Gender Performativity

In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988) Butler argued that gender is not a static identity or role but a set of acts that can evolve over time. If gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, the appearance of substance is precisely that: a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts through time rather than a seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation lie in a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style. Butler was also clear that strict punishments await those who contest the script by performing out of turn. The essay draws heavily on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “The Body in its Sexual Being”, and cites Gayle Rubin and Butler’s own “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex” (1986).

In Gender Trouble (1990) Butler argued that feminism had erred in making “women” a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics, and challenged the usual distinction in which sex is biological and gender constructed. The apparent existence of sex prior to culture is itself an effect of the functioning of gender; the construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender, and perhaps was always already gender. Gender is not something one is but something one does, a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. Borrowing Nietzsche’s “no doer behind the deed”, Butler held that there is no performer behind the performance, and proposed drag as a practice that unsettles the notion of an original gender.

The word performativity comes from the philosophy of language. In How to Do Things with Words J. L. Austin called utterances in which saying something is doing something, like the “I do” of a wedding, performative utterances. Jacques Derrida, in “Signature, Event, Context”, stressed the citationality or iterability of every sign, which can be cited and so break with any given context and engender new ones, and Butler took up this citational dimension. Defining performativity as “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”, Butler gave Austin a Foucauldian reading, a view also influenced by Louis Althusser.

The performativity of Gender Trouble was often read as choosing a gender the way one chooses clothes. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993) Butler sought to clear up readings that see the enactment of sex and gender as a daily choice. Performativity cannot be understood outside a process of iterability, a regularised and constrained repetition of norms, and this repetition is not performed by a subject but is what enables a subject. It is a ritualised production, reiterated under the force of prohibition and taboo and the threat of ostracism and even death, yet not determined fully in advance. In Undoing Gender (2004) Butler added that gender being performed without one being conscious of it does not make it automatic or mechanical.

Gender performativity became one of the foundations of queer theory, and Susan Stryker judged that it became central to the self-understanding of many transgender people. Criticism was plentiful: Susan Bordo argued that Butler reduces gender to language and loses the body, and Martha Nussbaum that Butler misreads Austin’s idea of performative utterance and neglects the material reality of gender oppression. Butler’s exchange with Nancy Fraser became famous as well.