Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an analysis (part 1)

It turns out that anyone wanting to read what Judith Butler actually has to say needs only go as far as Google, because at least some of her essays are online. I just tried it, and one result that popped up was her “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” (You need a PDF reader to open that.) I suppose that’s as good a place to start as any.

Butler is infamous for writing word salad and there’s a lot here to unpack, so I will do this in installments. That’ll make this all easier for you to read, too.

So first off, what does Butler mean by phenomenology, a word found in her essay title? News to me. I’ve probably seen the word before, but not often enough to have remembered it. So I just looked it up. You know how the “woke” crowd endlessly drone on about “lived experience”? Phenomenology is basically the study of lived experiences. It’s not so much interested in material reality as it is in how people experience that material reality.

Then we get into Butler’s first paragraph and I’m really feeling my lack of philosophy background. Speech acts? What the hell’s that? So I’m digging around on Google some more, and apparently a bunch of wits in the philosophy movement figured out, all on their own, that speech is about more than just stating facts. You can also — wait for it, I’m serious here — use speech to accomplish things! Oh my GOD. You’re KIDDING. So that seems to be what a speech act is. It’s speech intended to make a thing happen. Examples of types of speech so labeled: apology, promise, request, complaint, warning. Even sentences such as “Is there any salt?” when uttered in the course of eating dinner carry the implication that if there is any salt present, the speaker would like you to hand it to her, so that counts as a speech act too.

Honestly, though. Philosophers get paid for this?

Then we see, in that same paragraph, Butler talking about how “social agents” create social reality. This is nothing earth-shattering. Social reality basically boils down to relationships between members of a society and which stories about their society they all agree to believe in. Most of us may have never thought about this but when you spell it out, most people are probably honest enough to say, “Oh. Right. Of course.” She mentions in that final sentence that the “social agent” — I assume she means person living in a society — can sometimes be the target (object) of actions that create social reality and not just someone (subject) who commits those actions. Also a no-brainer.

Okay, right. That was the introduction. Harmless enough. But in the very next paragraph, she jumps straight into the gender nonsense.

I’m so tired of these people touting Simone de Beauvoir as some kind of proof that men can be women. If you are not familiar with this scam, they’re basing it on her famous opening sentence from a quote on page 267 of her book The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Brains better than mine have explained why Butler and her ilk have interpreted this wrongly: what Beauvoir meant was that society defines woman in a certain stereotypical way (women are submissive, women like pink, women are scared of spiders, women are inferior to men) and that girls have to learn to fit that set of stereotypes to be considered women. To me, it’s even simpler: No one is born a woman because women are adult human beings who were born with ovaries. Humans are babies when we’re born. Babies are by definition not adults. Female babies are born girls, not women. None of this leaves any space for a man to decide he’s a woman. The process of becoming a woman is not slapping on a Party City wig and an ill-fitting lingerie set and stilettos and then prancing around in public collecting “stunning and brave” compliments. It’s being a human being born with ovaries and then surviving childhood and puberty.

But of course Butler has to misinterpret Beauvoir. And then we have to look at the way Butler defines gender. I keep my own Substack in which, among other things, I talk about the gender-identity issue and I have explained the differences between sex, sex class, and gender. I will condense all that down here:

—

SEX: female, male (“intersex” people are also either female or male)

SEX CLASS: woman, man (“intersex” people are also either women or men)

GENDER: sexist stereotyping, or labeling things which have nothing to do with your sex as being things which determine or prove your sex. So: pink, submissiveness, and long hair are “feminine” while blue, assertiveness, and short hair are “masculine,” even though any human being of either sex can like pink, have any personality, and wear their hair any length they want with zero effect on their reproductive anatomy and role.

—

It is very clear to me, when I try to slog through anything Butler writes, that when she says gender she actually means sex class. You will find an example of what I mean in the first section of the body of her essay, “1. Sex/Gender: Feminist and Phenomenological Views,” in the final sentence of the first paragraph. Page three in the PDF file if you’re having trouble finding that. This bit here: “…her claim that ‘woman,’ and by extension, any gender…” On the basis of believing that woman is a gender, which it is not (and it isn’t a gender identity either), Butler builds her entire house of cards.

So when you substitute the term sex class for the term gender in what Butler writes, you begin to see how full of it she really is. Let me walk you through this a little bit. Let’s go back to the second paragraph in her introductory section, on page two of the PDF, after she first mentions Beauvoir.

…In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede [sic]; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time — an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and exactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

This should be upsetting all the liberal feminists who continually argue that sex work is work because women have agency. Butler is arguing here that a woman is not an adult female human being with agency who may choose to perform behaviors but instead, a woman is a matched set of behaviors and gestures and movements that work together to communicate a concept called “woman.” So much for women having agency. Concepts don’t have agency.

No. Wait. Hang on. Don’t get mad yet. There’s more.

This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of a constituted social temporality.

