Butler- Performativity of Gender

Gender theory has been dominated by the work of Judith Butler since Gender Trouble (1990), introduced the concept of ‘gender performativity’. This is a theory of gender as the creation of reiterated performance of stylized bodily acts that produce gender effects and construct gender differences: ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (1993:2). Thus performative acts are constitutive of meaning, producing a series of effects: ‘we act and talk and speak in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man, or a woman’ (Butler, 2014).

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

72 Butler’s concept of gender performativity and doing gender continues the work of the symbolic interactionist/ ethnomethodologists on gender iteration and attribution. The main difference is Butler’s emphasis on language and reiterated speech acts (influenced by John Austin, 1962). For example, when a child is born, usually the initial act of classification concerns gender identity. This labelling ‘it’s a girl/boy’ has consequences known as ‘linguistic performativity’, a statement that brings what it names into being, beginning the process of ‘materialising a sexed body’, and is ‘more than mere performance’ (Rahman & Jackson, 2010:173), because it ‘consists in a reiteration of norms that precede, constrain and exceed the performer’ (Butler,1993:243). ‘There is no gender identity beyond the expressions of gender…Identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1990:24).

The influence of Foucault is evident in Butler’s analysis of gender and sexual normativity as discursively embodied categories constructed on the basis of knowledge and power. For Butler, the performance of the gendered, sexed, and sexual subject is not a choice, but located within a Foucauldian regime of regulative discourses, frameworks of intelligibility, and disciplinary regimes. Individuals situated within specific discourses repeatedly perform modes of identity until these become successfully internalised and experienced as the individual’s lived subjectivity. There is no ‘internal core’ to gender identity only performative enactments - ‘words, acts, gesture, and desire’, creating the illusion of an identity (Butler, 1990:500). Gender therefore is a constructed category, there can be no claim to any essential gender. The natural-seeming coherence of sex, gender and sexuality is culturally constructed.

Femininity and masculinity are not natural but culturally acquired through repetitive acts. Thus feminine identity is created by feminine behaviour, by performing discourses of femininity that constitute the individual as a feminine subject. It is acts of self-presentation then that produce or ‘perform’ gendered identity (Butler 1990), and gender is constitutive of and precedes identity in Butler’s theory:

It would be wrong to think that the discussion of “identity” ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that “persons” only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility (Butler, 1990:22)

Identities become stabilised and relatively enduring only when repeated performance fix them in the minds of the performers and the audiences. The individual subject with

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

73 claims to an identity is a discursive fiction for Butler. Instead the subject is constructed through the regulatory practices of gender and sex (Butler, 1990: 23). Where modes of identity are not internalised they can become the basis for a rejection of hegemonic identity norms, a counter identification, for example cross dressing creates performance acts that subvert gender binaries and identities (Butler,1990:502).

A central concept in Butler’s work is the heterosexual matrix: ‘that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders and desires are naturalised’ (1990:208 fn6). Subject positions are rendered socially coherent in terms of the conflation of sex-gender-sexuality matrix underpinning heteronormativity. Categories of sex, gender, and sexuality provide ‘stabilising concepts’ that work together to form a system that reinforces gendered identities. Recognition within this matrix permits the right to a particular identity. The ‘naturalness’ of these gendered identities can be contested by other identities that do not conform to what is considered to be normal, exposing their lack of basis in reality: ‘called into question by the cultural emergence of those

“incoherent” or “discontinuous” gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined’ (Butler, 1990:23). The subversive performativity of drag or cross-dressing undermines the illusion of gender reality. The analysis can also be applied to transsexual or transgender identities, although Butler does not deal specifically with these categories in the 1990 edition of Gender Trouble, acknowledging this omission in the ‘Preface’ to the 1999 edition.

The existence of gender variance and homosexuality dislocates the coherence of the heterosexual matrix: ‘The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of “identities” cannot exist’ – that is those in which gender does not follow from sex, and those in which the practices of desire do not “follow” from either sex or gender’ (Butler, 1990:24). Gender identities and sexed bodies are only comprehensible within the boundaries of the sexual-gender binaries.

When these are ambiguous they disrupt the cultural order, and have to be modified by medical science in order to conform to the norm and maintain the boundaries and

‘natural’ logic of the sex- gender- sexuality matrix. In this way gender variant identities are reincorporated into the gender order and made culturally intelligible (Butler, 1990).

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

74 Transgender exists because of a dichotomous model of gender; and within the boundaries of the cultural matrix it is gender queer identities that contain within them the possibility of subverting the gender order with their non-conformity to male or female binary subjectivities.