 |
| Judith Butler |
—Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss (1991)
In the passage above, Butler rehearses the theory of identity as performative, stated in impersonal (third-person) terms in Gender Trouble, with reference to herself. We see her own, experiential sense of how being a lesbian is differently important according to context (e.g., an academic talk on sexuality). When she says that since age sixteen, "being a lesbian is what I've been," we should hear the emphasis on the "-ing" in "being": she's been being a lesbian, bringing that aspect of herself into being through recurrent actions.
This idea that identity (being) is the product and not the ground of action (doing) finds perhaps its clearest expression in Nietzsche, who develops it in The Genealogy of Morals I.13 (you have this in your course reader):
A quantum of force is equivalent a quantum of drive, will, effect--more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed--the deed is everything. (p. 45, trans. Kaufmann)We might say in this spirit (awkwardly but memorably?) that there are no lesbians, only lesbianing (and no heterosexuals, just heterosexualing, etc).
Butler's generally critical attitude towards sexual identity categories, which she regards as confining and regulatory, sets her work apart from that of earlier theorists who claim "gay" or "lesbian" identities as sites of positive value and as bases for political rights. Thus Butler's work is associated with "queer studies," as opposed to "gay and lesbian studies." (We'll talk about this distinction more, and see more examples of it, over the coming weeks).
(n.b. - I'm indebted here to Paul Fry's excellent discussion of "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Theory of Literature (Yale, 2012); you can see him lecturing on Butler here).
"Gender" and "Sex" (outwittig Wittig)
While the English word "gender" is quite old, dating to the 14th century, the sense in which we use it, where it distinguishes culture from biology, is very recent. The O.E.D. describes this sense as follows:
3b. Psychol. and Sociol. (orig. U.S.). The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex.The first use in this sense is from 1945, in the American Journal of Psychology 58: 228: "In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’" The first non-specialized use given is from 1968, in Life magazine.
The gender/sex distinction was elaborated by psychologists studying what we now describe as transgendered people; they needed a way to distinguish biological from psychological sex. During the '60s and '70s, feminist theorists appropriated the sex/gender distinction for their own purposes (see the first chapter of Toril Moi, What is a Woman?, for a fuller account of this history).
 |
| "Garbo 'got in drag' whenever she took some heavy glamour part, whenever she melted in or out of a man's arms, whenever she simply let that heavenly-flexed neck... bear the weight of her thrown-back head." Butler's epigraph, N2542 |
The Norton's selection from Butler's Gender Trouble picks up just after her critique of Wittig. The first part of "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions" (2542-7) concerns the body as culturally "inscribed" or "constructed" or "constituted." Some of her language in this section is quite abstract, but she also brings these abstractions down to earth at a few points. For example: "this is the mode by which Others become shit" (2546). What does she mean by this? What sort of cultural constitution of the body enables this devaluation (or "abjection") of the other, and how does Butler contest this?
 |
| "the imitation that mocks the notion of an original is characteristic of pastiche rather than parody" (N2550). |
It will help to have a clear sense of this portion of Butler's argument before viewing Paris is Burning, so that you can begin to test out her claims about drag on the basis of what we see in the film.
Paris is Burning
Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary, filmed in the late '80s, focuses primarily on two groups or "houses" of gay men in Harlem who compete in drag balls. The two houses, House Ninja and House Xtravaganza, are divided largely along ethnic lines (black and Hispanic, respectively).
Drag in particular and female identity in general play different roles for different individuals in the film: some men go in drag only for the balls, others cross-dress in their everyday lives, and some are transsexuals who have modified their bodies surgically, or wish to. Yet "drag" also includes the performance of straight masculine identities (e.g. "executive," "soldier"), and many of the performers understand the identities that they perform as bound up with race and class as well; to look like an "executive," for example, means to look both white and wealthy.
The drag balls, then, are about the glamour of identities from which the performers, non-white gay men, feel cut off in ordinary life, and for the most part, the winner at a ball in the performance of one of these identities is judged by how close he comes to passing for the "real" thing; the primary intent--and intentions in these performances are surely complex, multiple--in the "executive" category, for example, isn't to mock executives, but to emulate the appearance of one. This means that the application of Butler's idea that drag is "parody" to this film isn't perfectly straightforward: if drag is about parody, what does ball culture parody?
The film will cut between footage of the balls and interviews with the participants, and sometimes to footage of wealthier and whiter parts of Manhattan; we should think critically about how the documentary constructs the relationship between the balls and the "outside" world.
Since many of the drag performances involve the imitation of media and film images, Livingston's own camera should be seen as more than just a passive recorder of events here. If the drag balls are in part about a longing for visibility and fame (and the wealth that goes with them), does the performance (or the longing) end when the ball participants talk on camera to Livingston herself?
Like Butler--who will point this out in "Gender is Burning"--Livingston is a white, Jewish, Yale-educated lesbian, and Paris is Burning launched her own career as a filmmaker, winning a major award at the Sundance festival (among others). Some critics of the film thus wondered if it was in part repeating rather than critiquing the inequalities of race, class, and sexuality that have structured the lives of its subjects. The drag performances themselves have been criticized as fundamentally misogynist; Butler will address some of these views in Friday's reading, but I think it's useful to have them in mind as possibilities before going into the film.
For some of the ball participants, Willi Ninja in particular, ball culture really did lead to wealth and fame: Ninja was already becoming a sought-after dancer and choreographer when filming for Paris is Burning ended. In the same year as its release (1990), Madonna released her hit single "Vogue," which draws directly on a dance style invented at the balls--in New York, she had met members of House Xtravaganza.
