Bodies that matter

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Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex". New York:Routledge.

Introduction

BIG QUESTION: how does gender performativity relate to materiality of the body?

Sex is

"Sex" not only functions as a norm

but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs
productive power (1)
An "ideal" construct, "forcibly materializes through time" (1)
One of the norms by which one becomes viable
That which qualifies a body for life within the "domain of cultural intelligibility" (2)

Materiality rethought

Materiality rethought "as power's most productive effect" (2)

5 ideas "at stake"

Bodies as effect of power, indissociable from the regulatory norms governing materialization, signification of material effects
Performativity as "that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains"
Sex not a given but a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies
Subject formed by virtue of having gone through the process of assuming a sex
Identification constrained by "heterosexual imperative", some identifications enabled, others closed/disavowed (3)

From construction to materialization

Weakness of some "construction" thinking (4)

Implication that there is an agency acting upon a nature
That the natural is passive and outside of the social
Nature / social necessarily "counterparts"

Lots of problems with various formulations of nature/sex as prior to social/gender

Hierarchy
Replacing
Sex as passive, inscribed upon
Gender as desubstantive (amaterial)

Construction has no subjectivity

Construction is not an activity but an act
It cannot be a subject that acts upon
- Because subjectivity is, in part, among its effects (9)

"Construction ... is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration." (10)

Conceding a material sex

To concede unconstructed sex characteristics is to materialize the sexed body
- Concession to differences such as genitalia, chromosomes, hormones (11)

Semiotics of sex

If the concession is made and some characteristics are thought unconstructed
- Then they must also be signified such that they can be referred to
Is sex, then, the result of a signification process?
- "Marking off", "delimiting", "selectivity"
Certain categories must be excluded in order to make coherence of a sexed semiotics

Performativity as citationality

Performativity is not an act in isolation
It is a recurring reiteration of regulatory norms (12)
Power is performed through the "citation" of pre-existing norming authoritative systems (e.g. "let there be light!" requires a subject and a language through which to speak a will.)

Bodily ego

"The ideal that is mirrored depends on that very mirroring to be sustained as an ideal." (14)

"Spatial contour"
Formed within a social, cultural system
Historically bound, revisable
Eliminates certain bodies as it marks others (14)

Agency in resistance

Agency in performing "sex" is limited to the available regulatory norms
Agency is "immanent to power" and not an external opposition to it (15)
There cannot be a "choosing subject" (the "mask" metaphor)

4. Gender is burning

"Where the uniformity of the subject is expected ... there might be produced the refusal of the law in the form of the parodic inhabiting of confirmity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command..." (122)

Resistant relationship to the terms effected by power

Just because "sex"/"race"/"gender" are instruments, effects of "sexism"/"racism"/"heterosexism"

Does NOT mean that we shouldn't ever use them
Or that they always reinforce the violence of those regulating regimes (123)

Instead, they ought to be repeated in "directions that reverse and displace" those systems from which they originate

At the risk of complicity
Repetition need not be a recycling, revisiting
But can be an "affirmative response"
Agency to repeat is paradoxically "derived from the impossibility of choice" (124)

Certain repetitions of hegemonic terms fail to recreate the hegemonic power

Failure is a possibility
Possibility to resignify

Paris is burning

Big questions:

Is parodying the dominant norms enough to displace them? (124)
- No "necessary" relation between drag and subversion (of gender norms)
- May also call forth and reconsolidate hyperbolic hetero norms
- What kinds of subversion are sought here?
- Is the performance of apparent heteronormativity problematic in and of itself?
  - Is this a kind of "false consciousness" or "buying in"?

Butler "hesitant to call [high het] subversive"

Seems to be thinking very rigidly of the text and its preferred readings
What of the reader? What of subversive reading?

Heterosexual privilege

Naturalizes itself (through science, etc)
Renders itself original and (therefore) the norm (126)

Is drag misogynist?

Asserted by bell hooks in a review of Paris is burning
To identify with a gender is to identify with its social construction and the matrix of power that effects it (126)
- Drag is not dragged out woman but feminity
Butler says that this suggests some feminists placing themselves at the center of gay men's lives
- "reverse colonization"
- Assumption that male homosexuality is a displacement, appropriation of women
- Also norms heterosexual desire
- Unless there is love, desire that is not borne of rejection

Realness

A standard used to judge any given performance within the established categories (129)
Expanded usage of "realness" in contemporary slang?
"The body performing and the ideal performed appear indistinguishable" (129)

Within Paris

Realness, real womanness, is an escape
- From poverty, racism, homophobia
For others, only a game to be played in the balls (130)

"The subject is the incoherent and mobilized imbrication of identifications; it is constituted in and through the interability of its performance, a repetition which works at once to legitimate and delegitimate the realness norms by which it is produced." (130)

Power

In and as discourse
In and as performance
Agency that "repeats in order to remake - and sometimes succeeds." (137)

Reading

Take down
Exposure
Undoing
Failure to accurately mimic the norm (129)

Misapprehension of power in the drag ball

When pursuit of a hegemonic realness involves drag of black women,
- The subject misreads the relations and hierarchies of power in which women of color exist
The presumed privilege: to attract a man and be protected by him (130)
- Disconnect from lived experience of many black women
Venus' denaturalization of gender and racial norms is in pursuit of a black woman ideal
- She imagines finding a man and a white picket fence; this itself a denaturalization of heterosexual reality

Privilege operating at the level of filmmaker in Paris

"The camera thus trades on the masculine privilege of the disembodied gaze, the gaze that has the power to produce bodies, but which is itself no body." (137)

As alleged by hooks and explored by Butler,

Livingstone (white, lesbian) wields the camera like a phallic wand, able to transform men into women and confer bother "legendary" status, fame, and feminity (135)
"Visual pacificiation/feminization of black and Latino men, subjects by whom white women are imagined to be socially endangered?" (136)

To what extent is the film shaped not only by whiteness

But lesbian desire?

