An essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory by Judith Butler.
Phenomenological: The philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness
Gender is a stylised repetition of acts that occur over a period of time.
There is no one stable identity or point of agency (through which all acts start) for gender.
Gender identity is a performative achieved by social sanction and taboo.
Gender is a constructed identity.
Sex/Gender: Feminist and Phenomenological views
The biological sex is by default understood as a factor that defines one’s gender and one’s social status or activity. More for women.
The concept of gender as “natural species” is questioned and is instead a “historical idea” that is continuously created over time.
Through very specific corporeal acts, gender is constructed.
The body absorbs/embodies cultural and historical appropriations. (Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty)
Merleau-Ponty: Gender doesn’t have a predetermined interior essence, infact there is agency to transform/render gender. “One does one’s body”
“You are not born a woman you become a woman”- Beauvoir : “Body is a historical situation and it is embodiment(= a manner of doing, dramatizing and reproducing) a historical situation.”
Sartre: “style of being”
Foucault: “a stylistics of existence”
Gender --> corporeal style (an act) --> i) intentional ii) performative --> i)dramatic
ii) non-referential
Gender as a project: the body is a cultural sign, conforming to historical norms (eg. the historical idea of ‘woman’) which requires radical will, for cultural survival. Because of a series of acts and idea of gender is created, without those acts gender doesn’t exist.
Subjectivity: Personal is political. Some have argued that the personal cannot question the larger picture (because of public/private) but the subjectivity is important in order to challenge the political because it is still located in a larger social structure.
“The Body” is transformed into “his body” or “her body” : “a gender body is the legacy of sedimented acts rather than predetermined structure, essence, fact(natural, cultural or linguistic).
The sense of it being the natural order of things is a social fiction.
The category of “woman” is also complicated because i) certain acts are done in the name of woman ii) certain acts with consequences are done to challenge the category of women. So one needs to investigate/consider that where does this category come from? And why does the category by default make being “woman” as being oppressed.
The universal viewpoint of ‘man’ is challenged through feminist theory and intends to make female specificity more visible and to read culture and history from this lens.
2. Binary Genders and the Heterosexual contract.
Over time using the social fiction of the “natural” order of things certain acts are considered as a norm in order to reproduce the given culture.
The reproduction of this culture is instated through: sexual reproduction in heterosexually-based marriage systems.
Levi-Strauss points out that incest taboo was in order to channelize this sexual reproduction towards heterosexual marriage.
A certain social order of thigns are basically ritualised through repetition, reenactments and re-experiencing these set of meanings. There are huge consequences to this.
The body isn’t scripted. It does not have a certain set of codes that it was born with and that define it. The embodied self does not have these cultural conventions predetermined in it.
Certain limits of using “theatre” as a metaphor is that even though one’s views may be challenged by what is presented on stage it can still be written off as “fictional/unreal/staged/theatre” but in real life the same representation can have dangerous reactions. Eg a transvestite on stage as opposed to on the street.
Gender reality is performative: it is real only till it is performed. Thus there is no true abiding “masculinity” or “femininity”. Gender can thus not be true or false, yet one is in a world where its polarised.
3. Feminist Theory: Beyond an Expressive Model of Gender
Feminist theory and politics are interlinked
Gayatri Spivak: a false order to woman as universal needs to be applied in order to find a feminist political program.
Mary Anne Warren: says that agendas of population control and reproductive technology are at time to eradicate the existence of women.
Judith Butler: doesn’t want the worldview to be from one gender side. Man or woman. But she says that then one needs to think of the world where acts,gestures, body appearance etc express nothing.
Sexual Difference as inherent or as an interior essence should not be used to create binary restriction on gender identities.
Sexual difference should not become a reification (=In Marxism: it’s a process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved.
Binary gender system is not a given it is because of the operative culture of patriarchy and sexual difference.
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