Flexner Book Club Blog

Judith Butler totally saw me coming. In her preface to this week’s essay, Butler addresses my critique from two weeks ago that theory and reality are fundamentally disconnected. To explain to the reader that “there is someone here,”  behind the fancy words and the brilliant theories, she briefly documents her own activism within the LGBTQ movement and her struggle with gender identity.  I wish she had written entire books about this (perhaps she has?), critiquing that movement, and, by extension, all social justice movements, from the perspective of someone steeped in thinking about sex, power, and performativity. I wanted to hear more about her diagnosis of the LGBTQ movement as full of  “hopefulness and internal dissension.”

Instead of digressing into movement politics, Butler tackles my critique of her theory being too difficult to digest,  too far from reality,  by posing the following questions (all on p.97):

• “Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for ‘plain speaking’ or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life?”
• “Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty?”
• “Who devises the protocols of ‘clarity’ and whose interests do they serve?”

These are not easy questions, so instead of trying to answer them, I’ll pose a few questions of my own: Who is Butler’s audience? Does she want her theory to stay inside the academy, or does she want it to cross the radar of a layperson? In her preface, she says, “it has been one of the most gratifying experiences for me that the text continues to move outside the academy to this day” (page 96). Where is this text being used outside the academy? Is it being used by gender deviant/gender non-conforming individuals to help their advocacy efforts?

Let’s step back for a moment. According to a study released in February of 2011 by the National Center for Transgender Equality, transgender and gender non-conforming Americans were:

• Nearly four times more likely to live in extreme poverty, with household income of less than $10,000
• Twice as likely to be unemployed compared to the population as a whole.
• More likely to face a disproportionate amount of discrimination, especially if the trans individual is a person of color, in regards to housing, health care access, employment,  and harassment by law enforcement.

The list goes on and on (here’s the full report). Should we expect communities who are fighting for their very survival to get down in the weeds with Butler’s philosophical jargon? Do Butler’s theories matter to these communities? Or, thinking about it another way, is she bringing the concerns of the trans and gender non-conforming communities to light in academia, where they are seldom heard?

When you live in a house with two teenagers, it’s easy to believe that identity is performative. You don’t have to read Foucault to know that a brow piercing is some kind of inscription of the soul on the body. Over the last few years, I have seen a “fluidity of identities” in my household that bears out Butler’s idea about the importance of resignification and recontextualization (112). In this case, the contexts (adolescence, high school, dating) are some of the most brutal known to humankind; the norms, the most punishing. Still, somehow my children are emerging with what seems like a self-composed identity, or at least self-informed, and many of their peers seem to be similarly fortunate.

And yet, I know I cannot compare adolescence, as painful as it is, with living one’s life in the margins of gender and sexuality. I know that Butler’s call, in the Preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, for “the extension of. . . legitimacy to bodies that have been regarded as false, unreal, and unintelligible” (101) is still an urgent plea in 2011. We still have to imagine what the world would have to be like to make life possible for sexual and gender minorities (98). I think we are creating this new world little by little, with the increases in states recognizing and legalizing gay marriage, with talk shows featuring transgender people and discussions—and with women’s colleges, Bryn Mawr included, examining possibilities for inclusivity across the gender spectrum.

I have had the privilege of inheriting Butler’s theories; they inform my work and my worldview. And I must remember that, if we are making progress in “increasing the possibilities for a livable life” (103) for those outside a gender binary, it took Butler’s assertion that “genders can be neither true nor false” (111) and her debunking of any “true or abiding masculinity or femininity” (115) in Gender Trouble to bring us to this point. Her statements in Chapter 3 are powerful: by the end of the chapter, I emerged even more convinced of the hegemony of heterosexuality and the oppression of “masculinist domination” (115). Still, I felt the absence, alluded to in her Preface, of other factors. How do race and (non-Western) culture complicate her theories? And how do we address the complex intersections of identity?

