Judith Butler and 'Performativity'



The thrust of performativity within Butler’s work is held in her concern for becoming, her primary theoretical goal to denaturalise what she terms the 'heterosexual matrix' (Butler 1990: 35). Beginning with a consideration of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous claim that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman”, Butler first draws her theory of gender performativity in ''Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (1988). Here, Butler takes aim at the traditional focus of woman as the subject of the feminist project. According to the theory, gender is not a stable identity, not a pre-discursive locus of agency from which acts and identity proceed, but rather “an identity instituted through a ''stylized repetition of acts”. ''Gender here is to be distinguished from the biological facticity of ‘sex’ as the “cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity” (522), though even ‘sex’ as a category does not escape the critical implications of performative constitution for Butler. She asks:

"What is ‘sex’,anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such ‘facts’ for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary operations as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests?" (Butler 1990:10)

Between Gender and Sex
Butler does not deny the existence of material dimensions of the body, but argues that to describe the ‘gendered body’ a phenomenological theory of constitution must understand ‘acts’ to mean “both that which constitutes meaning and that through which meaning is performed or enacted.” (Butler 1988: 521) Gender here is the effect of reiterated acting, producing the effect of a static or normal gender, at the same time obscuring the instability of any single ‘gender act’. Gender, in this way, is a social construction instituted through the stylization of the body, understood as the “mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” (519) Recognising gender as performative rather than expressive of a ‘true gender’ identity, Butler wants us to move to a phenomenological model that “requires a conception of a constituted social temporality.”

"Significantly,if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief." (Butler 1987: 520)

In her first book Subjects of Desire Butler establishes her critical difference from the Foucauldian understanding of power and production, what she describes as a “dialectic gone awry”, “unmoored from both the subject and its teleological conclusion”(Butler 1987: 222). In Gender Trouble Butler combines her conception of the performative with what Foucault called a ‘genealogical analysis’ of gender. Foucault’s analytic was concerned to trace how sets of ideas and meanings coalesce around a phenomenon like sexuality. This kind of analysis helps Butler to reveal the performative rather than expressive condition of gender. This analysis is not concerned to discover an original or natural gender identity, a concept of ‘true gender’: it abandons the concept of an authentic sexual identity that repression has supposedly elided or effaced in favour of an "investiga[tion of] the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, and discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin" (210 sexuality, butler 1990: 141)

Butler’s early accounts of performativity are anchored not in Austin or Derrida, but the works of performance theorists such as the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner (Butler 1990: 277-78). It is only in her subsequent work – in particular ''Bodies that Matter and Excitable Speech ''– that the Derridean and Austinian heritage underpinning her theory becomes more evident. Through this performative concept of ‘gender acts’, Butler wants to show the ways reified, reiterated, repeated and naturalized conceptions of gender can be understood as constituted socially, and therefore capable of being reconstituted differently. This is the emancipatory political capacity that Butler identifies in the recognition of performative constitution, without claiming all re-significations as innately emancipatory. Indeed, there is never a promise that reconstitution will not lead to further oppression. As Butler reads performativity largely through Derrida’s engagement with Austin, and his own concept of iterability, this capacity for reconstitution is always already present in the capacity for constitution itself. As a consequence, the very possibility of stable gender identities is denied for Butler:

"In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meaning subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction." (Butler 1990: 138)

As an explanation of Gender identity Butler's argument avoids unnecessary universalisation, apprehending gender not as the effect of determinism but lived discursively on a day-to-day basis as the reiterative effect of historically specific ensembles of practices, gestures and ideas. Through this idea of (re)iteration Butler explores how change might be engendered through subversive or parodic repetitions that take aim not at the subjects of gendered identities but at the "mechanism of that construction".

Further Work
Butler’s engagement with the performative dimensions of social constitution is by no means limited to gender. For instance, her later works Precarious Life and Frames of War analyse how performances of grief and mourning work to constitute identity and community, considering how the sanctioning of particular performances of grief to the exclusion of others constitutes and distributes the identity of ‘human’ or ‘life’ differentially across space and time, revealing the performative dimension to the social apprehension of ‘humanity’ and ‘life’.

Related Terms and Pages
J.L. Austin and the 'Performative', Iterability, Parody