Undoing Gender

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2004

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Gender Performativity and the Social Construction of Identity

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses violence, anti-gay bias, and transphobia.

In the Introduction, Butler comments that gender “is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing” (1). However, this performance of gender is neither “automatic or mechanical,” and Butler grounds the “terms that make up one’s gender” in a “sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself)” (1). In short, they suggest that gender defies the idea of “creation” or origin, existing as a perpetually reenacted set of norms. Gender, as part of identity, is socially constructed in the sense that society represents and idealizes gender; people then internalize and adopt gender as performative ways of living. A major theme in Butler’s text is both how gender is performed and how sexuality, sex, race, and culture are performed as and through identity.

Butler probes the implications of identity as governed by social norms in their critique of Agacinski’s perspective. Butler acknowledges both the perceived rigidity of norms, by which thinkers like Agacinski speculate what is or is not allowed in human behavior but also the inevitability of challenges to these norms. When Lacanians use the symbolic order to restrict human identity by gender, sex, and sexuality, they must pathologize identities that fall outside their structures. In reality, the “challenging” identities already exist, and so the symbolic order is revealed as a faulty performance of cultural norms.

Citing Habermas, Butler explains why norms are critical to social function, noting: “Indeed, the presumption of a common set of idealizations is what gives our actions order” (220), adding that these idealizations of norms give people a way “to order ourselves in relation to one another and a common future” (220). Performance is not false but exists for the sake of maintaining an “ideal” form of a culture or society. By performing gender, individuals make themselves legible to those around them, but the constraints implicit in these performances render those who fall outside the norm unintelligible and, therefore, potentially less than human. Butler hence uses gender performativity and the social construction of identity to advocate for greater inclusivity in understanding the human, and they view it as a main reason to oppose the current details and functions of norms.

The Experiences and Exclusion of Marginalized Identities

Butler’s discussion throughout the collection focuses on the need for a more inclusive and evolving understanding of what is “human.” They frame this argument in an early comment: “Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life” (2). The term “viable,” meaning capable of living successfully, directly informs what it means to “live” an “unviable life.” Though much of Butler’s focus remains on gender, sex, and sexuality, especially the ways in which people do not fit into the binaries assigned to these categories, they also broaden their argument to encompass people of color. Though Butler does not make an explicit comparison, Undoing Gender explores the consequences of marginalization when the “ideal” is restricted to whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity.

Regarding the case of David Reimer, Butler poses the question: “[W]hat, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” (58). The norms that allow intelligibility and autonomy for some do not extend those freedoms to others. For example, David Reimer’s case does not involve, necessarily, any deviation from the norm within David’s identity, and yet the medical and legal institutions intervened in his life to mold him into the “contemporary order of being” in an attempt to make him “legible” as a woman, even as he vocally protested. People with marginalized identities, such as David, are conditioned to live without autonomy. Thus, if the “human” is considered autonomous, those who are denied autonomy are those who are considered “less than human.”

In Butler’s discussion of Anzaldua and Spivak, they note the need for a broad understanding of how categories of identity lead to marginalization and exclusion from what is human. Butler notes of Spivak’s view that “the subaltern woman activist has been excluded from the parameters of western subject and the historical trajectory of modernity” (230). Essentially, Butler is highlighting how cultural origin, sex, and occupation can all lead to exclusion from modern, global society, which heavily favors “Western” perspectives and uses the benefits of modernity as an incentive to conform to “Western” ideals. Butler’s conclusion does not limit their argument to gender and sex, instead opening the issue of performativity, norms, and exclusion to all people in the international community, arguing for an end to the oppression inherent in marginalization.

The Intersections of Personhood with Legal and Medical Institutions

Butler brings up a wide array of issues concerning the interplay between personhood, norms, and institutional intervention. Early in the collection, Butler brings up “the intersex opposition to the widespread practice of performing coercive surgery on infants and children” (4). The euphemistic term “coercive” refers to the fact that infants and children cannot reasonably consent to sex-determining surgery, and these surgeries are done with the theoretical “best interest” of the child in mind. This issue opens the discussion, for Butler, on how doctors and legislators effectively override autonomy over individual personhood in the name of preserving normalization. As with other issues brought up in the collection, coercive surgery intersects with multiple institutions, which intervene both with and without the consent and desire of marginalized groups.

Institutions, in this case, are the government, medical professionals, legal professionals, and even private corporations, such as insurance companies. Butler notes of their friend who desired a full mastectomy: “Paradoxically, the insurance companies demean the notion of liberty when they distinguish, say, between mastectomies that are ‘medically necessitated’ and those that constitute ‘elective surgery’” (85). The distinction between medical necessity and election is essentially an objective one, and yet norms interfere in this process by undermining decisions that, though potentially life-saving, run counter to those norms, such as a full mastectomy to prevent the spread of cancer. Nonetheless, much like the GID diagnosis, insurance companies, psychologists, and legislation can provide the necessary means by which marginalized groups can access care, albeit with the caveat of accepting pathologization.

Butler brings the institutional discussion of personhood to the highest forum by integrating arguments involving the UN, considered the arbiter of international rights and legislation. Butler sums up the issue of institutional decisions, saying: “to be called unreal, and to have that call, as it were, institutionalized as a form of differential treatment, is to become the other against which the human is made” (217). Inherent to this argument is the issue of norms, which are how marginalized groups become “the other” that determines what the “human” is. At the legislative level, as well as in common practice like coercive surgery, this differential treatment can be oppressive, abusive, and deadly, and Butler argues that a more inclusive development of humanity can influence institutional practice to ameliorate these lasting issues.