Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an analysis (part 3)

Oh my God.

Okay. So. If you’re just joining us, go ahead and read the About page for more about the purpose of this Substack, if you’re curious. Back? Good. So, we’re continuing with my untrained, uneducated analysis and possibly (I hope) takedown of Judith Butler’s essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (that’s a PDF file). You can find my previous installments here: part 1 and part 2. With me so far? I’m sorry. Moving on now.

I just… I was getting into the second part of her essay, entitled “II. Binary Genders and the Heterosexual Contract,” on page 7 of the PDF if you’re reading along. I occasionally run across something in this essay that’s a no-brainer, that I can agree with, and that’s been all right. But in the very first paragraph of this section I’m already running into mad fuckery. Pardon my English.

No, really. Peep this:

To guarantee the reproduction of a given culture, various requirements, well- established in the anthropological literature of kinship, have instated sexual repro- duction within the confines of a heterosexually-based system of marriage which requires the reproduction of human beings in certain gendered modes which, in effect, guarantee the eventual reproduction of that kinship system.

Okay, I don’t know if Butler meant to say that cultures invented heterosexual sex on purpose and forced people to have two sexes and to engage in heterosexual sex — meaning they would not otherwise have had two sexes and would never have engaged in heterosexual sex without the culture making them do it — in order to ensure the continuance of that culture. But that’s sure what it looks like, isn’t it.

(Remember that when Butler says gender she really means sex class. I just went over this, in my previous two installments, about how Butler thinks women and men are cultural inventions rather than biological realities.)

Oh god, here we go. She’s referencing Foucault.

As Foucault and others have pointed out, the association of a natural sex with a discrete gender and with an ostensibly natural 'attraction' to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural conjunction of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests.

I’m sorry. I’m about to speak English again. HOW THE BLUE FUCK DO YOU MAKE BABIES IF YOU NEVER PUT FEMALE PEOPLE TOGETHER WITH MALE PEOPLE FOR HETEROSEXUAL CONGRESS. HOW. And unless Foucault proposes that heterosexual sex is always rape, at least some of the time there’s going to be mutual attraction naturally involved. Rape may not shut down fertility, the claims of certain insane U.S. government officials notwithstanding, but everything turns out a lot better for the mother-baby dyad if Mom actually loves and trusts the man who knocked her up. So it’s in the best interests of the human species if the woman feels an attraction to her sexual partner. “Ostensibly,” my ass. (Sorry.)

Feminist cultural anthropology and kinship studies have shown how cultures are governed by conventions that not only regulate and guarantee the production, exchange, and consumption of material goods, but also reproduce the bonds of kinship itself, which require taboos and a punitive regulation of reproduction to effect that end.

There isn’t a lot to this snippet of this section’s first paragraph and you would think I wouldn’t find much to pick apart here, and yet.

First off, why are we talking about “regulat[ing] and guarantee[ing] the production, exchange, and consumption of material goods” when this essay is supposed to be about sex and gender?

Secondly, and I noticed this with her mention of Foucault, is there some reason we’re not seeing multiple references to multiple sources on this subject? First it was Foucault “and others” but I only see a footnote about Foucault. Then it’s “feminist… studies,” plural, but I only see one source for that. And nothing directly quoted or even restated properly. It’s like she’s name-dropping and expects us to just take her word for it. Weird.

Thirdly, since when do you have to have taboos and a punitive regulation of reproduction in order to maintain and continue kinship bonds? You might have to have taboos in order to protect the health of kinship bonds, but you’re going to have a mother and a father and siblings (as applicable) and cousins (ditto) and all the rest regardless of the existence or absence of taboos. Maybe your relationship with your kin is healthy and maybe it’s not, but they exist regardless and unless you go off into the wilderness and live by yourself or move to a village where no one’s related to you, you’re going to have some kind of a bond with those people. Maybe Butler just has a low opinion of humanity. I don’t know.

Oh god, here we go getting weird again. (Shocker.)

Levi- Strauss has shown how the incest taboo works to guarantee the channeling of sexuality into various modes of heterosexual marriage

Levi-Strauss, whoever that is (probably not the jeans maker), sounds like someone I would put on a sex offender list. Incest taboos work to prevent inbreeding and the family conflicts that ride along with that. They’ve got nada to do with someone’s sexual orientation.

