Queer Property, Queer Persons: Self-Ownership and Beyond

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QUEER PROPERTY, QUEER
PERSONS: SELF-OWNERSHIP
AND BEYOND
MARGARET DAVIES
Flinders University of South Australia
ABSTRACT
The primary focus of this article is the relationship between property and personal-
ity with reference to the specific form of transgression offered by queer theory, that
is, transgression of the conventional boundaries of sexual identity and desire. Femin-
ists have strongly challenged the gendered nature of personal relations expressed
through property – the association of masculinity with the position of proprietor and
femininity with the position of object of property, which in its turn relies upon a fixed
opposition between subject and object. It is argued here that attention to certain
aspects of queer theory and praxis offers a further ground of critique and the poten-
tial for reconfiguration of these fundamental relationships.
The wish for one’s own terms and one’s proper identity, perhaps the most deeply
private property of all, is an impossible desire since both are held in common
with others in the community as an effect of the symbolic. (Tyler, 1997: 230)
But if this attribution of property is itself improperly attributed, if it rests on a
denial of that property’s transferability . . . then the repression of that denial
will constitute that system internally and, therefore, pose as the promising
spectre of its destabilization. (Butler, 1993: 63)
INTRODUCTION
P
‘
ROPERTY’ AND ‘personality’ are terms that are heavily theorised and
debated in scholarly literature in disciplines as varied as psychology,
law, economics, analytical philosophy and cultural studies. Both terms
are also part of the everyday language we use to describe our selves, our
relationships with others, and our relationships with external objects. Neither
term points clearly to a single referent, and both are conceptualised in widely
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varying ways. It is therefore not possible to deploy either term without making
a number of assumptions, and without – whether intentionally or not – raising
a whole constellation of social, legal, political and economic associations.
In this article I have chosen to explore the relationship between property
and personality through the lens of sexuality and its associated symbolism.
My primary focus is upon private property, specifically its privateness, but I
hope that some of the ideas that I am developing here will suggest new ways
of conceptualising property per se, both private and collective. I regard my
comments as a selective reading of property and personality as it appears in
various discourses, which does not even approach a general description or
theory: although this is a point I could make in relation to any scholarly
writing, I wish to emphasise it here because of the obvious need to clear a
path through a number of large and often contradictory bodies of literature.
SOME PROPERTIES OF PROPERTY
Technically speaking, property is a crystallisation of a number of legal rights
and responsibilities. As such it has an unavoidably intersubjective element,
meaning that although it may attach to a concrete or abstract object, ‘prop-
erty’ is primarily a relation between legal subjects which has things as its
focus.1 For instance, my property in my piano is the legal effect of a system
of legal rights and responsibilities (Eleftheriadis, 1996: 39): the quality ‘mine’
is attributed by law. Emphasis upon the idea that property is a ‘bundle of
rights’ (such as the right to use, enjoy, possess, alienate, exclude, derive
income), none of which – except perhaps excludability (Gray, 1991) – is essen-
tial to the legal construct of property, has led to some debate among legal
scholars in the 20th century over whether ‘property’ is a distinct legal cat-
egory at all (Penner, 1997).
At the same time, it is frequently observed that property also carries a par-
ticular cultural significance: the relational, mediating and dynamic side of
property is often repressed in popular language, meaning that it also signifies
a much more immediate, personal, sovereign power of a person over objects
(Grey, 1980; Macpherson, 1978: 6–9; Waldron, 1988: 26–30). In both legal and
popular language the term ‘property’ is frequently used to refer to the object,
rather than to the right. Property is therefore a complex legal relationship, the
character of which is highly contestable, and at the same time it is in everyday
language a relatively stable reference to things that we own. To say that a legal
concept is much more complex than an everyday concept is neither surpris-
ing nor usually of much significance. In the case of property, however, I
believe it is of great significance: the first purpose of this paper is to indicate
some of the ways in which the legal and social meanings of property interact,
and why it is important to understand this interaction. I should therefore indi-
cate at the outset that I will be referring to essentially two property concepts:
the social and the legal, and hopefully it will be clear by the context which is
uppermost at any given moment.

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Property is also characterised by an immensely strong symbolic power and
is both expressive and constitutive of the person (Nedelsky, 1991), as well as
of class, sex and race differences. As I will indicate in more detail later, central
social relationships, such as conventional heterosexual ordering, have been
symbolised as relationships of ownership (Irigaray, 1985; Pateman, 1988).
Moreover, property also obviously holds a central place in the economic
order as the legally enforceable mechanism of commodification, enabling
capitalist exchange. While it may be true that since the decline of Marxism as
a universal explanation of oppression, ‘the ownership of economic means of
production, that is, property relations, cannot be seen as the source from
which all forms of oppression flow’ (Edgeworth, 1988: 101), it is also arguable
that the metaphorical and symbolic power of property extends well beyond
purely legal and state-enforced ownership regimes. The material effects of
property are moreover not confined to those flowing from the central cat-
egories recognised by legal and economic discourse (see e.g. C. Harris, 1993).
The forms of oppression which accumulate around the myth of property do
not rest merely in formal legal relationships, but also in the way that prop-
erty rhetoric is extended and used to structure the realm of the social. I believe
the feminist literature already makes this point abundantly clear, but I raise
it in a context intended to extend and further explore central feminist insights.
Clearly, therefore, the power of property arises in very complex economic,
social and legal ways. Without losing sight of this complexity (but inevitably
reducing it in various strategic ways), this article attempts to bring together
several further thoughts. As I have indicated, the ways in which certain social
hierarchies, in particular those organised around sex and sexuality, are con-
structed by and reflected in property relationships provide a critical starting
point for an analysis of the symbolic power of property. Insofar as it provides
a metaphor for personal identity through the notion of self-ownership, for
instance, property takes on stereotypically masculine characteristics; but at the
same time, the object of property is sometimes said to be structurally female,
because the owner/owned, subject/object distinctions all correlate socially
and epistemologically to the male/female distinction (Levi-Strauss, 1969;
Wittig, 1992). Historical ownership of women by men and the objectification
and commodification of women has been the basis of this correlation.
At the same time, arguably, the hierarchy of owner/owned which is
expressed in any property relationship translates into other major social div-
isions, such as those delineated by race and class (Bell, 1988; C. Harris, 1993).
The history of slavery, together with its philosophical and scientific justifi-
cations, expresses the association of hierarchically constructed race divisions
with property relationships.2 Ongoing processes of colonisation centrally
involve constructions of property and racial propriety: this is evidenced in
the non-recognition of indigenous custodianship of the land ( J. Singer, 1991;
Watson, 1997); in the exclusion of racial ‘others’ from the property of white-
ness (C. Harris, 1993); and arguably in the continuing appropriation of the
bodies and cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples by the forces of western
intellectual property expansionism (Shiva, 1997; cf. Pottage, 1998). In each

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case appropriation is perpetuated and justified through the exclu-sionary
structure of property and its association with a particular type of subject, or
a particular type of knowledge. A second intention of this article is therefore
to revisit analysis of the way in which the metaphor of property is used to
support specific social divisions, and in particular the division male/female.
Clearly I do not have space to summarise the whole of this literature or to
evaluate it in any detail, but I do rely...