![]() ![]() Earlier, in a 1988 essay, Butler had likened gender to ‘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 actualised and reproduced as reality once again’. ![]() The basic idea is that gender is created by the very words and actions that appear, superficially, to be simply describing it after the fact. It’s against this background that Butler provides her definition in Gender Trouble (1990): ‘gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be’. A performative, then, is as much a repetition or re-creation of what’s expected as it is an act of individual agency. Society needs to accept the authority of the judge and the form of her declaration. What Searle noted is that, in order for a performative (the judge’s proclamation) to have any impact on the future, it has to adhere to certain conventions that have already been established. For example, when a judge declares a case closed, she’s not simply ending the trial, she’s setting off a chain of events – plaintiffs will be acquitted or indicted, and the courtroom adjourned. Butler was interested in Searle’s analysis of the way that performatives don’t simply do things, they also commit the people involved to future actions. Roughly 30 years later, Butler linked performativity to gender, making explicit reference to the American philosopher John Searle’s work on speech act theory. In a wonderful way, the neologism did exactly what it was describing – it made things happen in the world. This focus on the functionality of statements, not their truth or falsity, proved to be revolutionary, and the interdisciplinary enterprise of ‘speech act theory’ was born in its wake. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin described these types of statements, which entailed performing actions, as (you guessed it) ‘performatives’. To make a promise, for example, is to do the promising, not just to say something about it. In the mid-1950s, the English philosopher J L Austin pointed out that language is often a way of accomplishing things in the world, not only a means of describing it. The question Butler would want us to ask is: does my friend do this because she is a woman, or does the act itself contribute to making her so?Īlthough Butler is its most famous advocate, the concept of performativity is rooted in earlier observations about how language works. Such an acquiescence feels feminine, she said. I was recently on a road trip with a group of friends, and one woman observed that she always lets her partner, a man, drive her car instead of doing so herself. What’s at stake in performativity stretches into the minutiae of the everyday. ![]() And crucially, such repetitions are rarely performed freely. Rather, Butler insisted that gender resides in repeated words and actions, words and actions that both shape and are shaped by the bodies of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. For her, gender wasn’t predetermined by nature or biology, nor was it simply ‘made up’ by culture. But Butler was careful to avoid arguing for a simple split between nature and culture, or sex and gender. ![]() This catchphrase sets the ‘social’ against the ‘natural’, and implies that gender is merely an artificial layer, encrusted by choice onto the supposedly more fundamental reality of sex. It’s unfortunate that popular culture often reduces performativity to the idea that ‘gender is a social construct’. Her theory of ‘performativity’ upended ideas about gender by shedding light on the many processes that produce it, and the theory’s far-reaching consequences are still widely misunderstood. Most contemporary public conversations about what it means to be men and women will engage with some version of this thesis – a development that’s due, in large part, to the work of the American philosopher Judith Butler. These descriptions share the common assumption that gender is mutable, not fixed. According to the American rapper Young Thug, an artist at the helm of hip-hop who is known to occasionally wear dresses, ‘there’s no such thing as gender’ at all. It’s non-binary, it’s fluid, it’s ‘over’. Gender is burdened by a lot of adjectives these days. ![]()
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