Judith Butler on Gender Performativity

Gender: stylized, social, temporal

• “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as constituted social temporality.” (GT: 191)

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On the feminine subject

• Many feminists have taken uncritically the terms ‘woman’ or ‘women,’ suggesting that they connote an enduring subject.

• Put in the language of the tradition, the category ‘woman’ has been taken to mean something essential, something substantial.

• Butler calls the very idea of the “subject” into question, suggesting it is a performative construct.

• But how can there be a performance without a subject?

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Performativity

• Performance vs performativity

• There is no performer who carries out the performance, no metaphysical subject or agent, no doer behind the deed.

• There is only the doer of performativity.

• That is, Butler questions the common assumption that there is a relation between one’s body and one’s gender; that, for example, being biologically female requires of one that one display feminine traits.

• Hence the idea that gender is not what one is, but what one does.

• “Sex, by definition,” says Butler, “will be shown to have been gender all along.” (GT: 11)

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Gender is doing

• For gender “is not a noun.”

• Rather, “gender is a doing.”

• Not “a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.”

• Rather, as Nietzsche said: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”

(Genealogy of Morals)

• Butler: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” (GT: 34)

• In other words: Butler calls for a new understanding of gender identity around the idea of gender performativity.

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De Beauvoir: the process of gender

• “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between female and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”

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Butler on de Beauvoir

• “If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim…it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the ‘congealing’ is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means.” (GT: 45)

• In other words, while gender may solidify or congeal in a way that makes it appear as if it were always there, for Butler this is a mistake: gender is a process with neither beginning or end.

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Gender as “repeated stylization”

• “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.” (GT: 45)

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Appearance and reality

• In other words, the appearance of substance, the idea of woman as essential, is a kind of performative reification and accomplishment— which is to say, insofar as performative acts constitute gender, they also create and construct the illusion that the performative is real or natural.

• And this is especially problematic when the forces that police the social appearance of gender deploy heterosexuality as the performative norm or script.

• Hence, insofar as there is a transformation of gender relations, this will involve breaking the “repeated stylization of the body,” the repetition of stylized performance—that is, by undermining the script.

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Disciplinary production

• “The disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain. The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender— indeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another.” (GT: 185)

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Interiority

• Such regulatory discourses, Butler insists, are fabrications taken as natural or essential and “manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.”

• They create the illusion of interiority, of identity as having its cause in the interiority of the subject and thus as instituting “the integrity of the subject.”

• This illusion of interiority, the subject as an organizing gender core, is “discursively maintained for the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” (GT: 186)

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Displacement of the political

• Once gender has been cast as interior, with the subject the cause of identity, the focus is off the political, it is displaced.

• As Butler says: “the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view.”

• With emphasis on the psychological, the political is precluded as an analysis of the constitution of gender and identity.

• Identity is causally located in interiority, in the causal agency of the subject.

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Gender: neither true nor false

• “If

the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the true effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.”

(GT: 186)

Gender is not free choice

• The script, Butler tells us, is already determined by the “regulatory frame,” a frame that has congealed over time and which constrains choice of gender styles

• Butler develops Foucault’s point here: gender is a construction or production of discourses in which it is framed, “a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory enactment.”

• (See Foucault on the “Deployment of Sexuality.”)

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Doing gender

• In other words, the stylization of gender is never fully self stylized

• Why never fully self stylized?

• Because of what de Beauvoir calls a situation.

• That is, one is always already embedded in historical and contingent circumstances, and insofar as one acts, or does gender, one reproduces an historical situation.

Parody

• If it is possible to “act” gender so that attention is drawn to the constitutive and regulatory nature of gender discourses, then that also opens possibilities of subversion.

• Hence the role of parody.

• All gender acts are parody in the sense that heterosexual gender identities are not essential or natural.

• However, some forms of parody allow for a parody of parody.

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Drag

• Drag is a double inversion which reveals the imitative and parodic nature of all gender identities.

• Drag highlights the disjunction between the body of the performer and the gender that is being performed, thereby revealing the imitative nature of gender identities: “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” (GT: 187)

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Failure of reproduction

• Thus, to become a woman is a historical sign—one reproduces the idea of gender as manifest in the dominant, repeated, and policed, performative acts and scripts of society.

• Failures of reproduction have serious consequences in the form of punishment or oppression.

• Consequently, performative acts are often out of duress and for reasons of survival, as might be the case for those who fall short of the societal discourse and so regulative norms of heterosexuality.

• As Butler says: “We regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.” (GT: 190)

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Meaning

• The fact that gender acts are repeated also shows that gender is an act.

• For the repetition is a “reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established.”

• A public act of “maintaining gender within the binary frame.”

• And thus an act to “consolidate the subject.”

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The task of genealogy

• “The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself.” (GT: 202)

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References

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