Kinship

Houses as nurturing communities of caring outside of the conventional heterosexual family arrangement
- "none of us who are outside of heterosexualy "family" are absolute outsiders to the film" (137)

Symbolic reiterations

How do the static workings of the symbolic order becoming vulnerable to subversive repetition and resignification?

8. Critically Queer

BIG QUESTION: Why is queer available for reclamation when similar racial slurs remain painful?

Continuous Nietzschean "sign-chain": "ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion" (Nietzsche as quoted on 224)
Is this optimistic? "Hopeful" from the vantage of privilege, power?
Convergent force of (power + discourse) = accumulated effect of usage that constrains and enables their reworking

Performative power

Performative acts, forms of authoritative speech

Statements that perform a certain action and exercise a binding power (225)
Discourse: power to produce that which it names (225)

Citational discourse (225)

Calling forth the authoritative power of history
Yet in this reiteration, it is reconstructed in a new historical, cultural moment/context
"Invocation of convention" (225)

Derrida on citation:

"Could a performative succeed if it were not identifiable in some way as a 'citation'?" (226)

Social history, context precedes subject formation

"I" in speech, precedes the naming and use of "I" in my subjectivity
My names precede and exceed me but I need them to speak (226)

Queer trouble

The power of "queer"

Repeated invocation: accusation, pathologization, insult, shame (226)

Political use of "queer" (226-7)

To (re)claim a name and attempt to control its meaning and circulation
Impossible to sustain in time, scale
Exclusively available to certain categories. Who is left out?
How is it bound up or dismissive of historical trajectory?

Can "queer" be used politically without losing the historicity? Reducing exclusivity?

Democratic contestation of a term rubs up against a political grip on (even a resistant) meaning (229)
"Queerness" (and related terms) effect some of the structures they are politicized to resist
Safeguarding "queer": note it's divergent uses among younger gay/lesbian people, as well as radical lesbians, and even bi/straight identified people seeking affinity with a queer politics (230)

"Fate of the self-identical subject" (230)

There is no subject locus, point of intersection for relations
Rather, the subject is constituted wholly of those relations
Spivak talks about the "necessary error" of identity
- Necessary for kinship, affiliation, sense-making
- Error because it implies totalization, self-identification

Gender performativity and drag

Gender is not clothes, is not drag

(Though drag may be an example of performativity)
Gender is "compulsory practice", "forcible production" (231)
Addressee of gender "assignment" is never able to fully inhabit the gender ideal

Drag is not subversive unproblematically

Reflects and denaturalizes heterocentricity
But does not necessarily challenge or call them into question
Heterosexuality can "augument its hegemony" when parodies "reidealize" the norms (231)

Necessity of gender performance

From the first transitory naming ("It's a girl"), femininity is corporeally enacted
To remain a subject (a "one") requires the persistent attempt to perform and embody the norm (232)
- Without gender performance, the "one" is negated

Theatrical discourse

For a person who has been interpellated by "queer"
To cite the term in contest of homophobia is to "mime and render hyperbolic" (232)
Theatricality is not opposed to politics, evidenced by "increasing" theatricality of political rage
- "Theatrical rage" a la "die-ins" and "kiss-ins" (233)

Melancholia and the limits of performance

Gender is neither "inside" or "outside" but rather

Play between public presentation (dress, speech) and interal self-knowing
Regulated by heterosexism but not "fully reducible to them" (234)

Performativity (reiteration, on-going) cannot be reduced to performance (an act)

Performance reveals tactically, agentially
As well it conceals, makes opaque

"Heterosexual melanchoia"

In drag, the masculine performer refuses to mourn the loss of masculine love
- Likewise the fem/fem
The "strictly straight man" represents the gay male melancholic, refusing to mourn the loss of possibility (235)
Homosexual contact, within the heterosexist regime, is not rejected but actually proscribed, impossible (235)
- Thus they cannot be openly grieved
What is perceived as normed gender may be a performance of the disavowed love
- The straight man performs the masculinity that is impossible to know as partner? (236)

Gendered and sexual performativity

Norms are ineffectual, requiring repeition, reassertion

To subvert through resignification is to exploit this weakness
Drag may not oppose heterosexuality but it allegorizes or reflects it in hyperbole (237)

Sexuality is policed via gender normativity

To perform homosexual acts is to risk gender stability
A man having gay sex accused of being feminine or less of man (238)
Yet nothing about sex means it should be privileged over gender
Is there a sex practice that obscures dyadic gender distinction?
- If so, is it necessarily "fetishistic"? (238)

Gender and sexuality are not structurally related (as has been previously asserted, m:dom, f:sub)

But to disjoin them should not disavow their "dynamic" interrelationship (239)
Helpful to think in terms of identification and desire
Academic language languishes behind (queer) colloquialisms for describing the myriad possibilities within gender identification and sexual desire (240)

Durable questions

Power of opposition that is not "pure" but works with and through resources/signs/artifacts of hegemony (241)
How to know what might qualify as an affirmative resignification?
How to run the risk of reinstalling the abject at the site of its opposition?
How will we know the difference between the power we promote and the power we oppose?

"The hope of ever fully recognizing oneself in the terms by which one signifies is sure to be disappointed" (242)

"Speaking is always the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself" (242)