions. It is for this reason that I think 
it is useful to supplement Butler's theory of performativity with the theory of 
hegemony developed by Laclau and Mouffe in order to understand how, under 
certain determinate conditions subversions can become normality, and fiction 
can fiction reality. 
There are two important aspects of the theory of hegemony proposed by 
Laclau and Mouffe which enable us to think through the subversive potential 
of performativity. Firstly, successful subversion requires decision. If every 
performative instance is, as we have seen, undecidable between subversion 
and repetition of a norm, on the theory of hegemony a decision must be made 
on this undecidable terrain as to which of the possibilities is to be taken up 
(Laclau 1993, 281-2). To be sure, nothing guarantees that the decision will be 
correct because according to a theory of hegemony in which no description is 
possible outside discourse, there is no higher rationality - God, the history of 
class struggle or the like - according to which a decision could be made that 
would ensure its truth or its teleological realisation. And it is also the case that 
such a decision can not definitively close off undecidability; as we have seen, 
any identity constituted in discourse will necessarily be unstable, undecidable 
between identity and difference and it is, in fact, this undecidability that 
permits the articulation and rearticulation of elements in different hegemonic 
projects (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 111-113). Nevertheless, a decision needs to 
be taken because, and this is the second aspect of the theory of hegemony that 
is needed here, achieving hegemony depends on the articulation of discursive 
elements around nodal points, privileged signifiers, that will partially fix their 
meaning in opposition to alternative projects which attempt either to institute 
new forms of the social too, or which continue to reproduce social practices 
that are already ongoing (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 135-6). On the theory of 
hegemony proposed by Laclau and Mouffe the subversion of social identities 
does involve the repetition of identities in continually changing contexts such 
that something new is created, but this does not happen as a matter of course; 
new identities have to be created by their articulation with others with which 
they were not previously associated in projects which are actively promoted in 
order to displace others. Fictional identities do not fiction reality as a result of 
their undecidability, the subversion that every norm harbours is not a sufficient 
condition of the displacement of that norm; fictioning a new reality involves 
decision and an act of will. Fictional identities fiction reality only where a 
58 Kate Nash 
hegemonic project has been relatively successful in instituting new social 
practices and new - fictional - identities. 
To return, then, to the problem with which we began this paper we can see how 
women were fictioned as individuals in the nineteenth century in the light of 
the theory of hegemony. We have seen how in Mill's liberalism women were 
undecidable between femininity in public opinion and the abstract self-deter-
mining individual of liberal rights. In Butler's terms the norm of the Victorian 
woman was subverted as »woman« was contextualised not only as feminine 
but also as a free and equal liberal individual. This individual was fictioned 
into reality - women came to describe themselves and to be described as such 
- as a result of the hegemonic project of first-wave feminism. Feminism 
decided on women as individuals and, with varying degrees of success, chal-
lenged the description of women as irrational, inferior and naturally subordi-
nate to men with the description of women as rational, self-determining 
individuals whose rights - to property, education, divorce, custody of young 
children, protection from domestic violence and so on - should be guaranteed 
(Shanley 1989). 
And beyond formal rights, women were further articulated as individuals with 
equal rights to self-determination in personal relationships with men, espe-
cially in marriage (p. 63).5 Feminine women in the private sphere could be, and 
were, individuals in nineteenth century liberal theory and in the social prac-
tices realised by first-wave feminism but clearly the undecidability of Mill's 
text - the fictional status of its identities - was not sufficient to fiction reality, 
to perform it in new ways.6 For reality to be fictioned a decision had to be 
made in the context of a hegemonic project which succeeded in instituting new 
5 This is to abstract from and somewhat to simplify first-wave feminism which also, on occasion, 
decided for the feminine woman of Mill's public opinion (despite Mill's hostility), attempting 
to extend her influence beyond the private domestic sphere (Holton 1986, ch. 1). At the same 
time woman as an individual was promoted in private, in the reform of marriage and property 
law and so on, and also in public, in the suffrage campaign, for example. In fact, we might say 
that first-wave feminism oscillated between the construction of women as feminine and as 
abstract individuals without, however, ever giving up the attempt to institute the rights of the 
latter, in law and in social practices more generally. 
6 In fact, the undecidability of a text could not be sufficient to fiction a new reality in Butler's 
terms either: subversive performativity takes place in social practices and not simply in 
language. She explicitly argues, for example, against what she calls »linguistic constructivism« 
as unable to account for the materiality of the sexed body (Butler 1993,6-10). But the important 
distinction here is not between language and practice as such; it is a question rather of the 
relation between a text and its social context. It is evident that performativity for Butler involves 
practices that are at the very least linguistic as well as material and in actual fact, and possibly 
inconsistently (can there be social practices that are entirely or almost entirely linguistic?), she 
Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism 59 
social practices on the basis of that decision. In short, the fictioning of a 
progressive reality requires political struggle, it does not just happen. 
Acknowledgements - I would like to thank Anne-Marie Fortier for helpful 
comments on this article, for which, of course, she can in no way be held 
responsible. 
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