On Judith Butler and Performativity

1 33On Judith Butler and PerformativitySARA SALIH Science and naturalness are discur-sive constructs and, although it mightseem strange to refute the authority of science after quoting apparently scientific data, the point Butler is making is clear: thebody is not a mute facticity (GT: 129), afact of nature, but like gender it is produced bydiscourses such as the ones Butler has beenanalyzing. As with gender, to suggest that thereis no body prior to cultural inscription will leadButler to argue that sex as well as gender canbe performatively reinscribed in ways thataccentuate its factitiousness ( its construct-edness) rather than its facticity ( the fact ofits existence). Such reinscriptions, or re-citationsas Butler will call them in Bodies That Matter,constitute the subject s agency within the law,in other words, the possibilities of subvertingthe law against itself. Agency is an importantconcept for Butler , since it signifies the oppor-tunities for subverting the law against itself toradical, political has collapsed the sex/gender distinctionin order to argue that there is no sex that is notalways already gender.

2 All bodies are genderedfrom the beginning of their social existence(and there is no existence that is not social),which means that there is no natural body that pre-exists its cultural inscription. Thisseems to point towards the conclusion thatgender is not something one is, it is somethingone does, an act, or more precisely, a sequenceof acts, a verb rather than a noun, a doing rather than a being (GT: 25). Butler elabo-rates this idea in the first chapter of GenderTrouble:Gender is the repeated stylization of thebody, a set of repeated acts within a highlyrigid regulatory frame that congeal overtime to produce the appearance of sub-stance, of a natural sort of being. A politicalgenealogy of gender ontologies, if it isSOURCE: This chapter was originally part of chapters 2 and 3 in Judith Butler . Copyright 2002 SaraSalih. Reprinted by 7/8/2006 12:11 PM Page 55successful, will deconstruct the substantiveappearance of gender into its constitutiveacts and locate and account for those actswithin the compulsory frames set by the var-ious forces that police the social appearanceof is not just a process, but it is a par-ticular type of process, a set of repeated actswithin a highly rigid regulatory frame asButler puts it.

3 I have italicized that last phrasein order to stress that, as with the wardrobeanalogy that I introduce later in this chapter, Butler is notsuggesting that the subject is freeto choose which gender she or he is goingto enact. The script, if you like, is alwaysalready determined within this regulatoryframe, and the subject has a limited number of costumes from which to make a constrainedchoice of gender idea of Performativity is introduced inthe first chapter of Gender Troublewhen Butlerstates that gender proves to be performance that is, constituting the identity it is purportedto be. In this sense, gender is always a doing,though not a doing by a subject who might besaid to pre-exist the deed (GT: 25). She thenquotes the claim Nietzsche makes in On theGenealogy of Moralsthat there is no being behind doing, acting, becoming; the doer ismerely a fiction imposed on the doing thedoing itself is everything (1887: 29), beforeadding her own gendered corollary to his for-mulation: there is no gender identity behindthe expressions of gender; that identity is per-formatively constituted by the very expres-sions that are said to be its results (GT: 25).

4 This is a statement that has confused manypeople. How can there be a performancewithout a performer, an act without an actor?Actually, Butler is not claiming that gender isa performance, and she distinguishes betweenperformance and Performativity (although attimes in Gender Trouble the two terms seemto slide into one another). In an interviewgiven in 1993 she emphasizes the importanceof this distinction, arguing that, whereasperformance presupposes a preexisting subject, Performativity contests the very notion of thesubject (GP: 33). In this interview Butler alsoexplicitly connects her use of the concept per-formativity to the speech act theory of J. s How To Do Things With Words(1955) and Derrida s deconstruction of Austin sideas in his essay Signature Event Context (1972). Both of these texts are discussed indetail in Chapter 4 of Judith Butler , where Ilook at Butler s theorizations of language, buthere it should be noted that, although neitherAustin nor Derrida is in evidence in GenderTrouble, Butler implicitly draws from their lin-guistic theories in her formulations of is linguistic Performativity connectedto gender?

5 Towards the beginning of GenderTrouble Butler states that [w]ithin the inher-ited discourse of the metaphysics of substance,gender proves to be performative, that is, con-stituting the identity it is purported to be (GT: 24 5). Gender is an act that brings intobeing what it names: in this context, a mas-culine man or a feminine woman. Genderidentities are constructed and constituted bylanguage, which means that there is no genderidentity that precedes language. If you like, itis not that an identity does discourse or lan-guage, but the other way around languageand discourse do gender. There is no I outside language since identity is a signifyingpractice, and culturally intelligible subjects arethe effects rather than the causes of discoursesthat conceal their workings (GT: 145). It is inthis sense that gender identity is this point, we might return to thewardrobe analogy I explored in an earlierchapter of Judith Butler (p.)

