[Transcript]
Butler is one of those figures who’s really at the heart of gender theory for a variety of different disciplines, including philosophy, but not limited to philosophy, and whose work is also really applied and brought up in many cases outside of academic context.
For the purposes of this video, I wanted to give you an introduction into some of the philosophical concepts that Butler is working with.
Butler’s work is really rooted in philosophy in a way that is sometimes not drawn attention to. So I really want to do precisely that here: to draw attention to philosophical, antecedents and roots in her work. And I want to do that by drawing attention to 3 different philosophical traditions that she is working with.
The first is a philosophical tradition of the 19th century German philosopher, Hegel. Butler wrote her PhD thesis on Hegel, which became her first book. Why do I mention that here? We’re not reading Hegel in this class. You might not know who Hegel is, who cares? Well, the reason I mention Hegel here is because you’ve actually already encountered his ideas in an indirect way. And that’s thought Beauvoir’s idea that being is becoming. Both Beauvoir and Butler are steeped in the work of Hegel and Hegel is the philosopher who is most famously associated with this idea that being is becoming. Hegel asserts that being is developed historically, so there’s no essential human essence to who we are. But rather our human condition is coded and shaped by the historical circumstances in which we live. Being comes about through a process of becoming. This will be the basis for Butler’s theory of gender performativity, but it’s not the only basis.
The second philosophical tradition that Butler is working with here is that of phenomenology, which is, of course, a philosophical tradition that we have already encountered. One of the reasons that I wanted to assign this essay, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution here, is because it’s a little known early essay by Butler. I comes out before Gender Trouble, which is her main text on performativity. And it’s actually really the first place where she’s working out this theory of performativity. And as you can see from reading this text, she does so in terms of phenomenology, drawing on Beauvoir’s idea that one is not born, but becomes a woman, as well as upon Merleau-Ponty’s idea that when we think about the body as sexed, we also think about the body as sexed within a historical context. So one thing that Butler really draws on this essay, you can see this around page 521, but a number of other places, is the idea that the body is a historical idea, which is one that comes from Merleau-Ponty. When we say that the body is a historical idea, it doesn’t mean that I don’t feel like my body is material. It doesn’t even mean that my body isn’t material. Right? But it means rather that my material body is coded, understood in such a way that reflects the historical sedimentation of a particular society. So for phenomenology, as you’ll recall, the first person perspective of how you experience yourself is paramount, but that’s not in opposition to a historical or perhaps a sociological understanding of who you are.
The third philosophical tradition to mention in the context of Butler’s conception of performativity is speech act theory. Speech act theory is the origin of the concept of performativity. And Butler’s incredible intervention here is into the idea that we can apply insights from speech acts theory to gender, and that’s a really surprising and super influential move to make. Now speech act theory comes out of a 20th century tradition of Anglo European philosophy of language. Sounds boring as heck. Well, it’s actually pretty interesting here because speech act theory, and in particular, the work of one theorist, J. L. Austin divides common statements into two different categories:
- Constantives
- Declarations
- Statements of fact
- Reflex existing states of affairs
- Performatives
- Bring about new states of affairs through their utterance
- Require proper authority to be effective (e.g. a judge decides ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’)
A constantives speech act is what we do most of the time. These are declarations, statement of facts. So if I say it’s raining outside, that is a constitutive. So most of what we do on a day-to-day basis is wrapped up in this particular kind of speech act. Constative speech acts echo existing states of affairs. They talk about what is the case already, and they just designate it or express it. This is most of what we do in our everyday speech. But there’s this other category that’s actually pretty rare in our everyday speech called performatives.
Performatives, instead of echoing existing states of affairs, actually bring about new states of affairs through their very utterance. The classic example here, which is a pretty interesting example from the perspective of philosophy of gender, is the example of an officiant at a wedding: who says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. This is the example that Austin gives–very classic, sort of heteronormative example, right?
If I am endowed with the authority to pronounce somebody ‘man and wife’, then my utterance actually brings about their marriage. Promises also count as performatives, signatures count as performatives. But the thing is I have to have the right conditions for a performative to work. So if I say ‘I now pronounce you, man and wife’, just like right now in my office. Nothing’s happening, right? Or if I say it to two friends and I don’t actually have the authority, because I haven’t like, gone through that process of being an official officiant of a wedding, then that’s not a performative. And so performatives bring about states of affairs, but under the conditions where somebody has the authority to make a statement, how then does all of this apply to gender?
Well, Butler says that gender is performative. And what she means by this is not that we perform our gender in a theatrical sense, right? In a theatrical performance, I bring myself as an individual into a scene where I adopt a role. So I have myself and then I have my role. The reason that this doesn’t work in thinking about gender performativity is that it presumes a self that’s behind the role. And Butler’s whole point is that there is no such distinction, and there’s no such self behind the role. When we’re thinking about gender as performative, we have to think about it with this background of the theory of speech acts because what’s happening in gender performativity is that I am bringing about the reality of gender by uttering my gender.
But uttering my gender doesn’t mean just speaking, right? And so Butler is extending this claim from philosophy of language into our very embodiment. This is a hybrid of phenomenology and speech act theory.
So my way of performing my gender isn’t just in making a statement about my gender. It’s also in the expression of my physical gestures, right? My way of walking, my way of dressing, my way of speaking. All of these types of things and more. The way that I am attributed as being woman by others. For Butler, it’s not that the theatrical model of performance is entirely wrong, it’s just that the way we usually think about it is wrong. So, for instance, if I take a conception of theatrical performance that doesn’t presume a self that just adopts a role, and I have a more integrated sense of the way that the actor and role are a single unit, then that actually is pretty close to what Butler means by performativity.
Performativity happens within a broader social context in the same way that my saying, I now pronounce you ‘man and wife’, only operates as a performative in a broader social context where there are two people in front of me, uh, presumably a man and a woman, and I have the official authority to pronounce them married. The reason I really want to emphasize this is that it’s super easy to misunderstand Butler as saying gender is a performance and take that in the usual sense that we mean performance. And I just want to draw your attention in this context to the second paragraph on page 520, where Butler writes the following: this is the second sentence of that paragraph.
“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 a constituting the identity of the actor, but as constituting that identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief.”
This goes back to some of our claims about social construction last week, where we said that social construction is of course not natural. Right? But that also doesn’t mean it’s fictional. It’s existing sort of in this space in between the natural and the fictional where the social construction has real material effects, but it’s also an object of belief.
One final thing I want to note here is that, unlike a speech act performative, which just happens one time, gender performativity is necessarily ongoing. And so I constitute myself as a woman through the repeated performance of my gender embodiment. Repetition is crucial to Butler’s worldview here.
Image source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/opinion/judith-butler-gender.html