Remember that when Butler says gender she means sex class. To understand what she is saying in this bit, here are a few other definitions.

substantial: Being of substance; in other words, being materially or physically real
conception: The forming or devising of a plan or idea
constituted: made up; formed; composed
social temporality: the social organization of time

Butler is saying that in order to understand what a woman is, you have to stop thinking of women as physically real beings and start thinking about how to define us in terms of how society organizes the concept of time.

Don’t look at me. I’m just translating.

Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous,

Oh, us pesky women. How dare we not be uniform in appearance, thought, and deed.

then 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.

If women don’t all look and behave in exactly the same ways, then we’re not really women, we’re just pretending to be women but also, we believe our own pretense and the rest of society does too.

Ironically, if Butler meant gender when she says “gender,” her analysis here would be correct. Sexist stereotypes, unlike womanhood, are indeed a performance and society has to believe in that performance and go along with it in order for gender to exist in any meaningful sense. But Butler isn’t talking about gender. Not really. Butler is talking about sex class, and Butler is saying that sex class is not real. Butler is saying women aren’t real.

Next up: Butler mentions gender identity for the first time in this essay. I don’t know if they’ve standardized the definition of gender identity yet, but from what I can see it mostly involves one’s sense of “matching” the sexist stereotypes society has made up about a given sex class. Also, a lot of people use the term gender identity to mean sex class. So: a person who loves and wishes to abide by patriarchal sexist stereotypes about what femininity means will conclude that they are, as a result, a woman.

Back to Butler. (Aw. Do I have to?)

If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.

I’m going out on a limb here but I suspect that when Butler speaks of a seemingly seamless identity, what she means is a consistent material state. It’s hard for me to tell, because identity is one of the words misused and abused by the gender-identity movement. But in the context of everything else she says here, my interpretation makes a lot of sense to me.

So if I’m right, what Butler is saying is that if womanhood (applicable to manhood too, but Butler led off by addressing Beauvoir, so that’s why I keep harping on women) is not a material state but instead a matched set of behaviors and gestures and movements that work together to communicate a concept called “woman,” then maybe it’s possible to stop being a woman just by changing some of those behaviors and gestures and movements, or by breaking some of the rules about how you engage in them.

Don’t want to be a woman? Tie your long hair up into a man bun, I guess.

Now let’s get into the final paragraph of that first introductory section and then I need a break. Got to scrape the drying concrete off my gray matter.

Through the conception of gender acts sketched above, I will try to show some ways in which reified and naturalized conceptions of gender might be understood as constituted and, hence, capable of being constituted differently.

Once again we need to break out the definitions.

reified: Reification is treating an abstract concept as if it were materially real.
naturalized: I don’t know what this means in philosophy and I’m sort of out of mental spoons, but I suspect the definition is close to the legal one, where a thing didn’t used to belong in a set and now it is considered to belong there. Like when an immigrant becomes a naturalized citizen. Apparently you can do this with concepts too, when they were previously not a part of a given society but are then adopted by that society as valid. I’m guessing that’s what Butler means here.
constituted: made or created.

So Butler is acting from the premise that people made up the concept of sex class in the first place (rather than making up words to label an already-existing thing, which is what we actually did) and that sex class is actually made up in people’s heads and that, again, if we could make up sex class in our heads, we can also change how we make up sex class and just define it differently.

Sure, Jan.

In opposition to theatrical or phenomenological models which take the gendered self to be prior to its acts, I will understand constituting acts not only as constituting the identity of the actor, but as constituting that identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief.

Lady, you don’t “understand” squat.

So, still, not only does Butler say gender when she means sex class, now she’s arguing that a person belonging in a given sex class is nothing more than a “gendered self,” which is an incorrect definition of the reality. When gender is sexist stereotype, and these days it usually is (the original definition of gender was “type or category”), we only gender things that don’t already have sexes. There is no need to be a “gendered self” when you already have an anatomical sex.

Then she can’t accept the idea of a person existing in a sex class and then acting on the reality around themselves any old way they want. Instead she perceives the situation as a random person of no particular description participating in a certain set of acts which then determine which sex class that person is actually in. (For right now, because they can always change their mind later.)

Also, women being women is an illusion. FYI.

Okay. Last bit and then I’m done for today.

In the course of making my argument, I will draw from theatrical, anthropological, and philosophical discourses, but mainly phenomenology, to show that what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status.

Butler has mentioned the theatrical several times thus far and I am not sure what she means by it; this is my lack of philosophy background betraying me again. I find it interesting that — see my discussion of phenomenology way back up at the beginning of this post — she hangs on “lived experience” much more than anthropology to talk about this stuff, but whatever.

Here again we see the irony that if she were actually talking about gender or gender identity instead of what she’s actually doing, which is claiming that sex class is an imaginary game of Let’s Pretend, she’d be onto something here. Because sexist stereotypes are made-up things that we pretend are real, and people perform them because society forces us to perform them by threat of punishment (sanction) and declaration of taboo. This is all true. If you’re talking about gender and gender identity and NOT sex class. If you are talking about sexist concepts of femininity and about a man’s devout wish that he could be a woman and NOT about actually being a woman.

Alas. Butler missed a huge opportunity here. And in upcoming posts we will discuss how she misses the mark, over and over again.