by Bilal Rehman

 

Is it a cop out if I write about Judith Butler for my blog post?

Despite the verbosity of Butler’s writing, her ideas lead me to think more deeply about how social interactions (and the discourses that permeate them) function to constitute the very subjects that participate in those interactions.

In this blog post, I will outline a few features of Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity. I will unpack the notion of performativity, and I will consider how masculinity is performed in everyday life. Finally, I will critique Butler’s conception of gender for its limited ethical and political potential.

I. Gender Performativity

Butler writes in her seminal text Gender Trouble that gender is performative. In the chapter “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” she argues that gender is socially constructed. In other words, gender as a category is a kind of discourse made up of social practices (e.g. gender reveal parties, weddings, most sports), language (e.g., gendered pronouns) and ideals (what does it mean to “be a man”?). Butler claims gender (and other social categories) “is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (722). Nevertheless, supposedly originary social categories require deviation and derivatives in order to be thought of as original, “for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives” (723). For example, when a supposed lack of manliness is made apparent, we gain a better sense of what it means to be a man, which we take to be the normative, normal archetype. Because of this, the ideals of masculinity and femininity are always out of reach for the subject; gender is therefore bound to fail. In the chapter “Subversive Bodily Acts,” Butler goes on to explain that the inevitable failure of gender requires that subjects repeatedly perform gendered acts to reconstitute themselves as gendered subjects (191).

But how are subjects constituted through acts? What does that even mean? On a foundational level, Judith Butler is challenging the traditional Enlightenment conception of the subject, which assumes individuals exist isolated from the world and act in accordance with their own free will. For Butler, gender is not just a performance put on by volitional subjects. Rather, the imitative performance constitutive of gender produces “as an effect the very subject it appears to express”; in other words, there is no performer prior to the performed (725). This means that attempting to act like a man or woman constitutes that subject as such. This notion of performativity is rooted in speech-act theory, which can be grasped through a simple example. Consider the phrase “I promise.” By stating those words, a subject has performed an action that enters them into a new social arrangement – namely, one in which the subject has an obligation to the person with whom they made the promise. In an analogous way, by performing a gendered act (living up to a masculine ideal, identifying oneself as a man, arm wrestling because you want to prove your strength, etc.), the subject situates themself in a constantly shifting though always present field of normative social discourse that lays out what it means to be a man or woman. The subject not only recapitulates normative ideals about manhood, but also comes to understand themself as a man.

I find Butler’s conception of gender performativity compelling for several reasons. First, by understanding the subject as not just the cause but also the effect of a social discourse, Butler captures the complexity of how gender ideals originate and how we situate ourselves in relation to them. Second, her view accounts for the great variation we see in gender ideals not only across societies, but also amongst individuals within their lifetimes. As our understanding of masculinity and femininity changes as we grow up, we act in different ways to try and live up to gendered ideals. Finally, Butler’s account implies that gender ideals are always shifting, and can never be truly lived up to. When we realize that the gender ideals are arbitrary in this way, we also gain the sense that there’s no real reason to live up to them. Gender can thus be toyed with and parodied.

II. Examples

I will now give two simple examples of how subjects are constituted as gendered to give some life to Butler’s account.

  1. Gender reveal parties – Even before a child is born, they are already thrown into a nexus of gender relations that inform how others understand them as a subject. When the sex of a child becomes known, the traditionally corresponding gender is also assigned to the child. When this is celebrated, a number of symbols are used to represent the gender of the child. If the sex of the baby is male, then it is presumed that he will be a boy, like blue, play with toy dinosaurs and trucks, etc. As the child grows up, he is taught to conform to these ideals and symbolic associations, understanding both himself and the concept of boyhood in terms of these symbols.
  2. Playground rules – growing up, boys are told to not cry and instead live up to the Stoic ideal of manhood. For example, a boy who tears up after falling from his bike at the playground might tell himself that he should not cry, since men, of course, do not cry. This feedback loop of expectation (that men do not cry) and response (the resulting feeling that the boy should hold back his tears) forms the boy as a gendered subject.
II. Political Potentials

Butler’s analysis of gender is compelling and comprehensive. It suggests that the norms of gender can be subverted through parody, or even simply by acting in ways that violate gender norms. But in foregrounding the role that individual behavior plays in the constitution of gender, it seems that Butler can only conceive of resistance in terms of individual behavior, as well. In other words, the only kinds of resistance that Butler’s account of gender allows are the subversion of norms through individual behaviors.

In her critique of Butler, feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that Butler’s praxis is too limited in its focus on individual behavior: “When I find myself doing femaleness, I can turn it around, poke fun at it, do it a little bit differently. Such reactive and parodic performances, in Butler’s view, never destabilize the larger system. She doesn’t envisage mass movements of resistance or campaigns for political reform; only personal acts carried out by a small number of knowing actors.” (Nussbaum)

Although Nussbaum mistakenly seems to equate ‘femaleness’ with womanhood in the above quote, her point is well taken. In poststructuralist accounts of gender (and social life more generally), a philosophical commitment to dissensus and the fundamental instability of categories leave theorists with little room to call for action on a collective level. Further, a focus on the general category of gender  leaves behind pointed critiques of what might be more pressing political problems: patriarchy, sexism, etc. Nonetheless, Judith Butler’s account of gender enables us to think critically about topics that are deeply tied to patriarchy and sexism, such as toxic masculinity, by reminding us that the gendered ideals that seem deeply ingrained in society are in fact always in flux.

 

References (the two Butler chapters I’ve cited are from the same text, though one is excerpted in an anthology – hence the very different page numbers)

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan, 1998, pp. 722-730.

Butler, Judith. “Subversive Bodily Acts.” In Gender Trouble, Routledge. 1990.

Nussbaum, Martha. “Professor of Parody.” The New Republic, 1999. https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody