Judith Butlers Book Gender Trouble

Working off of the post colonial theories presented by Bhabha and Foucault, Judith Butler wrote her book Gender Trouble, as a way to undermine our firmly held beliefs of sex, gender and sexual identity. Butler questions the formation of a person’s identity, subjectivity and subjecthood. Based on theories by Foucault, Butler argues the commonly held belief that sex is fixed, while gender is learned/mutable. For Butler, identities are constructed for us, by a power beyond our subject, and our participation and usage of societies’ constructions creates our own identity.

In “Gender Trouble”, Butler asserts that the subject is constructed through its performances of the discourse. She further writes that identity is not inherent, it is something that you do and your performance falls into a structured discourse of opposites which makes it hard for you to break from. There will always be someone there who wants you to perform your “set” identity in order to validate the opposite. These opposites, through their existence validate each other existence while maintained an uneven control to one another (as later discussed, the paradigm of the homosexual/heterosexual, male/female).

The idea of the subject is brought up in its denial. Butler is not interested in the individual, even going so far as to denying its existence and essentialism. Rather, she is interested in the performative actions that turn the individual into a subject. This subject formation is brought about by the acting out of the repetitive acts that create an identity. Gender is performative and does not need the original actor to act upon: “gender is not a noun [but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (Butler 1990).

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Butler’s gender is in ways similar to Bhabha’s culture. Both state that there is no original, whose processes continuously change. One of Butler’s main points is that gender, sex and sexuality are not related to each other. For example, one can be a masculine female, or a feminine male and this has no impact or relation to your sexual orientation (based on the current heterosexual view that ‘weak’, feminine males are homosexual, and ‘strong’, masculine females are lesbians.) Gender is a discursive construction. It is not natural, rather a product…it is the effect. Through repetition, gender has become the effect, not the cause. If gender is seen as a constant repetition of acts, then it is never ending. In turn, we never stop reading, acting and internalizing the constructed gender. Through time, and constant repetition of identity acts, the construction of gender is seen as more fixed than fluid, and more natural than constructed. The subject, then, is a product of playing out the gender. Gender is independent of sex, and the former two are independent from sexuality.

Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that ‘congeal’ over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender. (Butler 1990)

Developing on the idea of performative vs. performance, Butler asserts that gender is performative and does not need the original actor from which to act on: “gender is not a noun [but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (Butler 1990). Butler describes both sex and gender to be not the cause that begins the process of identity formation, rather the effect of identity formation after you have performed its identity as a subject. This idea of performance, of becoming, is perfectly exemplified in Cindy Sherman’s work, which shows the constructions of the different identities she assumes as something to be done…not an essentialist notion that binds her to a fixed identity.

For though Sherman is literally self-created in these works, she is created in the image of already known feminine stereotypes, herself therefore understood as contingent upon the possibilities of the culture in which Sherman participates, not by some inner impulse…There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only the disguises that she assumes. (Crimp 1980)

Butler’s concepts of “process” and “becoming” are drawn from Hegel’s idea of the dialectic, which draws on the concept of the meeting between two opposite theories, resulting in a synthesis which can then be combined with its opposite theory (the antithesis) in order to create a new synthesis.

Photographing mostly adolescents, Rineke Dijkstra’s subjects always look to be in transition. This can be read literally, as transitioning from the water to the beach in her beach series, or figuratively: the transition from a child into adulthood (in the particular case of the Tecla series, the transition of a motherly instinct). If clothing and a person’s immediate surrounding are the signifiers of identity, Dijkstra’s Beach series strips them of this identification. By withdrawing their surroundings and the cultural objects which shape them, she in essence is showing us the personal constructions that are left in the absence of the cultural references. If identity, as understood on Butler’s terms is constructed through its society, what we really see is the social group construction to which these subjects belong to, not their individuality.

The distinction between the performance and performativity, is that performance relies on the replicating from an originator, while performivaty does not need an originator, but simply exists from the continuous constructions provided. Butler makes the distinction between performativity (linguistic and discourse based) and performance (acting).

Nikki S. Lee is an artist who infiltrates cultural groups and learns their identity. By learning and acting on this identity (performing it), she becomes immersed within it, so well, so that it is impossible to tell her identity apart from the newly adopted one. “The fact that a young Korean-American artist can be equally convincing as a Japanese hipster, yuppie stockbroker, Hispanic teenager, or Ohio trailer-park- dweller suggests that social identity has at least as much to do with conscious choices about clothing and hairstyle as with facial features and skin color” (Dalton 2000)