And how many modes of heterosexual marriage are there, anyway? Is there a vacation mode? I’d go for that one.

Oh lord, more nonsense:

Gayle Rubin has argued convincingly that the incest taboo produces certain kinds of discrete gendered identities and sexualities.

Maybe Gayle Rubin is convincing to the stupid, sure. No examples given of what Butler means by “discrete [individual, separate] gendered identities and sexualities.” What is a “sexuality” in Butler’s world, anyway? I tend to think “sexual orientation” when I see that word, but I have no idea if that’s what she means. Also, I shouldn’t have to go looking at the sources she cites in order to understand what she’s referencing. Lazy, lazy, lazy writing. For shame. But I’ll bite: Assuming we’re talking about the two human sex classes and about the three sexual orientations? Those exist with or without an incest taboo, BUTLER. Thanks anyway.

My point is simply that one way in which this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with 'natural' appearances and 'natural' heterosexual dispositions.

Look. Heterosexuality is only compulsory if you are forcing a homosexual person into a heterosexual relationship. Most people are not homosexual. Most of the time, assuming sexual consent, heterosexuality is desired, not compelled. No one made me be heterosexual. I really was born this way. I checked. Sorry to burst your bubble.

And do I see Butler arguing that sexual dimorphism (two different forms according to sex) is artificial because cultures make human bodies look sexually dimorphic on purpose? Really? What was the ritual to install a penis, again? I missed that somewhere.

There is not enough alcohol in the world to contend with this nonsense.

I’m doing it sober.

Although the enthnocentric [sic] conceit suggests a progression beyond the mandatory structures of kinship relations as described by Levi-Strauss, I would suggest, along with Rubin, that contemporary gender identities are so many marks or "traces" of residual kinship.

…wat?

Okay, quite aside from not knowing what the fuck (pardon my English) Butler is on about here, I can’t even gauge whether she’s made proper sense of Levi-Strauss or Rubin because she does not quote them at all. You know, maybe they do things differently in the universities, but when I wrote research papers at the K-12 level, I used citations to mark ideas that were not my own or to provide the source for direct quotations. I didn’t just say “oh, so-and-so described this” and then not specify what they were describing or how. All I have so far in this stupid essay is that Levi-Strauss thinks incest taboos make straight people fuck (sorry) and that Rubin thinks incest taboos create women and men and make them fuck (sorry). What the everloving hell (sorry) is all this other crap that Butler’s dredging up and dear God, why? THROW ME A BONE HERE. Or are bones socially constructed too?

And, I mean… wat? “Contemporary gender identities are so many marks or ‘traces’ of residual kinship.” What does that even mean? Does “non-binary” mean “cousin” or something? You know, I don’t think even Butler knows. I think she’s just quacking here, solely to hear (read) herself quack.

Moving on.

The contention that sex, gender, and heterosexuality are historical products which have become conjoined and reified as natural over time has received a good deal of critical attention not only from Michel Foucault, but Monique Wittig, gay historians, and various cultural anthropologists and social psychologists in recent years.

Remember that reification means you are taking an imaginary thing and treating it as if it were real. Butler is talking about a claim (contention) that sex, sex class (she means sex class when she says gender, remember; see also part 1), and heterosexuality are all made up. Not real. Imaginary. Apparently I am supposed to care that Foucault and Wittig and whoever the heck else have been paying attention to this stupid idea. It does not matter how many people with letters after their names, or without, have been paying attention to this stupid idea. It is a stupid idea.

These theories, however, still lack the critical resources for thinking radically about the historical sedimentation of sexuality and sex-related constructs if they do not delimit and describe the mundane manner in which these constructs are pro- duced, reproduced, and maintained within the field of bodies.

No one needs critical resources for thinking radically or otherwise about “the historical sedimentation of sexuality and sex-related constructs” because only an empty-headed nitwit thinks sex, sex class, and sexual orientation are imaginary. This is a complete waste of everyone’s time and energy. We’ve got little girls out here getting their clitorises cut off and grown women getting rickets because they are never allowed sunlight on their skin but sure, let’s talk about Butler’s fevered imagination on why she doesn’t want to admit she’s a woman anymore.

Nah.

