12. Performance: Judith Butler-"Gender Trouble" Flashcards
1
Q
Performance
A
- Although the concept of performance has been in use since the 1950s – especially in anthropology and literary theory – it has gained a new relevance and significance in both postcolonialism and feminism, as it allows to conceptualize the erosion of the ’center’ in a new way.
- One of the most influential (and radical) proponents of this concept is Judith Butler, who has lead the discussion in feminism to a new level.
2
Q
Feminism and Performance
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- In her book Gender Trouble she criticizes what she identifies as a turn toward essentializing notions of sexual identity within US-American feminism.
- Strongly influenced by the works of Derrida and Lacan – and continuing in the line on Cixous and Anzaldúa – she actively deconstructs what has actually been considered an achievement within feminist studies: the dichotomy between sex and gender which, as we know, reflects the dichotomy between nature and culture.
- Butler’s main claim is that not even sexual identity is something natural, as what counts as natural is also ’defined’ by a culturally constituted, and ideologically inflected discourse, as naturalness is “constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within categories of sex.” (2489)
- What then constitutes ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’ is nothing more that the ritualistic repetition of certain roles or performances that reenact what has been culturally codified as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’.
- If both sex and gender are no more than ‘citational repetitions’ – and we know that repetitions can never be exact – then the texture of cultural codes can be changed by changing the performance of both sex and gender.
- That is, even what counts as identity – sexual identity – is nothing but a culturally (and predominantly masculinely) constructed fiction that can be rewritten.
- The male subject itself deconstructs its own claim to dominance in being dependent on the female ”Other”, which ”exposes his autonomy as illusory.” (2489)
3
Q
Naturalization Revisited
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- The nature/culture dichotomy assumes that there is a realm outside culture that is unchanging, while culture itself is something contingent, man-made, and malleable.
- But what if not only culture, and not only the dichotomy between nature and culture, but the category of nature – and what counts as such – is also a discursive, culturally created ’product’?
- Even if there is something like nature – pure nature, untouched nature – that might be out there: who’s to decide what is to be included or excluded from this category? After all, il n’y a pas de hors-texte…
- ”What other foundational categories of identity – the binary of sex, gender, and the body – can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?” (2489)
4
Q
Beyond nature, identity…
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- What, that is, if there is no such thing as a natural (sexed) body that would legitimate the gendered role models built (allegedly) according to the former?
- What about ”phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality?” (2490)
- ”What new shape of politics emerges when identity as a common ground no longer constrains the discourse of feminist politics?” (2490)
5
Q
… and essentialism
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- The assumption of an essential feminine – even for political purposes (comp. Spivak) – is out of the question, as the sheer assumption of such essences is what characterizes politics.
- The question is: ”is there a political shape to ’women,’ as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view?” (2490)
6
Q
Essentialism and the body
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- What has been the mainstay of all naturalizations and essentialisms of the natural has usually been the body.
- ”Der Geist ist willig, aber das Fleisch ist schwach.”
- While the body as been considered as the ’refuge’ of the ’natural’, the spirit or the mind has been considered as that which should control, overcome, culturally sublimate, the bodily drives.
- And most of all, these ’bodily drives’ have been connected to ’the body’ as sexual – as has been the sex/gender dichotomy, which appears ”to presuppose a generalization of ’the body’ that preexists the acquisition of its sexed significance.” (2491)
- ”What separates off ’the body’ as indifferent to signification, and signification itself as the act of a radically disembodied consciousness or, rather, the act that radically disembodies that consciousness?” (2491)
7
Q
The body as signified?
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- If anything, the body (as sexed) has been considered as the ’signified’ par excellence. The first question – even before a name is given, that would serve to ’identify’ a newly born baby – is the question ”And what is it?”
- Even before, that is, we consciously enter the symbolic order, we are ’subjected’ – that is, constructed as subjects by being ’appellated’ (in the sense of Althusser), we are already in the symbolic order.
- What if the answer to the inquiry above would be ”neither!” Or ”both!”
8
Q
Remember Derrida
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- we are “… faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.” (103)
- “In a sense, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche, cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed – that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values.” (2492)
- Writes Mary Douglas: “ ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.” (2492)
- The question then is: Is this “order” something that has the status of an anthropological (or ‘natural’) constant? In order to tame the non-taxonomicable, the unknown, the incalculable, the ‘abnormal’?
9
Q
The homosexual taboo
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- While the incest taboo is critical in that it seems to transcend – and put into question – the dichotomy between natural and cultural, homosexuality seems to do the same:
- ”Paradoxically, homosexuality is almost always conceived within the homophobic signifying economy as both uncivilized and unnatural.” (2494).
- Here, then, is another instance of something allegedly ”unnatural” that serves as a legitimation to close it out on the level of the cultural; a natural, however, that is itself defined culturally.
- ”the naturalized notion of ’the’ body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries.” (2494)
10
Q
Body Boundaries
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- ”the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an ’expulsion’ followed by a ’repulsion’ that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation… What constitutes through division the ’inner’ and ’outer’ worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.” (2495).
- This comes very close to Foucault, who describes the taxonomies of power and categorizing, excluding but at the same time including the ’other’ – in insane asylums, prisons, hospitals.
11
Q
Excreting the other
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- ”The boundary between the ’inner’ and the ’outer’ worlds of the subject is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.” (2495).
- That is, the body is doubly ’other’: There is the blank page on which to inscribe the signifiers of cultural power, and the doubly other which, as bodily fluids, makes the other ’other,’ as it leaves the enclosure of the body through orifices that threaten its enclosure: Snot, shit, bad breath, spit, menstruation blood, semen, the fetus – all of which were in us, after all!
12
Q
The ’desire’ for identity
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- ”According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the ’integrity’ of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion discursively maintained for the purpose of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (2497).
- ”If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a 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 truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.” (2493).
But where do the desire and the discourse come from?
Is it – can it be – a cultural patriarchic conspiracy? Or is the wish for identity something that transcends the binary?
13
Q
Isn’t it a drag?
A
- The drag queens – and the fact that Butler takes it as an example – make her the spokesperson of ‘queer theory.’
- “The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance… In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency… In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.
- The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate… gender parody … reveals that the original identity … is an imitation without origin.” (2498).
14
Q
Parody without origin?
A
- ”This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities… As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself.” (2498/9).
- But what about that ’myth of originality’? Where does it come from? Does it itself have an origin that can be dispensed with?
15
Q
The ’ideal’ gender
A
- What is comic is not only the parodic performance of gender, but also the desperate attempt to ’live up’ to the expectations of compulsory heterosexuality:
- ”Gender is also a norm that can never be fully internalized; ’the internal’ is a surface signification, and gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody… gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.” (2501).
