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Judith Butler's Gender Performativity · Acedra
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Judith Butler's Gender Performativity
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0:01
hi folks and welcome to a introductory video lesson about judith butler's theory of gender performativity i'm doing a video lesson because this is going to be one of the most difficult and yet canonical and important readings that we do throughout this course it's not a work of film theory it's a work of gender theory and a foundational work in what's generally known as queer theory so the first thing i want to do is provide some kind of context for how we get from
0:29
second wave feminism to queer theory queer theory is the name of an academic discipline that is both centered on thinking about non-normative sexuality and gender identity but also in the last say 20 years has moved toward a kind of way of thinking about normativity in general that is what are the structures of power that create um an aim to stabilize norms in general
1:02
um so first let's go back to second wave feminism the move from second wave feminism to queer theory that's emerging in the 1980s and 90s is a questioning of the criteria by which second wave feminists defined the term women the category of womanhood is in many ways obviously crucial for second wave feminism not just the kind of policy um revolution that was happening in 1970s feminism but also and more importantly for someone like judith butler the theory that was being put out
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shulam and firestone for instance as a second wave feminist so one question that queer theorists would ask of second wave feminists is how did they define this category of of woman because the category is actually not all that stable if you read a number of these texts so one way that the 1970s feminists might have defined womanhood was people that have a capacity for reproduction and you can understand why this would be an important category especially because
2:06
of the ways in which governmental powers uh sapped the rights of women to have um or cis women to have rights over their reproductive capabilities or you might think of the influence of freudian psychoanalysis which is certainly big for laura mulvey and schulima firestone in this case if you're a psychoanalyst feminist you might say women are those without the phallus um and that could simply mean say anatomical like the penis or it might mean something a little more abstract
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third use let's say that in a more sociological and nebulous definition of woman you could say those oppressed by men's objectification and this seems an even more difficult uh kind of thing to define especially if you want to say that um everyone is oppressed by men's objectification just to different degrees men are too um so let's think about someone like judith butler who would come on who would come in and say wait a minute what is a woman
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anyway and she'll say in the prologue the introduction to her landmark text her book gender trouble quote contemporary feminist debates over the meaning of gender the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism notice what she's saying here she's saying that contemporary feminists worry in a sense that they might not be able to define
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gender in a determinate and stable way and part of her aim in this book gender trouble is to investigate that slippery indeterminacy and a large part of what judith butler is going to do with her theory of gender um and gender performativity is to say that gender is largely socially constructed in many ways this is not an idea that originates with her um simone de bevoir who wrote a landmark feminist text the second sex in 1949 wrote famously one is not born but rather
4:17
becomes a woman a sentence that seems on the face of it to suggest a kind of social constructivist theory of womanhood one way you might think about what judith butler is doing is she's reading that sentence and she's saying keep going simone de bevoir keep pushing that idea further um what if we took this idea that one is not born but rather becomes a woman as a very serious thesis and investigated philosophically what it actually means in
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a precise analytical manner so one parallel idea um that i imagine most of you are familiar with um when we think of the uh the notion that gender is socially constructed or at least partly socially constructed is to distinguish gender and sex and butler might say that she didn't invent the idea that sex and gender are different but it is indeed a good start um so gail rubin writes gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes where sex is a kind of biological
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term which refers to chromosomes hormonal profiles or internal and external sex organs
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and gender which might define things like the spectrum of masculinity and femininity is a cultural term or refers to that which is cultural the characteristics that a society or culture delineates as masculine or feminine if we kind of branch out from this um there's been a um really kind of useful diagram that's circulating um on the internet that's a way of kind of breaking down a family of terms that seem to be part of the contemporary discourse
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for understanding the distinction between gender and sex and these corollary terms that butler herself will use gender identity meaning how you in your head define your gender
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attraction that is what kinds of people along a gender spectrum you find yourself attracted to if at all gender expression the ways that you present gender through your actions stress and demeanor biological sex the physical sex characteristics you're born with and develop and for for this class the gender-bred person diagram usefully distinguishes sexually attracted to versus romantically attracted to which is a way of acknowledging
6:46
the identities of sexual um or allosexual versus asexual um and uh romantic versus aromantic so if judith butler herself might say that she didn't invent the distinction between gender and sex but it's a good start for beginning to understand her theory of gender performativity let's look at one single sentence that i think is crucial for understanding her definition of gender performativity it's a definition of gender itself she writes gender is the stylized repetition of
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acts through time let's look at this sentence and not assume that we can understand what it means on the face of it i think we might understand each of these words we might recognize the word stylized and repetition and acts and time and gender but that doesn't mean that we will understand immediately what this sentence means putting all of these terms together so i want to just offer an
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attempt to think through some of these terms as a way of understanding the sentence itself so let's start with an act what is an act well walking is an example of an act why is walking a good example of an act partly because it takes place through time hold that thought in your mind now let's look at this uh other term stylized repetition of an act so walking in a particular way is a stylized act and i might say following judith butler's own theory that there is no such thing
