Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Subversive Bodily Acts – Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions & From Interiority to Gender Performatives

Reading Postscripts

(1) Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Subversive Bodily Acts – Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions & From Interiority to Gender Performatives

The problem:

Generally, Butler in her Gender Trouble wants to render nugatory any concept of a “pre-discursive” passive body – the assumption of a metaphysical simple substance – that presupposes the acquisition of its “sexed significance” (Butler GT pp. 164) or that awaits some cultural inscription onto it. She wants to blur or in a stronger sense expunge Cartesian-like dualisms of body/mind; subject/object. It is problematic for her that we preclude a stable “body” prior to inscription and that like for Kafka, Foucault or even Nietzsche, the historicity and (or of) cultural values that are inscribed on this bodily medium transvaluate (stronger sense: destroy) the body into a sublimated domain of values (Butler GT pp. 166). Is there a materiality prior to significations and forms?

The argument:

1) Gendered body is a performative: it has no ontological status part from the very acts that constitute its reality.

Implications

a) The idea that the body has an “interior soul” (an interiority; inner core) within the body – a structuring inner space “ready-to-be” signified is itself is a product of discourse, public and social regulation. The ontology of the body as signifying a lack or in other words, having an inner space “ready-to-be” filled is constructed and fabricated.

This is our idealized “coherent body” whose coherence is a fabrication, construction via the very performative enactments (acts, words, gestures, desires). These enactments signify our that very interior absence that needs to be filled. Thus, corporeality of signs, discursive means etc. produces this idealized body: “[the body is] an effect of a corporeal signification… an illusion of an interior organizing gender core.”

2) This Gendered body with a fabricated interiority is an effect or function of a public social discourse. “An illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” Hence, gendered body is a discursive product-object produced to be regulated or as an object of regulation.

3) But this phantasmic interior space is so successfully displaced from our view. It is displaced onto a psychological core (localized within our “selves”). In more layman terms, we think our desires, gestures and acts are innately psychological – i.e. that we naturally have this “natural core substantial self” that needs filling to be coherent and realized.

Implications:

As a corollary then, A) subjects will be amnesiac towards the very discursive acts of political regulations and disciplinary practices that produce these phantasmic empty shells that needs to be gendered into realization. B) Inner truth of gender is a fabrication that is C) instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies. If B) and C) then, D) Neither hetero- genders are true. They are all effects of discourses. They are constructs.

4) On the Drag: the Transvestite that fully subverts and mock (parody) this whole illusive model of appearances.

What the drag does?

The drag is a transvestite say a man wearing dressing women’s clothes. He is essentially a double subversion which blatantly declares that all appearances that we see or think true are illusive. Because a) The transvestite’s (in a woman’s dress) has an ‘outside’ appearance that is feminine but under his dressing, his ‘inside,’ his body is masculine. Also, b) his body is masculine but his inside is feminine. Both are antinomies that are true but contradict one another and hence, have an subversive effect i.e. shows that all forms of “gender significations;” “meanings accorded to gender (Butler GT pp. 175) are itself a prescriptive construction i.e. products i.e. effects of discourses of truth and falsity (Butler GT pp. 174). Thus, Butler thinks that this enlightening insight to the ontology of primary significations can result in a radical reframing of “original meanings” accorded to Gender and that “gender experiences might be reframed” as well (Butler GT pp. 175).

What can we see from the drag? Why is the drag an effective subversion?

The drag creates an “unified picture of a woman” that is falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence… [The drag] reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as well as its contingency”

The drag is essentially a distinction between the a) anatomy of the performer and b) the gender that is being performed.

But Butler says that what is really going on is not the two dimensions i.e. a) and b) but actually “three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: a1) anatomical sex, a2) gender identity, and a3) gender performance.” So there is a dissonance between “anatomical sex and gender identity” and “gender identity and performance.” One’s anatomical sex is not instantly coequal with one’s gender identity and one’s gender identity is not instantly coequal with one’s gender performance. The drag has the anatomy of a man with a penis and a muscular body, but he is does not behave like a “man” should. He does not (stronger sense: fails to) identify with his gender identity) and performatively, acts and performs the identity of the woman. Hence, the drag dramatizes this whole “naturalized coherent” story of “XX sex = XX gender identity” story by showing that all “natural originals” is contingent on the performative performance: the very act. The drag is a parody of the very notion of an original core (Butler GT pp. 175).

