Day Eight: Butler's Theory of Performativity

The Judith Butler Reader (Salih)
*Short debrief -- reactions to the reading/reminder about critiquing structures versus critiquing individuals.

Key Terms
Sex versus Gender: Sex is a biologically-determined category (male/female) referring to chromosomes, hormonal makeup and sex organs; Gender is a culturally-manifested performance of characteristics that appear to be natural to sex categories but are actually socially conditioned.

Phenomenology: "the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Phenomenology emerged as a philosophical alternative to psychoanalysis, the body of work created by Freud, which pathologized, or treated as diseased, many experienced phenomena of consciousness.

• Why does the author pose it as unexpected that Butler would move from the study of phenomenology to the performativity of subject and identity?

Binaries: A pair of opposites that are mutually exclusive. A system of binaries gives no room for a spectrum of options in between the two poles.

Essentialism: The view that for every identity there is a set of attributes (or an essence) that is natural (i.e. biologically-determined) and essential for its existence as such. The opposite of performativity.

Telos: An endpoint, a final objective; Butler uses this word to describe how categories like "man" and "woman" are never "complete" -- we never reach "manhood" or "womanhood" but are constantly having to perform the characteristics that prove our masculinity/femininity. There is no telos of gender.

Discourse: Most of the time, discourse means written or spoken communication; when Butler uses it, she is talking about discourse as societal shaping forces that create norms, values and politics (with a small "p" - i.e. the politics of every day life, how power relations governs our behavior -- not political systems and government). Example: the discourse of drug use defines it as a criminal/law enforcement issue, rather than a public health issue.

Key Lessons from the Reading

• Gender is something you DO, not something you ARE. 
• "Gender Trouble describes how gender 'congeals' or solidifies into a form that makes it appear to have been there all along" (Salih, p. 46)
• "...gender is not something that one is, it is something that one does, and act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a 'doing' rather than a 'being'" (Butler, p. 25, cited in Salih, p. 62)
• Performativity versus essentialism: "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 civilisation [sic] as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 281, cited in Salih, p. 45). 
• What it means to be a woman, or a man, or any other identity category changes over time because it is culturally determined.
• "All gender is, by definition unnatural" (Salih, p. 46).
• All genders are performative. All identities are performative.
• Importance of masculinity studies alongside women's studies: all genders are performative. If we pretend that the category of "gender studies" only applies to women we are saying that masculinity is the default and femininity is an abnormality (or, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it, "the second sex"). This tendency also encourages men and male-identifying individuals to think that anything with "gender studies" in it is not their issue, when men are disciplined into performing masculinity just as much as women are disciplined to perform femininity [see Emma Watson's UN speech on HeForShe]. 

• This also applies to other identity categories: race/ethnic studies applies to white people as well as racial minorities; sexuality studies applies to heterosexuals, etc.
• The politics of "[White] American History" versus "Cultural/Ethnic Studies" -- how does this reflect the discourse around race and (lack of) inclusion in the Academy?

• Social construction of the subject.
• The subject-in-process: "Gender Trouble makes trouble by calling the category of 'the subject' into question by arguing it is a performative construct" (Salih, p. 44).
• The subject is not a pre-shaped entity that exists before it DOES something: the doing is what makes the subject.
• While one's identity is "chosen" it is not a free choice because one can only choose from a finite menu of options offered by one's culture.
• "...by 'choice' Butler does not mean that a 'free agent' or 'person' stands outside its gender and simply selects it...Instead, Butler asserts that '[t]o choose a gender is to interpret received gender norms in a way that organizes them anew" (Salih, p 46). 
• Even if you resist gender norms, you are shaping your subjectivity in relation to that act of resistance. Your identity always refers back to the dominant social script.
• Freud, Foucault and the History of Sexuality
• "'Genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourse, with multiple diffused points of origin" (Butler, p. viii-ix; cited in Salih, p. 48). 
• Identities are disciplined: in this sense, I am not talking about disciplining as outright punishing (although sometimes this is the case). Foucault describes disciplining as the process whereby dominant power structures shape or condition behavior through the dissemination of norms (hence why Butler says that gender performances are located within compulsory frames, bottom of p. 62). Here's an example of gender disciplining:
  
  
• History of race categories: prior to the European colonization of Africa, the Americas and South Asia, there was no such identity category as "race".  "Race" became the means used to justify the exploitation of foreign lands and peoples by deeming certain populations to be "inferior" to white Europeans. Race is a socially-constructed category created by the dominant Eurocentric order. Yet we still see examples of social disciplining when it comes to adhering to performances "loyal" to one's race.

Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else.

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) October 8, 2015

to answer a question that's been blowing up my inbox: Cam Newton is not an NFL QB. At all. Great athlete. Heisman contender. That's all

— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) October 25, 2010

Group Exercise - Media Artifact Scavenger Hunt
Break into groups of three. In ten minutes, find as many media artifacts (photos, videos, graphics, commercials/advertisements, illustrations, songs, etc.) that illustrate the following:

• The performance of gender binaries (i.e. contrasting femininity and masculinity as mutually exclusive and oppositional)
• Socially disciplining children, babies, infants (fetuses??) to conform to gender normativity
• Framing gender as natural/essential/biologically-driven
• Questioning a person's identity authenticity
• "Types" of women; "types" of men
• Gender norms from other regions/time periods 
• Performing queerness
• Performing blackness
• Performing whiteness
• Performing straightness
• Performing [insert identity category here]