Earlier this week, I received New York Magazine in the mail and was surprised to see what I perceived at first glance to be a bare-chested woman on the cover.  It turns out that the model on the cover is male-bodied and featured in the “The Prettiest Boy in the World” article, which is about Andrej Pejic’s career as a model for both men’s and women’s high fashion clothing.  I was quickly reminded that the “construction of coherence,” regarding gender, “conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant…” and that even being a Gender and Sexuality Studies minor and reading all the Judith Butler work you can get your hands on does not make you immune to subconscious compliance with gender coherence (110). Conveniently, reading Butler’s “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions” was helpful in looking back at how and why I assigned a gender to the model on the magazine cover and examining the magazine’s approach to covering the work of “the prettiest boy in the world.”

I would argue that gender is one of our most utilized “tools” in the navigation of society and culture.  Even those well aware of the way that the notion of gender operates as a constructed form of social discipline are prone to, probably due to a lifetime of socialization within the gender binary, evaluate those before them for a projected gender.  We use this “gender evaluation” to inform and organize our interactions with the world.  This is much of the reason that I subconsciously categorized the magazine cover model as “female,” based on the model’s body stylization and performance.  As Butler describes throughout Gender Trouble, gender is really a repetition of “…acts, gestures, and desire [that] produce the effect of an internal core or substance…” (110).  Thus, the interpretation of each others’ genders is a vehicle for gender performance to be equated with an “internal core or substance,” which refers to the “natural” connection that is often drawn between anatomical sex and gender.  Butler suggests that we are socialized to draw this connection between the act of gender and an inherent gender “core” because it effectively conceals the work of “political regulations and disciplinary practices” (111).

Pejic states, “I know people want me to sort of defend myself , to sit here and be like, ‘I’m a boy, but I wear makeup sometimes.’  But you know, to me, it doesn’t really matter.  I don’t really have that sort of strong gender identity—I identify as what I am…”  Throughout the remainder of the interview, Pejic remains gender-non-conforming, but the article’s author assigns male pronouns to Pejic.  The author, Alex Morris, seems to be writing about Pejic with an eye that is very much attached to the “illusion of an interior and organizing gender core” (110).  From Pejic’s anatomical sex, Morris manifests a gender identity.

Morris also wrote that Pejic and transsexual runway models are “sidestepping the gender issue altogether by not only passing as women but even managing to be a more ideal version of the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes.”  This statement is most alarming to me for several reasons, but discussing that could be another few blog posts, so I will settle with looking back to my first post about gender deviance and if deviance can ever truly escape societally prescribed gender ideals.  In this article, we see Pejic, who does not conform to gender, being glorified for their ability to “pass” as a woman, with the added bonus of not having those awful hips and curves.  (I hope my sarcasm is obvious).  What do you think?

I should probably be embarrassed to admit in a public forum that over the course of this summer,  I have become incredibly addicted to the fascinatingly disturbing TLC program Toddlers & Tiaras (sadly,  the season finale was last week, but (un)luckily,  I now have Lifetime’s Dance Moms to fill the void).

T&T has received intense criticism for its portrayal of the child pageant world,  a universe abound with flippers (fake teeth),  parents with an obscene amount of disposable income (children often compete in $2000+ dresses for significantly less cash prizes),  and little girls not yet potty trained rocking more eyeliner than a heavy metal band. The main critique of the show is its sexualization of young girls—in essence, that girls are being made into women before their time. Interestingly,  this critique operates within a heterosexual matrix—it doesn’t want to acknowledge children as sexual beings yet,  but it still acknowledges and assumes that they can and will become sexual beings,  and heterosexual beings at that,  when the culturally sanctioned time is right (for more on this notion that children-don’t-have-sexuality-unless-it’s-an-assumed-heterosexuality,  check out Kathryn Bond Stockton). The issue isn’t the gendered performance;  the issue is that the performance is out of time. Implicit in these critiques is that wearing make up,  dressing provocatively,  and sporting spray tans are all okay for the purposes of being attractive presumably for the purpose of attracting a member of the opposite sex—just not yet.