6 50), where I arguedthat one s gender is performatively constitutedin the same way that one s choice of clothes iscurtailed, perhaps even predetermined, by thesociety, context, economy, etc. within whichone is situated. Readers familiar with Daphnedu Maurier s novel Rebecca (1938) will remem-ber that the nameless narratorshocks her56 SEXUALITIES AND 7/8/2006 12:11 PM Page 56husband by turning up at a party in an identi-cal dress to that worn by his dead wife on asimilar occasion. In preparation for the party,the narrator, assisted by the malign , believes that she is choosing her cos-tume and thereby creating herself, whereas itturns out that Mrs. Danvers is in fact recreat-ing the narrator as Rebecca. If Mrs. Danvers istaken to exemplify authority or power here,Rebeccamay provide an example of the wayin which identities, far from being chosen byan individual agent, precede and constitutethose agents or subjects (just as Rebecca lit-erally precedes the narrator).

7 SURFACE/DEPTHB utler s argument that there is no identity out-side language leads her to reject the commonlyaccepted distinction between surface anddepth, the Cartesian dualism between bodyand soul. In the third chapter of GenderTroubleshe draws from Foucault s bookDiscipline and Punish, in which he challenges the doctrine of internalization, the theorythat subjects are formed by internalizing disci-plinary structures. Foucault replaces this with the model of inscription : as Butler describesit, this is the idea that [the] law is not literallyinternalized, but incorporated, with the conse-quence that bodies are produced which signifythat law on and through the body (GT:134 5). Because there is no interior to gen-der the law cannot be internalized, but iswritten on the body in what Butler calls thecorporeal stylization of gender, the fantasied[sic] and fantastic figuration of the body (GT:135).

8 Butler repeatedly refutes the idea of apre-linguistic inner core or essence by claimingthat gender acts are not performed by thesubject, but they performatively constitute asubject that is the effect of discourse ratherthan the cause of it: that the gendered body isperformative suggests that it has no ontologicalstatus apart from the various acts which con-stitute its reality, she writes (GT: 136; myemphasis). Once again we return to the notionthat there is no doer behind the deed, no voli-tional agent that knowingly does its gender,since the gendered body is inseparable from theacts that constitute it. All the same, in theaccount of parody and drag that follows thisdescription it does at times sound as thoughthere isan actor or a doer behind the deed,and Butler later admits that in Gender Troubleshe waffled between describing gender interms of linguistic Performativity and charac-terizing it as straightforward theatre.

9 Hertheories are clarified in Bodies That Matterwhere Butler emphasizes the Derridean andAustinian underpinnings of Performativity thatare as yet only implicit in Gender AND DRAG If the inner truth of gender is a fabricationand if a true gender is a fantasy instituted andinscribed on the surface of bodies, then itseems that genders can be neither true norfalse, but are only produced as the truth effectsof a discourse of primary and stable identity, Butler writes in the third chapter of GenderTrouble(GT: 136). In that case, it must bepossible to act that gender in ways whichwill draw attention to the constructedness ofheterosexual identities that may have a vestedinterest in presenting themselves as essential and natural, so that it would be true to saythat all gender is a form of parody, but thatsome gender performances are more parodicthan others. Indeed, by highlighting the dis-junction between the body of the performerand the gender that is being performed, paro-dic performances such as drag effectivelyreveal the imitative nature ofallgender identi-ties.

10 In imitating gender, drag implicitlyreveals the imitative structure of genderitself as well as its contingency, Butlerclaims; part of the pleasure, the giddiness ofthe performance is in the recognition of a rad-ical contingency in the relation between sexand gender (GT: 137 8; her emphasis).Chapter 3: On Judith Butler and 7/8/2006 12:11 PM Page 57 Gender is a corporeal style, an act (or asequence of acts), a strategy which has cul-tural survival as its end, since those who donot do their gender correctly are punishedby society (GT: 139 40); it is a repetition, acopy of a copy and, crucially, the gender par-ody Butler describes does not presuppose theexistence of an original, since it is the verynotion of an original that is being parodied(GT: 138). Gender performatives that do nottry to conceal their genealogy, indeed, that goout of their way to accentuate it, displace het-erocentric assumptions by revealing that het-erosexual identities are as constructed and unoriginal as the imitations of does not happen once and for allwhen we are born, but is a sequence ofrepeated acts that harden into the appearanceof something that s been there all along.