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as a non-stylized act in other words try to imagine the way someone walks as being neutral not communicating any kind of information what you're looking at here is a point light display something that is used often in the psychology of perception and what i want to say here is a rather banal but important observation for someone like judith butler which is that when most people are asked to describe this in a gendered way even if these sequence of dots
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have no physical appearance they don't have a body that i can see they don't have a face um most people will identify this as a masculine way of walking we can just and and butler would think that that is significant not because there is an essential way of walking that is either masculine or feminine but it is hard to imagine a way of walking that isn't somehow interpreted as masculine and feminine in the world we live in in which the spectrum of masculinity and femininity
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is so pervasive and influential so when butler says gender is a stylized repetition of acts through time why does that through time matter when one way to talk about it is that our way of walking is repeated over time such that it becomes part of us so if butler wants to say that this manner of walking feels gendered in a way it's important that that gender expression always has the possibility of changing because it is merely an act that feels natural perhaps to
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a person but is not essential in the sense that it cannot change the possibility of change is very important for judith butler that's why one of the reasons she's so insistent upon thinking about gender as something that is akin to a verb rather than a noun now that it doesn't make sense to you that's where i want to go in this next kind of demonstration so let's imagine that judith butler is going to have a conversation with someone who doesn't understand her theory at all let's
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call that person zac efron and zach is going to pronounce himself as a man zack says zach is a man judith butler's problem with this sentence is not the word zach or the word man but the word is
11:05
she will say no zack we tend to think about gender as being but i want to be i want to think about it as something that you do through time that is your madness is a stylized set of behaviors or actions or expressions that you do through time butler says what is not simply a body but one does one's body gender should be a verb not a noun zach might say okay am i doing madness now as i'm flexing my body in a performatively masculine way she'll say yes but you were doing it before
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too what about now he might say with my clothes on so that i can't show my stereotypically masculine muscular body butler might say yes still with your clothes on your your clothes and hair and beard perform or do masculinity and he might say what about now with just my face she might say yes still you didn't realize it but you're narrowing your eyes to look smoldering in a conventionally or stereotypically masculine way then he might say oh i didn't do that on purpose i swear i'm
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not performing i'm just being myself butler might say who said anything about doing things on purpose here's where i want to get to this question of what performative means for judith butler and she actually answers this question in a fairly plain spoken and useful way so i'm going to play that brief video where judith butler herself answers the question of what performativity means as distinct from this word performance one thing to say that gender is performed
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and that's a little different from saying gender is performative when we say gender is performed we
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it's one thing to say that gender is performed and that's a little different from saying gender is performative when we say gender is performed we usually mean that we've taken on a role we're acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world to say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects
13:31
we act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman i was walking down the street in berkeley when i first arrived several years ago and a young woman who is i think in high school leaned out of her window and she yelled are you a lesbian
13:54
and she was looking to harass me or maybe she was just freaked out or she thought i looked like i probably was one and wanted to know but instead i just turned around and i said yes i am
14:06
and that really shocked her we act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that's simply true about us a fact about us actually it's a phenomenon that's being produced all the time and reproduced all the time so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start i know it's controversial but that's my claim okay so one of the main takeaways from
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butler's own account of what gender performance means is to say that we we tend to think that gender is a stable essential fact about a person but she's saying it is a phenomenon that is being produced and reproduced all the time and i might add in time so so the next crucial concept and this is where things get a little bit more dicey and a little bit more difficult is to understand the distinction between expression or gender expression and performativity because
15:09
judith butler will be somewhat critical of the concept of expression and i want us to understand what she means by this because this is a particularly difficult kind of idea so let's go back to zach zach says okay he understands this idea that he does his gender and gender is not a stable essential fact about who he is so he says okay i do my gender but i am still a man right she'll say well yes and no i don't like the word am once again she's critical of our linkage
15:42
of gender with to be verbs is am are you might say why not i'm a man who expresses his manness she might say zack you got it all wrong why do you think your madness is an expression he might say i was born a man and i feel like a man so i expressed that madness through my manly behaviors butler might say why do you think you were born a man and he'll say oh well because of my penis and xy chromosomes she might say well remember that crucial thing we started with zach
16:18
i said man not male gender not sex oh and then he might think about the difference and say okay so do you mean that uh it was because my parents named me zack a traditionally male name at least in the american context and dressed me in blue um a arbitrarily but concretely masculine color at least when it subscribes to the determinants of gender reveal parties and and they gave me tonka trucks a toy that is discreetly gendered masculine she might say okay you're on to
16:57
