Judith Butler on Gender Performativity
Gender Trouble acted as a revolutionary text for feminism and it’s ability to achieve change, as Butler addresses and clarifies two main confusions within the movement; what defines a “woman” and what defines a “subject”. Butler argues that gender is a construct that comes from the repeated performance of certain behaviors, which are regulated and re-enforced through the heteronormative biopolitics of our society. This text serves as a re-constitution of what gender means (or doesn’t mean) as Butler exposes gender and sex to both be artificial and constructed concepts. The text is split into three main parts.
The first point that Butler addresses is the category of “women” being the subject of feminism, and how both the notions of what it means to be a “woman” as well as a “subject” are open to question and more fluid than implied. Butler suggests that the concept of a subject regulated by law and society is controversial, as this subject can’t exist apart from the law that it’s defined and regulated by, because it means the law created this subject in the first place. Butler refers to this as “the ontological integrity of the subject before the law.” As the system and structures of power (who control society and regulate their pre-established norms through prohibition and subjugation) are the ones who actually created the “subject” in question, but naturalize its existence and imply that this existence predates and therefore defies the law. Butler then outlines the second point of her book which is that of the feminist subject and it’s definition also being problematic. By this Butler is referring to the fact that patriarchy varies across cultures and that the experiences of patriarchy vary by their intersection with “racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities”, and that feminism cannot group all of these concepts into one. Her proposed solution to this is not to create a universal category of women but instead to create a “feminist genealogy” to explore how these different exploitative systems affect different groups of people, and to explore the nature of these repressions through the history of their construction. The way Butler phrased it goes as followed:
'The notion of a universal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists ... That form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non- Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression'
I think the introduction of this critique of feminism was vital for feminism and our understanding of struggle. It sparked the chain of knowledge that led to intersectional feminism which is becoming progressively more inclusive of the struggle of all women rather than just white western women. Partly attributed to Butlers unique approach to Gender Theory, feminism now includes the struggle of women across all races, classes, and religions, which it didn’t do previously.
In Chapter 1, part 2, Butler briefly introduces the concept of gender being the “means by which sex is constructed and presented as natural.” Here she explores how feminism has created a distinction between sex and gender, whereby sex is considered biological and gender, cultural. However for Butler this does not imply that there is a correlation between the biological body and the cultural gender norms attributed to it, especially since it is based on the patriarchal assumption that there are only two genders. This links with French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s claims that “one is not born a woman, but rather, becomes one” and that “the body is a situation” Butler claims that sex and gender are one, and that the body “come[s] into being in and through the mark(s) of gender.” In responsne to this butler claims that:
““If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, 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.”
With this, Butler is referring to Beauvoir and Monique Wittig’s theories of gender, which claim that the masculine gender is the universal gender of personhood, which in turn makes the feminine gender the “other”. Butler also refers to philosopher Luce Irigaray, who discusses how the “phallogocentric” aspects of language present women not as “other” but as an unrepresentable “linguistic absence.” These analyses lead Butler into the discussion of the nature of being, to which Butler refers to as “the metaphysics of substance.”, Which discusses how subjects, individual beings, are constructed biopolitically. Butler returns to the concept of Identity politics and how the nature of gendered identity has hands-on implications. She discusses how the current category and definition of “women” in feminism, hiatuses into universalizing the experience of all women, which in turn is exclusionary to other experiences and causes disintegration within the feminist movement. Butler explores the idea of “coalitional politics” rather than identity politics, where the idea of a “woman” is not predetermined and allows for the inclusion of various other feminine identities within feminism. With this analysis butler is suggesting that feminism absolve itself from its connection to a set construct of “women” but instead moves towards an accommodating coalition of various interests and beings.
Furthermore, Butler believes that gender and identity (personhood) are inseparable. That entities who don’t perform the hegemonic cultural norm and link between sex, gender and desire. This patriarchal and heterosexual standard implies that female sex links with feminine gender and heterosexual desire for men. Butler explains how our heteronormative and phallocentric society created, requires, and upholds a gender binary to create “intelligibility” and simple understanding. This implies that the constructed idea of a “gender core” may be naturalized but is actually constructed in order to maintain control and understanding. Butler believes that “Being” and “doing” are heavily interlinked and that the identity of subjects is created fully through performance, she refers to identity as an “Effect of discursive practices” and explains that our society’s heterosexual hegemony makes intelligible only identities that conform to said heterosexuality, which in turn makes any non-conforming identities not possible. Ultimately she believes that the gender binary should be eradicated. Butlers notion of eradicating gender and the idea that gender and sex are one was met with backlash from the transgender community, as “(mis)representation of the transgender body within queer theory… is a privileged example of gender performativity” this is valid because “Transgender people claim that they experience a stable gender identity and they use the notion of a stable gender identity to explain to others that there is a mismatch between their body and their gender.” I think this is a valid criticism from the transgender community and should be addressed in future works by Butler.
