Bodily inscriptions, performative subversions

Place on List:

I. Literary Theory and Criticism

2. Post-Structuralism

Judith Butler. *Preface and “Bodily inscriptions, performative subversions” in Gender Trouble.

Supporting References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Trouble

2. “Judith Butler.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. 2485-8. Print.

3. Buchanan, Ian. "performativity." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 2 Sep. 2013 .

“Performativity. American philosopher Judith *Butler adapts J. L. *Austin's concept of the performative in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) to redefine gender as an action humans are compelled to perform by society rather than a state of being or bodily condition. Her case example, which as she acknowledges in subsequent books was much misunderstood, is drag or cross-dressing: drag imitates gender, she argues, and in doing so reveals the imitative structure of gender itself. Gender can be imitated because it is always already a performance to begin with. As such, gender does not have an essence, or an intrinsic nature or identity. What was misunderstood by many was the fact that this does not mean gender is something we can therefore opt out of. As Butler clarifies in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), while it is true that we can decide which aspects of available gender identities we wish to perform, we cannot choose not to have any gender identity at all because society constantly imposes gender upon us.”

4. Buchanan, Ian. "femininity." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 2 Sep. 2013 .

“femininity. The culturally relative ideal gender identity for women. Varying substantially from one historical period to the next and from one geographic region to another, femininity is considered by feminism to be an imposed system of rules governing how women should act, look, feel, and even think within a particular society. Femininity is generally portrayed as the weaker, lesser Other of masculinity; a fact that clearly underpins the psychoanalytic concept of penis envy, which supposes that all young girls actually want to be boys on some level. So internalized are these rules and cultural assumptions supposed to be, they define not merely how a woman should comport herself, but what it actually means to be a woman. This can readily be seen by doing a book search using ‘femininity’ as a keyword—the plethora of titles this throws up, from works in philosophy and critical theory to self-help manuals (both of the psychological and beauty tips variety) and autobiographies, is astonishing. A similar search for masculinity yields only a fraction of the results and nothing like the variety. That femininity is a constrictive demand placed on women by society has been recognized by female writers throughout the ages, but it was Simone de *Beauvoir who first theorized it. Her argument was that by consenting to play the roles femininity demands, women effectively consent to their own oppression. Recent work on femininity has been powerfully influenced by Judith *Butler, particularly her concept of performativity (which she derives from J. L. *Austin's linguistic concept of the performative), by means of which she argues that gender roles are paradoxical inasmuch that they aren't fixed and can be varied—women can dress and act like men if they want to and vice versa—but one cannot choose not to have a gendered identity.”

5. Buchanan, Ian. "Butler, Judith." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013 .

This articles treats the author and not the text exclusively.

“Butler, Judith (1956–) Americanfeminist philosopher and gender theorist, Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She completed her PhD in the Department of Philosophy at Yale University in 1984, where she attended seminars by Paul de Man and Jacques *Derrida, whose work would influence her in interesting ways. After holding visiting positions at Princeton, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins, Butler obtained a permanent position at the University of California, Berkeley. She is probably the most widely read and influential gender theorist in the world.

“A highly sophisticated work, Butler's PhD, which was published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), maps out a clear project that subsequent works would set out to complete, namely the attempt to understand how social constructs like gender come into being and more especially how they come to be seen as naturally occurring rather than historical. As Butler points out, while it is possible to choose a gender one wishes to identify with, it is presently impossible to choose not to have any gender at all. Society constrains us to have a gender, whether we want to or not. Her subsequent books, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), try to theorize this situation in terms of the concept of performativity (which she adapts from J. L. *Austin's concept of the performative).

“In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that contrary to popular wisdom both sex (generally assumed to be a biological ‘fact’) and gender are culturally constructed terms and the binary relation between the two is mutually reinforcing. By refusing this binary relation and showing that sex is fully as much a cultural construct as gender, Butler opens the way for a genuine critique of both terms. Both, she subsequently claims, can be understood in terms of performativity: sex and gender are, she argues, using Drag Queens as her case in point, the coded constructs that result from countless performances of gender and sex roles. Drag Queens turned out to be an unfortunate choice of example for Butler as many of her readers misunderstood her as saying that ultimately gender is simply a matter of choice. Bodies that Matter corrects this viewpoint with an extremely rigorous account of the various discursive ways in which gender is regulated.

“Outside of her work on gender theory, Butler identifies herself as an anti-Zionist Jew and is a stern critic of Israeli politics. Her later works, especially Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009) extend the notion of performativity to contemporary politics, while Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), basing itself in a critique of Emmanuel *Levinas, offers an ethics for the contemporary world.”