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BUTLER AND A POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE
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- BUTLER AND FEMINISM
BUTLER AND A POLITICS OF PERFORMANCEButler argues that from a realization that gender is performance, and not emanating from a natural, fixed, stable source, we can challenge dominant and hegemonic norms about how gender should be enacted. The result is a proliferation of gender performances, much like the gay pride parade. Nussbaum explains Butler's idea of resistance: "by carrying out these performances in a slightly different manner, a parodic manner, we can perhaps unmake them just a little."23 Alternative gender performances open up a space to reconceptualize dominant categories and provide more freedom for identity. Butler notes that this type of resistance is a difficult way to establish a basis for political action. She writes, "it seems difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a way to conceptualize the scale and systemic character of women's oppression from a theoretical position which takes constituting acts to be its point of departure. Although individual acts do work to maintain and reproduce systems of oppression, and, indeed, any theory of personal political responsibility presupposes such a view, it doesn't follow that oppression is a sole consequence of such acts." The relationship between acts of gender constitution and oppression is more difficult to describe than simple cause and effect. She writes that this relationship is neither "unilateral nor unmediated." The only possibility for resistance is to transform "hegemonic social conditions rather than the individual acts that are spawned by those conditions." Despite this warning, Butler sees potential for resistance in performative acts. Deriving inspiration from the feminist slogan, "the personal is political," Butler claims that the set of acts that constitute gender are "shared experience and 'collective action.'" These acts do not belong just to individuals, rather, they are public acts that make sense in cultural and social contexts. Butler doesn't want to say that individuals have role, "Surely, there are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender, but that one does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions, is clearly not a fully individual matter." 24 Butler wants to say that gender is neither an individual choice nor is it fully "inscribed" on an individual by society, culture, and history. She explains that "actors are always already on the stage, within the terms of the performance." Butler calls attention to the point at which the analogy between the theatre and gendered performances breaks down. In the theatre, we do not believe that the performances are meant to represent reality. But in our daily lives, those performances constitute our realities. She describes, "the sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence." This experience, in which "the act is not contrasted with the real, but constitute a reality that is in some sense new, a modality of gender that cannot readily be assimilated into the pre-existing categories that regulate gender reality" presents an opportunity to restructure the limits of possibility for gendered performance. These experiences, which most often leave people feeling unsettled (but isn't "she" really a "he"?) call into question whether or not a "reality" of gender exists. More than just calling into question the reality of gender, the transvestite "challenges, at least implicitly, the distinction between appearance and reality that structures a good deal of popular thinking about gender identity." Gender is "real only to the extent that it is performed."25 In addition to this "critical genealogy of gender," a "politics of performative gender acts" is imperative. This politics "both redescribes existing gender identities and offers a prescriptive view about the kind of gender reality there ought to be." The drag queen effectively redescribes an existing feminine gender identity and challenges the association with biological sex. She/He should be able to demonstrate the complexity of gender free from punitive consequences.26 Butler writes, "The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction." By recognizing that genders are "neither true nor false" we give license to an infinite configuration of gendered performances, not only in gay pride parades, but in everyday life. 27 BUTLER AND FEMINISMButler explains the applicability of her theory of gender to feminists: "From a feminist point of view, one might try to reconceive the gendered body as the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic." A vision of feminist politics that arises from Butler's theory would be starkly different from mainstream feminist organizing in the United States today. Butler writes "There are thus acts which are done in the name of women, and then there are acts in and of themselves, apart from any instrumental consequence, that challenge the category of women itself." Acts done in the name of women would be the majority of feminist political projects, for example, attempts to integrate women into previously male dominated fields, attempts to set aside specific places for women, such as "women-only" Women's Studies courses, or women's shelters, or attempts to restructure government and society to accommodate women's concerns, such as child-rearing, maternity leave, and education. Butler is critical of this sort of feminist political action. She writes, "one ought to consider the futility of a political program which seeks radically to transform the social situation of women without first determining whether the category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be a woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed situation." Butler criticizes feminism for an unquestioned acceptance of the stable category of "women." The idea of "women" as a category is dependent on social, historical, and cultural contexts. The idea of a "universal woman" who is the subject of feminist discourse, obscures differences between women and "provides a false ontological promise of eventual political solidarity." Ontology is a theory of being, what it means to exist. There is no objective existence as a "woman." Every woman's experience is mediated by her race, class, age, gender, nationality, and a myriad of factors too numerous to list. Every woman's experience does not fit the mold of oppression feminism seeks to combat.28 The binary gender system that feminism perpetuates continues to channel people into the categories of "men" and "women," closing down options for subversive, alternative gendered performances. A politics of gendered performances, however, can break down conceptions of femininity that tie women to domestic work and keep men from child-rearing. It destroy the notion that men need to be masculine and women need to be feminine in order to achieve normalcy, thus increasing the political, social, and cultural potentials for every individual. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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