something you were thrown into madness which itself is historically variable judith butler might bring up the idea that the division between blue and pink as wrapping onto a gender binary of male and female is itself a very very recent idea in history and pink had nothing to do with women before the 20th century zach might say oh so it wouldn't make sense for me to say i'm expressing something that comes from the outside not the inside bingo your inner gender is not
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the cause of your outward madness it's the other way around in other words if judith butler really wants to emphasize the way in which aspects of gender are inscribed on bodies through behaviors and actions which are all socially codified she doesn't want to say so much that your gender is result of an interior feeling that precedes being thrown into a social world and here's where some
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people have issues with judith butler's theory of performativity and zach might say but what about trans or not are gender non-conforming folks are you denying that they express their inner gender butler might concede and say this is a great point and and this is indeed a point of debate on my work remember that even though gender trouble is one of the most important and canonical pieces of writing and queer theory it's in many ways one of the starting points and many queer
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theorists especially those who are trying to articulate the subjective experiences of trans experience are going to critique some aspects of her theory for this very reason that zac afron brings up um and to clarify some of those issues i want to play another video from from a youtuber who makes videos about various topics in philosophy um and social theory there are two big theories about what gender is and where it comes from gender essentialism says that whatever it is
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to be a gender is ultimately best explained by biology sex chromosomes usually social constructivism on the other hand says surprise surprise that your gender is socially constructed butler's performativism plays very much to the social constructivist angle because she thinks that gender identities and all of the expectations and rules that come with them are grounded in social norms julius cerrano says that gender performativism is in danger of being a little
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bit patronizing it's in danger of overlooking the fact that for a great many people their gender expression is what feels right for them it is in a way an expression of something inside them
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serrano thinks that both essentialism and social constructivism are incomplete she thinks that people acting against what essentialism says their gender should be based on their sex chromosomes occurs far more frequently than the essentialist can account for the essentialists will say that people with exceptional gender expressions come down to genetic anomalies but as a geneticist serrano thinks they occur far too frequently in the
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population for that to be true but at the same time she says people with exceptional gender expressions often display them from an early age supposedly before any kind of social conditioning could have set in so maybe the social constructivist is missing something as well the missing ingredient she thinks is what she calls subconscious sex which is how your brain expects your body to be she thinks trans people can be acutely aware that their subconscious sex
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does not match their physical body and therefore the identity that they were assigned on the basis of that body whereas cis people have a subconscious sex that does match their physical body and therefore they don't experience that very painful gender dissonance whilst she does think that subconscious sex is a matter of how your brain is wired she doesn't want to go full gender essentialist on it because she does think that social conditioning
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can play a huge role in how you interpret your subconscious sex what she's really trying to explain is what she's found as a trans woman which is that certain kinds of gender expression just
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feel right and that feeling right she says is a function both of your subconscious sex and the social construction of gendered identities so as an alternative she puts forward the intrinsic inclination model according to this theory you are intrinsically inclined to some of the kinds of behaviors that make up your gender if we take gender which is a spectrum and graph it against physical sex which is also a spectrum we get two overlapping bell curves just like if we graph
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height against physical sex and just like with height there are certain correlations that we can observe people with penises tend to be taller and tend to have certain kinds of gender inclinations but just like with any set of overlapping bell curves there are outlying cases the difference between this and the gender essentialist model is that whereas the essentialists would say that the outlying cases are down to genetic errors or anomalies the intrinsic inclination theorists can
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say that they're just examples of perfectly normal variation within the human species serrano thinks the chief advantage of this model is that it explains both why there are typical cases most people are in the middle of the bell curves and most people are therefore cis but also why there are some rarer but still perfectly normal cases i think serrano's theory is compatible with butler's gender performativism the subconscious sex needn't be a complete self that
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exists prior to being assigned a gendered identity it could just be as she says natural variation in the kind of gendered selves that feel right what all this gets at is that perhaps worryingly your identity as a gendered being may not be up to you serrano thinks that your brain can and definitely should be allowed to play a role in shaping your gender but she butler and de bouvoir all
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emphasized that gender is as much object as it is subject an object that is shaped and acted on by other people as well as you okay so i know it gets a little bit complicated especially when we're juxtaposing these fairly complex and apparently dissonant theories of gender julia serrano and judith butler but i just want to highlight the ways in which many different works of gender theory can come into conversation and at least for ollie thorne the youtuber he thinks
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that butler and julia serrano that their theories are not mutually incompatible so i just wanted to show you this as a way to think about debates um and ideas that have happened after judith butler in a way that's analogous to how judith butler is responding to the readings that we've done in the first four weeks of the course and of course even after this video there are many uh many years of
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queer theory and gender theory that have tried to move beyond or at least get in a conversation with um judith butler's landmark work all right and i'll see you in class next week thanks
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