Gender and Society Summer Session 2014Allen Jeffrey Gurfel

Final Paper

In these pages I will discuss several readings from the semester. I will use the text I

prepared on my second presentation on Judith Butler. I will also consider some of

the readings on masculinity and sexuality. In a third section, I will make some

observations I think are interesting about gender.

Judith Butler

I think the smartest thing to do first then is to say what performativity means.

 

The term comes from J.L. Austin’s notion, in the philosophy of language, of a

performative utterance. A performative utterance is a speech act which speaks a

reality into existence. For example, in uttering the words “I do”, under certain

conditions, the speaker is not merely describing something as in an utterance such

as “the black cat crossed the street.” Rather, the speaker is doing something—in this

case, by uttering “I do”, he or she is entering into marriage. Other examples include

the following utterances: “I declare war” when spoken under certain conditions, for

example when the speaker is vested with the power to make such a declaration, or

“I promise”, in which case the utterance brings about the existence of the promise.

 

 

But Austin realized that the distinction between performative utterances and other

utterances isn’t so clear. He showed, in fact, that all utterances perform some sort of

action, and so abandoned the concept, replacing it with a new conception of speech

acts: locution, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary effect. Locution is merely the

words spoken. Illocutionary force refers to the speaker’s intention in speaking those

words. Perlocutionary effect is the effect the speaker has on the listener by speaking

those words.

 

So performativity is the power of speech and gesture to create states of affairs, such

as the state of affairs in which person A is obligated, by his word, to person B to

perform or not perform some promised action. More relevantly to our topic,

performativity also refers to the broad power of speech and language to construct

and perform an identity.

 

Butler describes it as follows: performativity is “that reiterative power of discourse

to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.”

 

As we saw, Austin’s straightforward performative utterances require that certain

conditions be met. For example, the mere utterance of the phrase “I pronounce you

husband and wife” can fail when spoken by a raving lunatic to his pet hamsters. So

just note that performative utterance only succeeds as authorative speech when it is

spoken from a prescribed social position vested with the relevant power. In this

case, the relevant power might be ordination by the church to which the spouses

belong, or empowerment by the state to create the legal marriage contract.

 

For Butler, the root of authoritative speech is social convention and repetition. To

explain how power and language rely on repetition and citation I want to quote

from her article ‘Critically Queer’.

 

“Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for

instance, are statements which, in uttering, also perform a certain action and

exercise a binding power. Implicated in a network of authorization and punishment,

performatives tend to include legal sentences, baptisms, inaugurations, declarations

of ownership, statements that not only perform an action, but confer a binding

power on the action performed. The power of discourse to produce that which it

names is thus essentially linked with the question of performativity. The

performative is thus one domain in which power acts as discourse.

 

Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only a

reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an act,

singular and deliberative, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or

mimes the discursive gestures of power.”

 

This passage essentially restates what I said about performativity above. The last

few sentences however gesture in a possibly confusing new direction. Butler

suggests that power doesn’t come from the will of any singular speaker, and it isn’t

solely in individual performative acts taken alone. 

 

The following passage illustrates how performativity, citation, and repetition are

tied up and related to power.

 

Picking up where I left off:

 

“This is less an act, singular and deliberative, than a nexus of power and discourse

that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power. Hence, the judge who

authorizes and installs the situation he names invariably cites the law that he

applies, and it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or

conferring power. And though it may appear that the binding power of his words is

derived from the force of his will, the opposite is more true: it is through the citation

of the law that the figure of the judge’s will is produced and that the priority of

textual authority is established. Indeed, it is through the invocation of convention

that the speech act of the judge derives its binding power; that binding power is to

be found neither in the subject of the judge or in his will, but in the citational legacy

by which a contemporary “act” emerges in the context of a chain of binding

conventions.”

 

The judge example is clear but I want to emphasize that power isn’t just the coercive

power of the state. As we noted, performativity, the power of speech productive

action and identity, is a feature of just about all speech. We also noted that for Butler

speech’s authoritativeness resides in the force of social norms as much as in law. For

this reason, I want to offer another example of repetition and power in action, one

that won’t allow you to equate power solely with state power.  

 

“The term “queer” emerges as an interpellation that raises the question of the status

of force and opposition, of stability and variability, within performativity.” That

sentence is a little confusing, but let me go on. “The term “queer” has operated as

one linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names

or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation. “Queer”

derives its force precisely through the repeated invocation by which it has become

linked to accusation, pathologization, and insult. The interpellation echoes past

interpellations, and binds the speakers, as if they spoke in unison across time. In this

sense, it is always an imaginary chorus that taunts “queer!”

 

So in this passage we see how a more subtle form of power is deployed, in the form

of accusation and shaming. We also see talk about “interpellation.” Interpellation is a

process by which subjects are hailed into being through discourse and social

interaction. This is view of subject formation is important to understand. To that

end, it is important to remember that for Butler, human beings are born into a

symbolic order, a historically contingent society with historically specific norms and

conventions, and into language. She writes, “the act that one does, the act that one

performs is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene.”

It is equally important to remember that Butler, and post-structuralists generally,

does not subscribe to an essential subject. The subject is, instead, spoken into being

by being addressed and by assuming a certain position, by becoming situated in a

certain spot drawn by society. As we saw in the example with the word “queer”

above, not all spots are created equal. Some come with praise, others with sanction.

