The Politics of Performance and
Gender Identities in Gender Trouble
Butler argues at the
onset of the awareness that characterises most of the outcomes of what is
generally understood as feminism. She unleashes scathing criticism on
traditional feminism on the grounds that it negates fragmented identities and
thereby assumes the subservience of the woman to the notion of universal
womanhood. She argues that “the juridical formation of language and politics
that represents women as “the subject” of feminism is itself a discursive
formation and effect of a given version of representational politics” (2). By
assuming the status of women as subjects, traditional modalities of knowledge
production attempt to thwart existence of the individual on unique terms. The
politics of representation often undermines visibility on a subjective and
individual level.
Universality in the perceived sense also undermines divergent
possibilities in the choice of individual identities. Rather than considering
the individual of the proprietor of his or her gender identity, universalism in
feminist discourses creates the dichotomy of identities or ready-made supplies
of stereotype gender models for the individuals to choose from. Butler’s
argument must be understood in contrast to the traditional notion of man and
woman defined by the symmetry of social relations, especially that of servitude
and authoritarianism. In Dialectic of
Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno writes: “In the enraptured adoration of
the lover, as in the boundless admiration shown in return by the beloved, the
actual servitude of the woman was endlessly transfigured. Again and again, the
sexes were reconciled on the basis of their recognition of this servitude: the
woman seemed freely to accept her defeat, the man to grant her victory” (83). Concretization
of gender identities and normalizing sexualities may serve the binary of
master/slave relationship.
The concreteness of gender identities proposed by
feminism serves the apparent cause of defying free existence of multifarious
gender roles. Butler argues that little difference existing between biological
gender bias and the bias between the male-female binary. When feminism argues
for a defined space for gender discourses, the latter takes the state and thus
initiates a series of challenges in post-modern era.
In the Preface to 1999 edition to Gender Trouble, Butler attests
that she undertakes “denaturalizing” of gender in order to achieve two goals:
as a resistance to the normative violence imposed by ideal morphologies of sex
and to deconstruct the notion of heterosexuality in epistemological interactions.
The
dogged effort to “denaturalize” gender in this text emerges, I think, from a
strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal
morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or
presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic
discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done
simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in
the place of “real” politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre
and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make
life possible, and to rethink the possible as such (xxi).
Butler
also underscores the perceived uncertainties in the reception of such an
argument as denaturalization. However, by positioning her arguments in relation
to the “assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism” (5)
Butler overcomes the fluctuations in received notions on her argument. She
asks:
“Is
there “a” gender which persons are said to have, or is it an essential
attribute that a person is said to be, as implied in the question “What gender
are you?” When feminist theorists claim that gender is the cultural
interpretation of sex or that gender is culturally constructed, what is the
manner or mechanism of this construction?” (10).
What Butler points at,
here, is a conformist norm that exists within the normative matrix of feminism.
Sexualities are often defined in terms of binaries such as man and woman. This
inevitably imposes the reliability upon heterosexuality as a definitive praxis;
consequently, denying the opportunity for the individual to choose his or her
gender roles. The man/woman dichotomy does not exist just in the temporal
discontinuity of the present alone. It has a historical context too. However,
Butler specifies that “gender is not always constituted coherently or
consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects
with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively
constituted identities” (4).
Butler argues that gender is relative and determined
under the influence of various social and political contexts. In order to
subscribe to the notion that gender is permanent fixture that determines a
‘person’, is to undermine the relevance of the possibilities available to the
‘person’ or individual to ‘perform’ gender. According to Butler, gender is “a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were,
which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a
dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (190). Butler’s argument could
comprehend as a resistance towards the earlier notions of gender as a fixed
identity. Through performance, the individual is capable of reversing the
pre-existing paradigms of sex, and gender. In demonstrating the specifics
between sex and gender Butler draws from Wittig. “Wittig understands gender as
the workings of “sex,” where “sex” is an obligatory injunction for the body to
become a cultural sign, to materialize itself in obedience to a historically delimited
possibility, and to do this, not once or twice, but as a sustained and repeated
corporeal project” (190).
Addressing gender as a project, Butler underscores that
“cultural survival” could be identified as its purpose. Negating and accepting
various convenient models of cultural identities, gender attempts to thwart its
obliteration in terms of asserting its significance through the diffusion of the
meaning specific sexuality. Conceptualizing gender in terms of a ‘project’ denies
its visibility in the terrain of indefinite existence. On the contrary, gender
attempts a struggle to exist. It is this struggle that perhaps, Wittig had
noted. Butler identifies this ‘project’ as an “originating force of a radical
will.” In other words, gender, because it is a ‘project’, is also a strategy
that could be identifies in various cultural contexts. “Hence, as a strategy of
survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly
punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what “humanizes”
individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who
fail to do their gender right” (190).
Butler assert that “[t]here 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” (34). Sex, according to
Butler, has a causal relationship with gender. It could be argued that if
gender could be identified within the purview of performance, sex could form
elementary levels of composition in the construction of such performance. The expression
of sexuality therefore, has both performatory role as well as biological
influence to play. Identity on a personal level is related to the expressions
of an individual during cultural, social and political interactions. The free-play
of identity constituted the major argument raised by Butler. Such a fluid notion
of identity undermines the consequences of the conformist norms of binary
gender, advocated by earlier theorists and writers such as Virginia Woolf.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge,
2007. PDF file.
Horkheimer, Max, Theodor
W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. PDF file.
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