27 pages • 54 minutes read
Judith ButlerPerformative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Gender as Essential to Society and Yet Without Essence
Butler’s work focuses on the thesis that gender is an essential structure of society and yet something without inherent essence. The idea that gender is socially constructed rather than natural or necessary is generally accepted by feminist theorists. Simone de Beauvoir and her followers such as Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, showed that the belief in gender essentialism was used to prevent women from accessing education, economic opportunities, and personal autonomy. So, even though gender is not a natural category, a hierarchical understanding of gender is an essential part of many societies.
While there are biological differences between sexes, these differences do not require one way of performing gender rather than another, and they certainly do not require gender to be defined in terms of domination and subordination or a hierarchy of oppression. Butler draws her interpretation of patriarchy from anthropological studies such as Claude Levi-Strauss’s kinship analysis and Gayle Rubin’s interpretation of kinship formation (Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon Press, 1965; Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, Monthly Review Press, 1975). In their analysis, the exchange of a woman from one family to another as a commodity can result in benefits for both families—status, economic potential, child-bearing potential, and so on. Even when thinking of a woman as a commodity becomes distasteful, the assumption of female inferiority remains. Societies with this legacy contain the tools for subordinating and disempowering anyone labeled “woman.”
Forming kinship relations through the commodification of women produces two different results: women come to be seen as inferior to men and heterosexuality comes to be seen as the only acceptable form of sexuality. Heterosexuality is required because, without it, women would lose their value as an instrument of kinship formation. The concept and norm of heterosexuality emerge from the need to stabilize kinship formation practices. Michel Foucault, in his treatise The History of Sexuality, argues that the concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality are tools of power, making it possible to pathologize, punish, and correct people’s behavior. As a preventative measure against alternate forms of kinship formation, both individuals and cultural institutions are licensed to commit violence against those who do not fit the underlying assumptions about gender roles and sexual preferences.
Butler argues that this need for violence, shame, and social stigma reveals the essential unreality of “natural” genders and “natural” sexual preferences. If gender aligned automatically with the physiology of the sexes, there would be no need for policing gender roles and norms. Similarly, if heterosexuality were the natural way of things, then there would be no need for legal or extra-legal punitive measures against other forms of sexuality. Butler believes that the inessential nature of gender is proven by the societal effort required to control it.
The Construction of Society via Ritual Performance
Butler uses the term “Performativity” in two ways. In one sense, it draws parallels between gender and theater. Butler often takes the theater analogy literally to illustrate the similarities and differences between gender performance and theatrical performance. The theatrical analogy has been inspirational to theorists in other fields. Performance theorists Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, for example, developed an understanding of ritual performance as a method for constructing society. This type of socially constitutive act is also known as a “performative” act. Butler uses both meanings of performativity—the theatrical and the anthropological—to understand gender as a form of socially invented and socially constitutive ritual performance.
Turner considered social drama to be a ritualized process for settling cultural conflicts and generating social cohesion. Ritual drama appears in many spaces—such as the performance of justice in a courtroom, the performance of romance through courtship rituals, and the performance of government through enforcement. These performances organize people’s lives and maintain social order. Just as the rituals of courtship create relationships and build families, so performing the rituals of gender creates gendered bodies.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz expands Turner’s understanding of social performance to include interpretation. In addition to the idea that social ritual forms and reinforces social order, he suggests that performances become examples or paradigms for society to follow. He writes, “The state enacts an image of order that—a model for its beholders, in and of itself—orders society” (Geertz, Clifford. “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought.” The American Scholar, vol. 49, no. 2, 1980). The function of the ritual—to handle and reconcile disorder—is only one part of the ritual’s effect. The meaning of the ritual is also key. When a society performs the ritual of a legal system, for example, not only does it create criminals and either exile or reconcile them, but it also creates a belief that the society is safe and well-regulated. This belief, reinforced by repeated rituals, can become considered a fact—i.e., that the legal system is necessary because it creates safety, and it is just because its stated purpose is justice. Butler uses this understanding of performance as creating both social objects (like criminals and citizens) and social beliefs (like justice and nationalism) to understand gender as well. Performing gender creates the social object of gendered bodies and the social belief that gender roles and norms are natural.
Butler uses the analogy of theater to emphasize the artificiality of gender—it is a “script”—but also the reality of it. Unlike actual theater, where the stage is a delineated space perceived as containing the unreal, gender performance happens in the everyday world. By using the term “performativity,” Butler calls on the theatrical narrative to explain how gender functions both like a script that must be dramatized by actors to become real and how it is a social construct through which ritual acts of gender create and reinforce the gendered body and the socially-approved possibilities for gender portrayals.
Resolving the Paradox of Gender Solidarity
Butler’s work, while imbued with a feminist impulse, often critiques contemporary feminist theory. This article cautions against a specific style of feminist discourse. The basic goal of feminism—the end of patriarchy—is not questioned, but Butler is careful to emphasize that women are not a singular type of entity with common experiences. Suggesting they are further embeds the gender essentialism that oppression relies on.
In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist activism often relied upon a sense of solidarity among women that transcended class, race, and religion. But critiques by feminists such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Winona LaDuke argued that solidarity can have a flattening effect, where the issues prioritized by the feminist movement are the ones important to middle-class white women. The idea of solidarity across boundaries relied on the idea of the gender binary. Simone de Beauvoir and others pointed out that women were conceived of as the “Other,” which allowed them to be defined as inferior. Interpretations of this effect led some scholars to decide that the gender binary itself was responsible for oppression, and that binary thinking was inherently hierarchical. Therefore, it made sense that being defined as a woman meant that one was necessarily oppressed.
Butler’s approach resists the impulse to maintain a gender binary. In their analysis, man and woman are not essential categories. Instead, gender connects to a set of culturally and historically determined possibilities that can be shifted or expanded based on people’s performances of these possibilities. This analysis makes space for social change by suggesting that a redefinition of gender is possible. It also resists the idea that there is only one way to be a woman, leaving space for the diversity of women’s perspectives and experiences, and—in response to the third wave move toward more intersectional feminism—diversity in their needs.
In the 1970s and 1980s, disagreements known as the “sex wars” divided feminists. These disagreements focused on differing definitions of womanhood. For example, if women are victims, everything they do (no matter how seemingly autonomous) must be seen as a form of oppression. Similarly, if men are oppressors, then trans people can only be infiltrators of, or traitors to, the feminist movement. Butler cautions that defining women as oppressed is a self-defeating attitude for feminist organizers. Butler writes, “One ought to consider the futility of a political program which seeks radically to transform the social situation of women without first determining whether the category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be a woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed situation” (532). Butler asserts that without questioning what a woman is and how that definition is socially constructed, it is impossible to work against oppression.
In Butler’s analysis, just as the category of woman is inessential, the quality of being oppressed is inessential. Butler argues that must avoid the type of essentialist thinking that led to the suppression of the needs of women of color and working-class women, divided feminists into their “sex wars” camps, and excluded trans voices from feminist circles. Only by altering what it means to be a woman—in a legal, social, and cultural sense, as well as in individual understandings of identity—can we move toward an experience of gender that does not entail oppression.
Related Titles
By Judith Butler