Two fundamental spots are the gender categories of man and woman. The subject is

addressed as “he” or “she”, and so the prerequisite and constitutional moment of the

subject in society is interpellation as either one or the other—there isn’t a third

pronoun, there’s “it”, but “it” is not used of persons. We can see how fundamental

this gendered binary is by observing how natural it appears. He or she is not

something that is predicated of not-yet-sexed or not-yet-gendered subjects. Rather,

he or she, and no third option, is given as the subject of predication.

 

Let us return to the claim that there is no essential subject and see what this means

for gender. This means, of course, that we do not have essential identities such as

man or woman. Rather, what we call masculinity and femininity are performed

through multiple citational and reiterative performative acts across time and by

multiple people. The more signs of masculinity and femininity are performed and

reiterated the greater their power to appear as natural. The ubiquity of these

performances suggests that they emanate from some fundamental psychical

interiority, some sort of stable male or female subject, but, for Butler, this is a sort of

illusion. These reiterations of performances of gender begin to layer atop one

another like sediment, gaining power with every citation, across time and space and

take on the appearance of a natural, solid, stable object—namely, gender, whether

man or woman—with which the subject identifies. These constructed identities,

these positioned subjects within the social, are policed by power, and in this way are

sustained and reproduced. Gender is normative.

 

So, for Butler, in her own words, “Gender is an impersonation . . . becoming

gendered involves impersonating an ideal that nobody actually inhabits.” Gender is

“a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . .[so that] 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” as if there is a

stable, essential identity named by “man” and “woman.”

Masculinity and Sexuality

In Gender and Power Bob Connell describes “hegemonic masculinity.” It is a vision

of masculinity almost silently assimilated into the most natural-seeming activities of

everyday life. That is to say, its hegemonic position is not assumed (solely) by

blatant force, though such force may play a role. It stands in dominating relation not

only to femininity but to other forms of masculinity.

I’d like to say that Connell is right to acknowledge other forms of masculinity, and I

wish we’d focused more on those other forms. We certainly focused on masculinity.

In Messner’s pieces, he talks about how boys become socialized to perform

masculinity in the context of sporting institutions. In the first reading, he traces how

athletics was a zone where a certain non-threatening closeness to other males was

possible, how boys were made boys, taught the values of manhood and success and

competition. In the second reading, he further emphasizes how heterosexuality is a

doing. It requires the repression of socially undesirable desires and traits and the

explicit performance and reproduction of others.

These two authors are congruent with Butler’s notion of gender. We see hegemonic

masculinity as a specter that does not feed on blatant, obvious power but is

sustained by the small, unquestioned details. Of course, while an single instance of

an unquestioned utterance might be called small, in repetition and reiteration these

symbols gain tremendous force and the ability to shape our conceptual horizons—

recall from above, a whole “chorus chants ‘queer’.” Messner illustrates this. It is not

enough to not be feminine, one must be obviously masculine.

Random observations

Here’s a question: Is it possible to reject performing gender? Can we be non-

gendered or perform non-genderedness?

I think there is at least one very obvious distinction that has to be made. There are

(at least) two dimensions that are relevant here. The first is the subjective

experience of gender—how a subject personally identifies. The second is the

intersubjective reading of gender—how most members of the subject’s society will

interpret his existence, as woman or man (or “it”). The situation in which a trans-

person identifies as one gender but society persists in identifying him as the other

illustrates this distinction.

I’m inclined to ignore the subjective element here, since I’m asking about

performance. I’m also inclined to say that it would be very difficult to successfully

perform no gender. Man/woman is a binary and almost all traits are filed with

relative clarity under one or the other camp. What then of the person who tallies

evenly on both sides? I think one of two things are possible. First, rather than

producing a reading as “without gender” or “no gender” (which differentially

amounts to a third gender, negatively defined in one sense but at the same time

necessarily claiming territory presently taken by man/woman or

inventing/discovering new territory, if such a thing is possible) it will produce mere

confusion. Second, it might be the case that this perfect-center performance of

gender will be read as feminine—the logic is that masculinity does not tolerate

ambiguity.

It isn’t that simple. There’s also the fact of knowledge of bodies. I’m told by trans

friends that it is frequent that people experience slip ups in their gender pronoun

usage when referring to transpeople only after they discover that the person is

trans, i.e. has certain anatomical features. This is a totally unconscious slip up.

Gendering functions out of the sight of consciousness.

This is a depressing take though. Are we condemned to perform one or the other

gender? Not necessarily. The key, I think, is repetition and meaning. When a certain

performance is repeated and paired with certain meanings it eventually becomes a

thing. The performance no longer creates confusion. It has told you what it means,

its signs and symbols are in circulation, it is legible. The question is then whether its

legible as gender. Not necessarily.

I think an essential element for any grassroots attempt at installing a genuine third

gender into social reality is language. It may be the essential element. We are

interpellated universally, without exception, from day one, as either “he” or “she.”

Even if we come to reject the genders of man or woman and seek to perform

something other, to the extent that we must continually be interpellated by a

gendered pronoun this will work against any interpretation of our desired third-

gendered performance as gender, as opposed to some other identity performance.