Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

“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.”

Butler’s goal is not to destroy the gender binary. Instead, they propose an incremental approach to dismantling the gender roles that support patriarchy. By questioning and changing the acts that constitute gender roles, the roles can transform, dissolve, or multiply over time.

“The ‘I’ that is its body is, of necessity, a mode of embodying, and the ‘what’ that it embodies is possibilities. But here again the grammar of the formulation misleads, for the possibilities that are embodied are not fundamentally exterior or antecedent to the process of embodying itself. As an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation.”

The idea that gender is an act suggests that embodying gender is a choice, but that is not the kind of act Butler is talking about. The act of embodying gender is a pre-reflective choice, one that begins before consciousness and therefore can only be altered by deliberate volition. This form of embodiment is both “being” a gender and dramatizing gender for others. Because of the pre-conscious choice involved, “doing gender” reproduces the historical gender definitions that one is born into.

“To be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project.”

Here again, Butler emphasizes the continuous nature of gender acts. Gender is a historically and culturally defined goal that we can successfully accomplish, but if at any point we fail to perform gender correctly, the illusion dissolves and we are subject to censure and punishment.

“Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.”

The inessential nature of gender can be difficult to conceptualize. One way to do it is to imagine a lack of gendered acts. Would any person have a “gender identity” if differences in feminine and masculine presentation, laws and behaviors differentiating the sexes, the assumption of heterosexual norms, and the naming of the genders did not exist?

“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.”

This “legacy of sedimented acts” refers to the idea that gender involves hundreds—if not thousands—of years of history and culture that have shaped and reshaped what it means to be a man or a woman. Although historical precedent suggests that gender is a natural fact, it is rather a product of culture that has survived over time. It is not an independently occurring natural entity.

“Indeed, 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. In an understandable desire to forge bonds of solidarity, feminist discourse has often relied upon the category of woman as a universal presupposition of cultural experience which, in its universal status, provides a false ontological promise of eventual political solidarity.”

Butler warns against a strategy of feminist organizing that claims the category of woman is universal. Women’s experiences of gender differ in terms of race, class, culture, and other factors. Butler warns that it can be easy to choose “oppressed” as the common denominator of all experiences of womanhood. But if even feminists define “woman” as “to be oppressed,” it will be impossible to use feminist activism to fight oppression, since eradicating it will destroy the group they aim to represent.

“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 interest […] 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.”

The idea that heterosexuality is the natural and normal form of sexuality is a product of culture, shaped not by the biological goal to reproduce, but by the patriarchal goal to give males control of reproduction. One way to compel people to conform to this norm is through the belief that gender roles and heterosexuality are “natural.” In Butler’s view, humans are capable of diverse presentational and sexual behaviors, with none more natural than another.

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

Butler argues that social change is not to be gained through individual gender acts. Our individual acts occur in the context of a society that both shapes them—making it very difficult to imagine gender acts that, for example, lie outside the signification of masculine and feminine—and has the power to punish nonstandard acts. To create social change, we must take political action to change the power structures that enforce oppression.

“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.”

A counterpoint to the idea that gender is socially and culturally enforced is that everyone performs gender differently. One woman might only ever wear trousers, and another might value her long polished fingernails. Butler points out that this seeming diversity is still constrained. Both women perform gender acts that are approved of by the society in which they live. Although there is choice, full freedom does not exist because the culture has determined the possibilities available to women.

“The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.”

The analogy of theater comes into play to elucidate the reification of gender: gender is similar to a script. Like a script, gender functions as instructions to the actors that perform it, and it is empty without those actors. Performance is what makes the script real and meaningful, just as the people who embody gender make gender categories real and meaningful.

“[T]he 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. From the point of view of those established categories, one may want to claim, but oh, this is really a girl or a woman, or this is really a boy or a man, and further that the appearance contradicts the reality of the gender, that the discrete and familiar reality must be there, nascent, temporarily unrealized, perhaps realized at other times or other places.”

Butler explains how our belief in the essentiality of gender provides the basis for censure and punishment of gender acts that do not fit the culturally determined possibilities. When confronted with someone who does not fit our predetermined categories, a common response is to say that this person is lying or pretending rather than accepting that the existence of a person who does not fit the categories means that the categories are insufficient. This misguided belief that one is being lied to can trigger discomfort, anger, and violence.

“Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.”

This sentence expresses Butler’s theory of performative gender, which is not that gender is a conscious or volitional performance but that it is constituted through performative acts, i.e., performing gender acts makes gender real.

“There is, in my view, nothing about femaleness that is waiting to be expressed; there is, on the other hand, a good deal about the diverse experiences of women that is being expressed and still needs to be expressed, but caution is needed with respect to that theoretical language, for it does not simply report a pre-linguistic experience, but constructs that experience as well as the limits of its analysis.”

Butler warns their readers to beware of trying to define what it means to be female. Women have varied and complex experiences that are valuable to hear and understand. Attempting to deduce a singular understanding of what it means to be a woman relies on the misunderstanding that there is something essential and unalterable about womanhood, when in fact it is the opposite. Womanhood is created by the acts and experiences of women and does not exist independently of them.