While I am certainly not defending the show (at least for the purposes of this entry) and acknowledge the aforementioned problem and a multitude of others with the child pageant world,  reading Judith Butler’s “Bodily Inscriptions,  Performative Subversions”  made me consider T&T in a new light. In this piece,  Butler points to drag as an example of subversion,  or that which “establish[es] that ‘[gender] reality’ is not as fixed as we generally presume it to be”  (101). Drag causes anxiety because it destabilizes the fictive and “falsely naturalized . . . unity”  (112) of “anatomical sex,  gender identity,  and gender performance”  (111). This destabilization “reveal[s] the performativity of gender”  (113),  threatening those naturalized categories which society needs to exist to continue to operate in a way that accepts and excludes certain bodies,  sexualities,  and genders.

I wonder if the anxieties over the children of T&T point to these glitzed-out girls as another example of subversion. That the gendered performance of a grown normative woman can be enacted by these girls in a way that stirs such controversy and scrutiny suggests that the “woman”  being performed by the girls is convincing enough to critics (or that critics think that the performances are convincing enough to viewers,  unspecified sexual predators,  etc). That this performance can be so easily co-opted by toddlers in a way that’s convincing enough to cause anxiety points to an unfixed-ness of the gender reality of,  in this case,  woman. Another dimension of the “unity”  of gender is its temporality—society wants gender to unfold according to a particular timeline,  and these girls illustrate that that timeline is also open to destabilization.

While Butler warns us that we have to be careful in deciding which parodies of gender are “effectively disruptive”  (113) of false realities and which merely “become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony”  (113),  the controversies surrounding Toddlers & Tiaras indicate a deeper anxiety over gender norms as they’re linked with time. While there are arguably many reasons to be uncomfortable by the performances of these gendered princesses,  how much of that discomfort may have to do with the fact that these girls actually reveal some of gender’s illusory powers?

Butler’s theory of the active performance of gender elicits questions related to my own research and teaching. I teach a course on medieval medicine and disease, and it seems that my students are perennially fascinated by the nuances of gender and embodiment present in medieval theories of sex difference. At one level, within the broadest framework of Aristotelian categories, all bodies were male. Women’s bodies were imperfect versions of male bodies, constitutionally too cold and damp to properly digest food (which then became transmuted into the humors via the stomach and liver) or extrude their genitals. Male bodies, characterized by a hot and dry complexion, had enough innate heat to digest food, and to extrude genitalia. Their innate heat meant that they could also get rid of noxious vapors that would otherwise build up within their bodies, causing illness. Body hair and regular secretions (mucous and semen, for example) were just two ways that male bodies naturally and perfectly purged themselves of toxins. Female bodies, on the other hand, had fewer options for releasing humoral excesses or putrid substances. They have less body hair, and only menstruate monthly (at best, keeping in mind that many women bore numerous children during their childbearing years, reducing their overall menstruation significantly).

Yet within this broad framework, a number of different theories of gender and/or sex arose and were debated to explain phenomena that did not fit into this broad Aristotelian framework. Many writers realized that complexion and sex difference existed along a spectrum that included viragos and effeminate men; that is, bodies that were physiologically, anatomically, and constitutionally “imperfect,” that did not conform to a strict Aristotelian or Galenic binary, and that resulted in gender that was performed wrongly, or at least in contradiction to established norms.

The one-sex body.

Several scholars of medieval and early modern bodies and sexuality have been influenced by Butler’s ideas, as well as Foucault’s (to whom Butler acknowledges her debt). The “one-sex body”is one such idea that has been examined in recent scholarship. This takes the Aristotelian idea to its extreme, that women’s bodies are imperfect inversions of male bodies.

However, it’s also been demonstrated that this idea, which did certainly exist in the early modern period, was limited to a particular time (several decades in the 16th and 17th centuries) and register (medical textbooks). While it’s certainly true that medieval gender was performed and constituted along specific norms, it’s also true that medieval notions of sex—and gender performance—were messier, more complicated, and less teleological than we might think.

Butler’s notion of the performance of gender was, as she eloquently states in the introduction to Gender Trouble, arose out of her own participation in different social movements and communities in which she lived for many years. “I went to many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds of genders, understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of them, and encountered sexuality at several of its cultural edges.” (95) I wonder if medieval notions of gender would complicate or change her own ideas, or if they would confirm them.