Then she gets into more the topic of this essay, and starts out with this:

Can phenomenology assist a feminist reconstruction of the sedimented character of sex, gender, and sexuality at the level of the body? In the first place, the phe- nomenological focus on the various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and assumed provides a felicitous starting point for the feminist effort to understand the mundane manner in which bodies get crafted into genders. The formulation of the body as a mode of dramatizing or enacting possibilities offers a way to understand how a cultural convention is embodied and enacted.

“Feminism isn’t doing enough to hype up how sex, sex class, and sexual orientation are imaginary, so clearly we need the study of lived experience to come in and shake things up. That way we can prove women are not real. They’re just a cultural convention.”

But 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

Well, no shit, Sherlock. (Pardon my English again.) You can’t look at the very real, material oppression that real, material women face and approach it from the point of view of “well, you don’t really exist anyway.” How can someone be oppressed if they don’t first exist?

Next you’ll be telling me we can’t fight fires by pretending fires are created by people talking about dragons. Land sakes.

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.

Oh sure, that makes sense. Sex class is a sole consequence of a whole lot of acts piled together but oppression? Which is caused by individual choices? Nah. There’s got to be some other culprit. Okay. So who else is doing the oppressing? The Easter Bunny? The Northern Lights? Dark matter?

One might argue that without human beings whose various acts, largely construed, produce and maintain oppressive conditions, those conditions would fall away

One would definitely argue that, yes. If I am facing difficulties caused by a non-human animal or an inanimate object, that’s not oppression, that’s inconvenience. Oppression requires the action of human beings. Nothing else.

but note that the relation between acts and conditions is neither unilateral nor unmediated. There are social contexts and conventions within which certain acts not only become possible but become conceivable as acts at all.

Somebody needs to lay off the pedo literature. (Speaking of Foucault.) Not that old canard about how it’s only oppression if the culture tells you it’s oppression.

Even if that’s not what Butler is saying, she’s still acting like human society is something separate from human beings. BZZT Wrong. Without human beings, there is no human society. Oppression is still the fault of human beings and the direct result of choices that human beings make. There is no Oppression Fairy. And we all say thankya. The human beings are bad enough.

The transformation of social relations becomes a matter, then, of transforming hegemonic social conditions rather than the individual acts that are spawned by those conditions.

Need another definition? Gotcha.

hegemonic: Ruling or dominant in a political or social context.

Transforming the dominant social conditions still requires changing how individual people behave, Butler. You can’t get away from this. You’re going to have to face it.

The next several paragraphs are droning on about how sex class (she says gender, but she means sex class) is an act or a performance and then goes right up her own arse about how bodies didn’t exist before social mores did, but rather the social mores create the bodies. Oh shut up, Butler.

Here’s an interesting bit. It seems that Butler’s mentions of “theater” were references to actual theater. Huh.

…it seems clear that, although theatrical performances can meet with political censorship and scathing criticism, gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions. Indeed, 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. The conventions which mediate proximity and identification in these two instances are clearly quite different.

So finally… I think? …she means “gender” when she says gender. Maybe? I’m not a hundred percent sure. Because a transvestite certainly isn’t a sex class. Okay, yes, how a person enacts sexist stereotypes can produce different reactions depending on the context of that enactment. I can agree with this.

This has nothing to do with Butler’s claim that women are a performance. Transvestites, obviously, are not women.

Honestly, I think Butler would have pissed a lot fewer people off if she had just started from the premise that women and men are not genders. I honestly think that’s the root of her problem. But either she doesn’t understand the difference or she’s playing dumb. If she’s playing dumb, I am not sure I want to know why.

I want to make two different kinds of claims regarding this tentative distinction. In the theatre, one can say, 'this is just an act,' and de-realize the act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real. Because of this distinction, one can maintain one's sense of reality in the face of this temporary challenge to our existing ontological assumptions about gender arrangements; the various conventions which announce that 'this is only a play' allows strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life. On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act, indeed, on the street or in the bus, there is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality; the disquieting effect of the act is that there are no conventions that facilitate making this separation.

…No, I’m gonna go with “the cross-dresser on stage probably had a majority gay and lesbian audience who is used to seeing such performances, or at least an audience accustomed to seeing cross-dressing men, whereas there is a greater chance of running into a homophobe on the bus, and they all think cross-dressers are gay men.”