Additionally, identity is understood to be constructed by language and discourse (similar to Said’s concept of the Oriental discourse). In terms of linguistic, the power comes from the one who is naming, who is writing because they are the ones who have control in shaping an identity. Because identity is dependent on language, it does not exist without it. For example, during this time in history (influenced by Foucault, both authors think that the subject-formation needs to be read in its own history and discourse to be understood), identity politics was in the midst of redefining the term “queer”. Prior to identity politics, the word was used as a slur, and it was Eve Sedgewick who traced the word in her book, “Tendencies,” to its Latin root, meaning “across.” This redefined of the term as something fluid and movable did more than redefine a word. It allowed a subject to appropriate and control its discourse. Another of Sedgwicks’s additions to this discourse was the notion of questioning the texts and literature to keep a lookout for injustices. She writes that you should ask “Where might these lie on a spectrum of sexual definition, by ourselves of others? To what extent might this experience be heterosexual or homosexual, on in some way marked or polarized by, or adjacent to those issues?” (Sedgwick 1990)

Butler, like Bhabha, gives power to agency. It is only through agency, they both assert, that the subject can subversively rebel against its constructions. By realizing the construction of identity, the subject, etc…, it gives the subject the power to step back from the established constructions and change it. By changing the status quo, this in effect gives the subject the agency to subvert the power which is controlling/retaining it. In a way to provoke feminism, Butler calls for “a feminist genealogy of the category of women” (Butler 1990), in order to analyze how the discourse functions and its purpose. This genealogy does not mean tracing its roots back to the original, which as discussed before, does not exist. Rather analyze it to understand its constriction and purpose specifically, how it is controlled in the social discourse instead of fighting the [male-dominant, heterosexual] society in which the discourse developed. As an antithesis to this notion of agency, is Butler’s notion of freedom, or rather, your lack of freedom. She hypothesizes that even if you were to break from the controlling activity of performing your identity, you would not stray far from where you are now, as your options would be limited to what the controlling powers allowed to be around you.

In her Buzzclub series, the young girls Dijkstra photographs are dressed up and staring at the camera is reminiscent of children playing dress up, the girls photographed in the Buzzclub series act out their perceived adulthood in “grown up” clothes, but their sense of childhood dress up undermines that image which they themselves wanted to construct. This could be read as falling into the space of agency, where a subject tries to change, but is limited by their resources. In this case the limitation comes from their lack of knowledge and experience in dressing like a ‘real’ adult.

An artist who has been said to be defiant of the learning of identity is Nan Goldin, whose work is atypical of a photographer who is fascinated with role playing in that she does not role play (in the sense of Sherman or Dijkstra). Another way she can be seen as asserting her agency is through selecting to show luminal subjects who like Goldin, refuse to follow the construction of set, approved identities. In her works of drag queens, gays, lesbians and substance abusers, when applying Butler’s theories, Goldin’s work does not show the outcasts of society as can so easily be applied, but rather, the mavericks of society who act as agents in breaking their subject identity. In Goldins work, the subject is seen as self constructed, not socially constructed.

The idea of a power paradigm which has the controller and the controlee (very similar to colonizer and colonized), both creates, institutes and controls the relationship: “homosexuality emerges as a desire which must be produced in order to remain repressed.” (Butler, 1990) Freud’s theory can then be used to explain her idea that gender identity is based upon the homosexual taboo desire, where gender and sex identities are a response to the denial of the taboo:”gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity.” (Butler, 1990) This idea is further developed in Butler’s theory of the gender identity and the idea of the melancholy heterosexual is structured around Freud’s work on a child’s rejection of homosexuality and incest in childhood, where the theories on mourning and melancholy are drawn from Freud, who defines mourning as the reaction to loss, while melancholia resembles depression and a sense of loss (without actually losing anything), and then in turn, identifying with the [perceived] lost object.

If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of [the taboo against homosexuality], and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego-ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity. Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex but in the production and ‘disposition’ of sexual desire . . . dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal. (Butler, 1990)

The idea of the melancholic heterosexual can be summed up by the progression of Freud’s girl as a child desiring her mother, realizing that this is an incest taboo which in turn sparks melancholia, since the loss is perceived, not actual. This, in turn leads of identification with the mother, the girl realizing and denying homosexual feelings, which leads to a melancholic heterosexuality. The idea of the internalization is Freud’s, related to theories of introjection and identification, where the former taken from outside and installed inside (into the ego).

The idea of the homosexual man is taken up by Eve Sedgwick, who based one of her ideas about homosexuality on the term ‘male homosexual panic.’ She explains that in the last hundred years, while men have socially been enforced into closer interpersonal relationships, which inevitably lead to a panicked backlash to the unmediated closeness. (Sedgewick 1994) Although many feminist scholars wrote about the joining of females in sisterhood the female’s ability to bond should not essentialized, as Sedgwich writes, Lesbian panic also existed.

To summarize, identity is learned through the repeated acts which are created for us and is performed by us, the subject (whose existence is questioned). Identity is both performative (literature and discourse based and a performance (acting). The way to keep the check on the balance is to be aware of the construction, and as Sedgwick points out, to always question it. Neither sex, gender nor sexuality is fixed, and with this knowledge, the subject can break from the enforced identity that is acted out in society.