5) Butler then draws a further conclusion that the “gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.”

a) Drags are imitations (albeit failed imitations) of the “original woman.” Everyone laughs at them… those transvestites! But their very failure of imitating shows that the original identity of man or woman itself needs to be constantly re-enacted and performed (it is a performative). If so, it shows that the original itself is a performative construction. If it is a construction that always have to be re-enacted and hence is always a “to be” instead of a stable “is,” then Butler argues that the original itself is a myth. It is has no origins (we cannot seek it by retracing its historicity or causality) but it is sustained by imitating itself i.e. it’s very own performative production here and now.

6) Thus, there can be no “original identification” i.e. a determining cause of the original (for there is not even an original or pre-discursive).

If so, then, a Butler sense or understanding of gender-identity must be that of a personal/cultural history of received meanings that imitates itself to create that illusion of a substantially and really existing “gender identity.” All originals are thus copies and hence, can evoke laughter… for there is no original, the original is a copy that always have to copy to be materialized into reality and if so, then the original ideal because it is a nonexistent ideal is something that no one can embody but only delude themselves to embodying. “Laughter emerges in the realization that all along, the original was derived.” (GT pp. 177)

A Butler conception of the “body” is hence not as a being but a variable boundary whose surface or permeability is always politically regulated. The body is a product of regulations within a cultural matrix of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. It creates the whole “need-to-be-filled” interiority.

“Gender” is then a repeated strategy constantly having to repeat, constantly under the duress of needing to perform to “survive” within this compulsory system. “Gender,” the fiction is sustained by the “tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions (Butler GT pp. 178).” But this whole collective collusion, fiction, performative is obscured by the very appearance of credibility of the productions and punitive mechanisms. These compel our belief in the necessity and naturalness (Butler GT pp. 188) Gender is thus a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.

Critique of Butler

Butler wants to efface original ideals and causal determinism so as to make “gender” a performative – a here and now effect which is contingent on being performed, repeated, imitated (imitating its own productive effects; performative). As Butler says:

“The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and hence must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.” (Butler GT pp. 179)

“…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 actors themselves come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief…” (Butler GT pp. 179)

“If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a “ground” will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed a gendered conventionalization of time. The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ground.” (Butler GT pp. 179)

I will not mount into a full-scale critique of Butler but will only raise several points and questions for my own future development of contentions from a Kantian perspective.

a) Butler wants to uproot the notion of a “spatial metaphor of ground;” “an abiding gendered self.” Hence, Butler claims that there is no ground (no substance; pre-discursive self; no “abiding self”). There is only a synchronic performative repetition in this or that temporality right here and now. Gender must be seen as a “stylized configuration of time” constructed through its very performative in a cultural-political-social matrix of regulations i.e. gender as a “constituted social temporality.”

Yet, from the Kantian perspective, we are not postulating that there is a simple abiding substance. To that, we don’t know and perhaps cannot know. But we can be sure that there is always an apperceptive “I think” that apprehends and synthesizes all our sensible empirical experiences so as to form coherence and order in the world. In this respect then, if it is in the very nature of our faculties to function this way, i.e. for the subject to give order and coherence to the world, then to what extent can Butler’s project to decenter the subject as a giver of coherence succeed? The project to make Gender be seen as something contingent, groundless (wholly exteriorized to the social-political) i.e. to essentially take the question out of the subject/object dichotomy seems to fail i.e. to not seek recourse to an “I” that preexists signification cannot hold. For if there is no “I think” no unifying mechanism, there will not be any order or coherence in ourselves and hence also, the world as we give order to the world. How then can Butler account for coherence and order without the I? i.e. or the very fact that there is cumulative experiences (Kant: apprehension) happening that gives coherence and continuity in our experience (and as a result of which gives us a sense of coherent identity)? Will she be saying or is she saying that all the exterior floating public discourses, acts etc. gives us our sense of order and coherence? That everything is prescribed/inscribed onto us as the body and self emerges through regulations and practices? Is that a tenable claim to make? That there is some sense of causal order is something I think even Butler cannot refute. Anyone who tries to deny that we at least apparently observe some form of causal order (regardless of whether there actually is or not is another matter) is delusional. It seems to me somehow that Butler like Foucault is letting things spin around in the exteriority… that I can’t really put my finger on at this point in time…

Butler says “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. (Butler GT pp. 185)”

She argues that the “signifying I only appears through a signifying practice (in the exteriority) that seeks to conceal its own workings and to naturalize its effects. (Butler GT pp. 184)” She also says that “to understand identity as a practice and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse… (Butler GT pp. 184)”

But somehow to me, I don’t know if this is going to be a logical or sensible or facile argument… the question will always be: Who then creates this rule bound discourse? Who creates these regulations but the creative man? The “I” that Butler and Foucault seems to all want to reject. They all seem to not realize that most of our knowledge begins with empirical experience of the world but not all of it.