Even the most raging homophobe isn’t going to want to punch a transvestite because the transvestite made the homophobe think he was a real woman. He already knows that guy isn’t a woman. That’s the point. So I’m afraid people out in public are thinking, “this is just an act,” just like the ones in the theater would.

Butler doesn’t get out much, does she.

Clearly, there is theatre which attempts to contest or, indeed, break down those conventions that demarcate the imaginary from the real

What conventions? You mean like having working eyes and ears?

Yet in those cases one confronts the same phenomenon, namely, that the act is not contrasted with the real, but constitutes 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.

…No, we’re still contrasting the act with the real. We usually know the difference. And I see we’re confusing gender and sex class again. But this is the same woman who just spent a whole lot of essay claiming womanhood is just an act.

Blah blah blah, apparently “transvestite” is a gender, more blah blah, and then…

Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed. It seems fair to say that certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some way. That expectation, in turn, is based upon the perception of sex, where sex is understood to be the discrete and factic datum of primary sexual characteristics.

If by gender she means sex class here, as she has for most of this essay, then no, sex class is not performative. A woman who has been in a coma her entire life is still a woman even though, by definition, she is performing nothing but a coma. I do agree that if we were talking about gender and not sex class, then yes, we tend to associate certain stereotyped behaviors with one sex or the other even though they have zero bearing on which sex that person is. And yes, sometimes people behave or appear in ways that we don’t expect to go together with what sex they are. That doesn’t mean that either sex (female, male) or sex class (woman, man) are performances. It means sexist stereotypes (gender) are stupid and inadequate for describing the human condition in any way.

This implicit and popular theory of acts and gestures as expressive of gender suggests that gender itself is something prior to the various acts, postures, and gestures by which it is dramatized and known; indeed, gender appears to the popular imagination as a substantial core which might well be understood as the spiritual or psychological correlate of biological sex.

Okay, I did mention — I think in part 1 — that Butler does not appear to believe in a gendered soul as so many gender identitarians do. But she’s acknowledging that belief here. I think she has switched back to meaning “gender” when she says gender, too. Very sloppy use of language. Big reason nobody understands what the hell she’s saying.

But, no. There’s nothing “spiritual” about sexist stereotypes. Thanks anyway.

Oh god. What now?

If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal. The distinction between expression and performativeness is quite crucial, for if gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.

I… I am having a really hard time understanding the difference between expression and performance. I mean, they don’t mean absolutely the same thing? But… isn’t expression a type of performance? Or performance a type of expression? Something like that? And how exactly does she think this all works? We’re talking about people who engage in behaviors. Of course there’s a pre-existing identity. Someone with zero brain function wouldn’t have a pre-existing identity, and they wouldn’t engage in deliberate behaviors either.

I have another issue with this, too. If gender is just a collection of acts, how do you tell whether it’s true or false or real or distorted? Why even ask that question if it’s all made up anyway or measured after the fact, as you would if you were analyzing a collection of acts? God. Identify as table gender. I don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference.

That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex, a true or abiding masculinity or femininity, are also constituted as part of the strategy by which the performative aspect of gender is concealed.

Sooooo now it’s that we made up the idea of true femaleness and true maleness to cover up the fact that woman and man are just acts and not real. IT’S A CONSPIRACY, I TELL YOU

That last paragraph is a doozy and it’s late and I’m tired. But I’ll give you a snippet of it and otherwise, feel free to go read the whole thing and then point and laugh at her. Or just be really confused. I don’t care. This here, this is trash.

As opposed to a view such as Erving Goffman's which posits a self which assumes and exchanges various 'roles' within the complex social expectations of the 'game' of modern life… I am suggesting that this self is not only irretrievably 'outside,' constituted in social discourse, but that the ascription of interiority is itself a publically [sic] regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication.

No, yeah, sure. Not only are women and men a figment of your imagination, you are a figment of your imagination too. Jesus Harold Christ.

I’m sorry. I thought this was going to be shorter than it was and I was SO WRONG. But we’re done with this one. Thank fuck. (Sorry.)

I should be getting to the final section tomorrow (Tuesday), so… look forward to that? Or not? Whatever.