Gender, performativity and consciousness
Explanation
The theory of gender performativity was developed by the American philosopher Judith Butler (b. 1956) in central works such as Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993). Butler, drawing on J.L. Austin (theory of performative speech acts), Foucault (productive power), Derrida (iterability of the sign), Lacan (split subject) and Simone de Beauvoir (one is not born a woman, one becomes one), produced one of the most influential theories in contemporary thought.
Butler's thesis is that gender is not an essence or interior identity that is then expressed outwardly, but performance: it is the stylised set of repeated acts (way of walking, dressing, speaking, gestures) that, through their cultural repetition, produce the effect of an apparently stable and natural gender identity. Gender is not something one is, but something one does incessantly. And in doing the gender (performing it according to culturally established scripts), the subject who apparently had it is also produced.
Butler criticises the assumption of a pre-discursive biological sex upon which gender would be constructed as a cultural layer. In Bodies That Matter, she argues that the very category of sex (male/female as biological facts) is itself the effect of discursive and material practices that materialise certain bodies as intelligible and others as abject or impossible. Intersex people, trans people, lives that do not fit the heteronormative matrix reveal the violence of this materialisation.
The concept of heterosexual matrix (also called heteronormative regime or compulsory heterosexuality, taking from Adrienne Rich) articulates how culture produces subjects with sex, gender and desire aligned according to a binary scheme (man-masculine-desires-woman / woman-feminine-desires-man). All that escapes that matrix is treated as abnormal, pathological, non-existent, dangerous. Gender performativity operates within this matrix, but at the same time its iterability opens the possibility of repeating gender in subversive, disruptive, non-normative ways (drag, queerness, trans, gender non-conforming, etc.).
Butler's theory has had enormous influence in gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, political theory, philosophy, literature, art. It has also generated fierce debates (within feminism and outside), about the relation between discourse and body, between performativity and agency, between academic theory and political praxis. Other important authors in the field: Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto, 1985), Teresa de Lauretis (queer studies), Paul Preciado (Testo Junkie, 2008), Jack Halberstam.
For the theory of consciousness, gender performativity proposes that subjective identity, far from being a stable inner core, is the effect of repeated performative practices within normative regimes. This extends beyond gender: race, class, nationality, sexuality, body, are all performativities. Consciousness of the self is the effect of these processes. Radical politics consists in opening up possibilities for dissident performativities that liberate unrecognised lives. As a theory that combines political philosophy, cultural critique and phenomenology of subjectivity, Butler's work is one of the great legacies of contemporary critical thought for rethinking consciousness as situated, normative and transformable practice.
Strengths
- Sophisticated analysis of the discursive production of the gendered subject.
- Political and clinical applicability (LGBTQ+ agency).
- Lasting cross-disciplinary influence.
- Articulates structure and agency.
Main critiques
- Dense prose hampers diffusion.
- Discussions about bodily substantiality versus construction.
- Tension with essentialist or materialist feminisms.