The second part of Gender Trouble is Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix. First, Butler claims that there is no point in looking for a pre-patriarchal past, as feminism often seeks an “origin” that existed before patriarchy was imposed upon society. Butler proposes two problems, firstly the fact that looking for one origin is impossible considering the variety of cultural experiences of oppression, that change from place to place and culture to culture which would therefore mean that there is no single origin and to imply that there is would discard the experiences of other women and contributes to the “universalization” of what it means to be a woman and of the oppressed group in question. Secondly Butler implies that these narratives must contain bias since they are created in order to fulfill a set of present self-interests and to show that patriarchy is not inevitable. This structuralist mentality belongs to socialist feminism. Butler explains and rejects this mentality and attributes some of it to structural anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1908 – 2009), who wrote about the separation of nature and culture, implying that culture acts on nature. This concept translates into modern feminism as a lot of people view a similar separation between sex and gender, where gender is imposed onto the natural attributed sex, which as a structuralist mentality, goes against what Butlers post-structuralist approach is attempting to explain to us because his theory is based on the pre-dictated idea of sex being natural. It’s important for feminism to stop arguing over semantics but rather to understand how to move forward in de-gendering our society and escaping the prison of the gendered body.
Butler then goes onto explore the ideas put forth by Jacques Lacan, who puts forth the idea of gender falling under the idea of the Symbolic. This refers to the unconscious constructs that supposedly exist prior to the birth of the subject. He believes that the Phallus embodies heterosexual male desire and is separated into two ideas. Men “have” the Phallus and women “are” the phallus, meaning that women embody the site of male desire which also implies that they are “lacking” a Phallus which gives room for the male to have it and emerge from this position with the power of having what women do not. He argues that this forces women to “masquerade” their desire and identity and conceal it, which solidifies it as secondary. She explains how this contributed to the formation of modern feminism, in which this concept of the predisposed attributes of biological sex remains intact and is therefore something Butler rejects.
Next Butler tackles Freudian narratives of gender and identity. Freud believes that something called “melancholia” is responsible for the construction of one’s character and gender, he believes melancholia is a “response to the loss of a beloved” and that one identifies with this loss which in turn builds the structure of ones ego. He claims that gender identity comes through this melancholia due to the taboo of incest, and how the banning of Oedipal desires results in unavoidable sense of “loss” of the desired mother or father. He claims that the ego either identifies with and embodies the gender constructs of the lost parent or alternatively could deflect said loss and embody the opposite of said parent. This development is supposedly meant to determine ones femininity/masculinity as well as ones homosexuality/heterosexuality, and relies on what he calls “primary dispositions” towards either of the two in ones psyche. Butler explains that Freud’s theory fails to justify the existence of primary dispositions, and actually rejects his claim and states that instead of being natural they are a result of repressive external prohibitions, such as the ban on homosexuality and that of incest. She also explains that for his idea to make sense, the causation must be upturned where the disposition is actually a result of the repressive heterosexual hegemony rather than something preceding it. This rejection of Freud’s claims is similar to her rejection of Levi-Strauss’s narrative, as they are both based on the idea of pre-dictated gender constructs as natural. Butler continues to explain how sex is viewed as biological and something that is simply ‘natural’ and a scientifically determined, and how throughout our upbringing this concept is “naturalized” to just ‘be how it is.” Ultimately Butlers point is that as long as Sex is culturally understood to be biologically determined and natural, it acts as something constructed. I think the way Butler deconstructs the arguments of other theorists on that premise is vital to a new understanding of the foundation of critical thinking, as it very often is based upon the very notion of sex as a predetermined factor with its own associations.
In part 3 Butler introduces the example of Herculine Barbin (1838-68) who was born with indistinct (not visibly male or female) genitalia but was labelled as female sex at birth. Later in their early 20’s they were pushed to embody a male identity, soon after, they committed suicide. Butler includes this story to demonstrate the detrimental effects of sex and gender. It also demonstrates the extent to which they are constructed, as they imply that everyone must fall under one or the other. Butler then delves into Monique Wittig’s (1935-2003) theory that the body is gendered policed through means of language and implies that removing gendering from language will suffice in eradicating sex. Butler disagrees with this as she believes that subverting heterosexism should include the unearthing of how this discourse functions and how it is behind curating identity within the heterosexual binaries. The end of this part introduces and explains the idea of gender performativity for which this text is notorious. She is described to ‘“decisively dismantles the ontological status of gender categories, proposing a theory of gender performativity that gender should only be understood as 'the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory gram that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being'”
On the whole, “Gender performativity, or the queering of linguistic speech performance, becomes the key to Butler's project of bridging feminism and gender studies.” And therefore on the whole I believe that Gender Trouble was something our society needed to be exposed to, as it changed the discourse and direction of feminism to being a more inclusive and intersectional fight for equality and fair treatment, as well as provided a better understanding of the biopolitical construction and maintenance of gender. Arguably Gender trouble has revolutionized academic discourse in all fields, since Butler draws evidence and explanation from fields of psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, literature, and biology. I found the text dense and difficult to unpack due to its abundance of new vocabulary and long complicated sentence structure, however unlike a lot of other texts Gender Trouble is worth unpacking, as the complexity of each sentence opened up new ways of thinking and included some form of new idea.
Bibliography
- Judith Butler’s Notion of Gender Performativity.To What Extent Does Gender Performativity Exclude a Stable Gender Identity?
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486?needAccess=true
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486?needAccess=true
