Tag Archives: Judith Butler

Performance Piece

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This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. It was reprinted in Julia Serano’s book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Communities More Inclusive which everyone should buy, damn it. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance” I think I am going to strangle them. What’s most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn’t” sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that every person in this room should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another and with the external expectations that other people place on us.

Sure, I can perform gender if I want. I can curtsy or throw like a girl or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why some behaviors and ways of being come more naturally to me than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes I experienced when I hormonally shifted from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same — wore the same t-shirts, jeans and sneakers that I always had — yet once people started reading me as female they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, it seems to me that we let the audience — with all of their interpretations, prejudices and assumptions — completely off the hook.

I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like “all gender is performance”, “all gender is drag” and “gender is just a construct”. They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations. And of course, this is a convenient strategy, provided that you are not a trans woman who lacks the means to have her legal sex changed to female, and who thus runs the real risk of being locked up in an all male jail cell. Provided that you’re not a trans man who has to navigate the discrepancy between his male identity and female history during job interviews and first dates. Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists that he doesn’t see race. It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you are not fully in touch with all of the ways in which you are privileged by it.

Almost every day of my life I deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake. People who make a point of calling me effeminate rather than feminine. People who slip up my pronouns only after they find out that I’m trans, but never beforehand. People who insist on third-sexing me with labels like MTF, boy-girl, he-she, she-male, ze & hir — anything but simply female. Because I’m transsexual, I am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when I am simply being myself. So it seems to me that this strategy of fictionalizing gender will only ever serve to marginalize me further.

So I ask you: Can’t we find new ways of speaking? Shouldn’t we be championing new slogans that empower all of us, whether trans or non-trans, queer or straight, female and/or male and/or none of the above?

Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let’s recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It’s an amalgamation of bodies, identities and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others of which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of arguing that gender is any one single thing, let’s start describing it as a holistic experience.

Instead of dismissing all gender as performance, let’s admit that sometimes gender is an act, and other times it isn’t. And since we can’t get inside one another’s minds, we have no way of knowing whether any given person’s gender is sincere or contrived. Let’s fess up to the fact that when we make judgments about other people’s genders, we’re typically basing it on our own assumptions (and we all know what happens when you assume, right?)

Let’s stop claiming that certain genders and sexualities reinforce the gender binary. In the past, that tactic has been used to dismiss butches and femmes, bisexuals, trans people and our partners, and feminine people of every persuasion. Gender is not simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.

Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let’s talk about all of the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn’t feel like drag when you’re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn’t feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you finally feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn’t feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let’s stop trying to deconstruct gender into non-existence and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound and intricate.

So don’t dare dismiss my gender as a construct, drag or a performance, because my gender is a work of non-fiction.

The Origin of Catwoman’s Ass

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Judith Butler is best known for stating that “all gender is performance.” However, as far as I know, she never actually said that. What she did say was that gender was “an imitation without an origin.” By this, she meant that there was no “true” or “natural” gender — and, perhaps even more importantly, no true or natural gendered acts. So wearing pink wasn’t “natural” for girls, any more than playing football was natural for boys. Rather, every gendered action or choice (like wearing pink) was an imitation picked up from other cultural sources or discourses. But these imitations had no origin — only referents which in turn had other referents.

So, for example, a little boy might wear a pink dress imitating a princess in a cartoon. But the princess in the cartoon was herself wearing a pink dress in imitation of other princesses, who were wearing it in imitation of other stories or combinations of stories. The boy’s supposedly deviant gender expression is artificial…but the natural gender expressions are artificial too. Gender has no origin, which means that you can’t use origins to police gender. Queer people are no more artificial than straight people. Indeed, to the extent that their gender expression highlights artificiality (as in drag), their gender expression is more true, since it acknowledges the lack of origin which straight gender expression attempts to elide.

So in that context, let’s consider Courbet’s infamous, quite, quite NSFW painting, The Origin of the World.
 

This painting was a private commission, and eventually found its way into the collection of Lacan, believe it or not.

Obviously, Courbet in this image is linking gender and origins in a fairly flamboyant way. On the one hand, you could argue that, like the title says, the female genitalia are literally figured as the site creating, or birthing gender — the site of difference if you’re Lacan, perhaps. Gender is a physical reality, and woman is defined by that reality as a lack to be filled with looking. The person of the woman (like, for example, her face) is left off as irrelevant; all that matters is the gender, an origin without imitation.

But are we really supposed to take the title that literally? Or, to put it another way, isn’t part of the joke, and part of the satisfaction, that this is precisely a copy — a image of that which is not meant to be imitated? And the rush (or a rush anyway) is precisely the insouciance with which the imitation is an imitation. Contra Stanley Cavell, the point here is not the powerful illusion of reality created by what is excluded from the frame — rather, the point is the brass insistence that nothing outside the frame matters, that the copy, not despite but because of its artificially constricted view, is the gender and the world. Gender here is manipulable and diceable, packageable and consumable. The painting is fun and funny not because it shows you the profound, true origin of the world, but because it mocks that profundity — because it says that that profundity does not exist except as a toy for you to do with as you will.

Along those lines:
 

In this issue, as you can see, Catwoman fights her posterior, which has attained sentience and is climbing up her spine to throttle her with her own sphincter.

Here, then, in Catwoman’s origin story, is a clearly ersatz imitation of gender — an imitation so ersatz that just by existing it makes the superheroine imitations its based on all look more than a little ridiculous. IF the truth of gender is artificiality, then this is surely as artificial and therefore as true, as gender comes.

But, of course, most critics of whatever gender and sexual orientation who have seen this haven’t enthused about its subversive liberation from the hierarchical hold of gender essentialism. Rather, folks have mostly pointed out that it’s incompetent sexist nonsense, which manages to look less like a real, actual human type person than Courbet’s severed torso.

For the Catwoman cover, then, a reference to origins — to real gendered bodies — is used as a check on an image that (semi-) deliberately indulges in artificial imitation. Here and (much) more competently in Courbet, the erasure of the origin leads not to a polymorphous free play of artificial gender possibilities outside of the restrictive hierarchy, but simply to a gendered imagining that hermetically, and gleefully, excludes actual women.

If everything’s imitation, if there is no real gender, then gender will simply be made and remade by whoever has the power — which is going to be the same people who always have the power. How do you say, “a cunt is not a woman,” if you’re not allowed to define “woman”? If there is no reality, on what basis can you criticize images for sexist distortions of it? Having to keep it real can certainly be oppressive…but, at least sometimes, it’s preferable to being someone else’s decapitated or spineless image.
 
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The title of this post is a crib from DCWKA. That Catwoman cover (which it seems cruel to attribute, but what the hey) was drawn by Guillem March.