Extra-Ordinary Men by Rehling Nicola;

Author:Rehling, Nicola;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2009-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Performativity of Gender and the Subversive Potential of Drag

In her now seminal work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler famously argued that gender was performative. By this she meant that all gender identifications, including normative heterosexual ones, are simulacra, “a kind of imitation for which there is no original,” though it is the kind of imitation that produces the very notion that there is an original gender.7 Butler argues that the language of presumptive heterosexuality assumes continuity between sex, gender, and desire. However, when this continuity is broken, as it is in drag performances or transgendered identifications, for instance, “gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.” If gender is no longer tied to sex, it “can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the apparent binary of sex.”8 More contentiously, following Foucault’s premise in The History of Sexuality (1976), she asserts that “sex,” as well as gender, is an effect of regulatory practices and therefore also performative. Refuting the sex/gender dichotomy that has underpinned feminist social constructivist theory, she argues that gender should also refer to the discursive and cultural ways in which the persistent notion of a naturally sexed body is produced.9 She is not, therefore, claiming that the body is only discursive, but that “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body.”10 As she clarifies in her later and more accessible book Undoing Gender (2004):

“Sex” is made understandable through the signs that indicate how it should be read or understood. These bodily indicators are the cultural means by which the sexed body is read. They are themselves bodily, and they operate as signs, so there is no easy way to distinguish between what is “materially” true, and what is “culturally” true about a sexed body. I don’t mean to suggest that purely cultural signs produce a material body, but only that the body does not become sexually readable without those signs, and that those signs are irreducibly cultural and material at once.11

Butler’s highly influential account restaged the stale debates over essentialism, social constructivism, and sexual difference.12 The academic interest it generated is also reflective of the more widespread interest in the malleability of the body in the postmodern era (also evident with the popularity of reality TV programs about plastic surgery or Nip/Tuck, the FX cable show about two plastic surgeons, which has devoted several episodes to transgendered or transsexual characters). The critical and commercial successes of films such as The Crying Game or Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex (2003) are also suggestive of current anxieties about and fascinations with bodies that refuse or fail to line up neatly on one side of the sexual difference binary. Along with Marjorie Garber, Butler argues that it is those who

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