Many of the Hollywood icons that Madonna names in the song, and whose images David Fincher will recreate in the video, are also gay male icons: Bette Davis, Greta Garbo (see the photo and quote above), and Marlene Dietrich, among others. After you see Paris is Burning, the lyrics may sound a bit less like pop and a bit more like nascent critical theory:
Look around everywhere you turn is heartache
It's everywhere that you go
You try everything you can to escape
The pain of life that you know
When all else fails and you long to be
Something better than you are today
I know a place where you can get away
It's called a dance floor, and here's what it's for...
It makes no difference if you're black or white
If you're a boy or a girl
If the music's pumping it will give you new life
You're a superstar, yes, that's what you are, you know it.
"Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion"
That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.
—Butler, Gender Trouble (N 2548)
Strike a pose, there's nothing to it.
—Madonna
I'd like to be a spoiled, rich white girl--they don't really have to struggle for anything.
—Venus Xtravaganza
 |
| Willi Ninja |
—Pepper Lebeija
Take a family--it's the mother that's the hardest worker, it's the mother who gets the most respect.
—Willi Ninja
I'm trying to bring their [NYC women's] femininity back... it's nice to know, because it's attractive to men.
—Willi Ninja, on coaching women in runway walking technique
Butler's essay on Paris is Burning was published in her Bodies That Matter (1993). She writes the essay after an initial wave of responses to the film, and so is able to engage with critics of the film (chiefly bell hooks) as well as the film itself. (Indeed, the essay seems to engage in more detail with other critics than it does with the film).
The balls confront Butler with an example of drag that isn't clearly efficaciously "subversive": the performance style of the balls, appropriated from mass culture, is easily enough reappropriated by it. The performers remain vulnerable to a world where being "read" can cost blood and not just trophies.
 |
| Octavia St. Laurent |
One complexity that she deals with concerns what Foucault has called "the tactical polyvalence of discourses." Foucault's idea is that no discourse is intrinsically at the service of any particular interest group. What Butler confronts in "Gender is Burning" is the fact that if discourse is "polyvalent," it's nevertheless not quite a tool, not really analogous to, say, a wrench or a gun that fits all hands alike.
If one comes into discursive life through being called or hailed in injurious terms, how might one occupy the interpellation by which one is already occupied to direct the possibilities of resignification against the aims of violation? (123)If you find out the name for what you are is, say, "faggot," you'll be able to mock and transvalue the derogatory intent of the word, even use it as a term of endearment (as the men in the film sometimes do). Does this change anything though, really? How do you understand what Butler means here by "occupying" an interpellation, and "direct[ing] the possibilities of resignification against the aims of violation"? How does she distinguish the drag balls from the drag in mainstream movies like Tootsie (see 126)?
 |
| Venus Xtravaganza |
 |
| The cast of Dynasty, the '80s primetime soap opera that becomes a 'category' at the balls. |
I
The idea of all people "being in drag" is one that has come up in a separate Gender Studies class of mine, and this is how I make sense of this idea presented in Butler's work:
ReplyDeleteFirst, all clothing is gendered masculine or feminine, as can be easily seen by the split between "men's wear" and "women's wear" in any department store. Since gender is performative- it is a sort of repeated "acting out" that turns into actual "being," our gendered clothing is part of our performance. Finally, since there is nothing inherent about our gender identity within in ourselves (no core "essence of femininity" lies somewhere deep within my female body), every time we go to our clothes to pick out some clothing, we dress in drag in order to make our gender identity more believable. The only reason that people think female's wearing dresses is "natural" is because people with female bodies have continuously repeated the action; in reality, it still is drag, just socially acceptable drag.
I want to connect this concept of drag to how drag queens talk about woman with sympathy. To me, what this is a sign of is the concept of "passing." If drag queens learn to act enough like a woman and dress like a woman, the can "pass" in society by being perceived as by other's as actually having a female body. If certain drag queens have "passed" as a woman out and about in society, the may begin to experience what a being a woman feels like from the male bodied perspective (they also know what it may feel like to be a man out in society having man's body). Thus, drag queens can shed light on being a "woman" in society (separate from having a biologically female body) because they can actually be a "woman in society"-- it's all a performance! Being a woman is society is all about being able to line up the right signals and have other people recognize those symbols. Experience the effects of biological sex— hormones, pregnancy, etc.— is something different.
Overall, I know that Butler's theory is complicated and I'd really love to discuss these ideas I have presented more throughly in class on Friday.
Judith Butler’s reading from Bodies That Matter entitled “Gender is Burning” brought up a lot of interesting concepts that definitely resonated with my previous experience with discussions of gender. In every gender and sexuality course that I’ve taken at Stonehill College, gender has always been explained as an “act” or as a very fluid “performance.” This view of gender is disputed by Butler as she states, “To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that “imitation” is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations” (Butler 125). To suggest that gender in itself and the action of creating one’s own gender portrayal is a representation of hegemonic power is a new concept to me. In addition, I enjoyed the quote “This ‘being a man’ and ‘being a woman’ are internally unstable affairs. They are always beset by ambivalence precisely because there is a cost in every identification, the loss of some other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, a norm that chooses us, but which we occupy, reverse, re-signify to the extent that the norm fails to determine us completely” (Butler 127). This quote looks at the portrayal of gender as again, never natural. It almost states that we can indeed take the classifications that are thrust upon us, and then rework them. In the film, Paris is Burning, one aspect of the film that relates to both aspects of my blog post, was the portrayal of “Realness.” Not only were men in the film reworking their sexuality by performing women, but also were often judged in a category that showed their ability to act as a straight male. This highlights Butler’s argument that gender as “drag” works to strengthen hegemonic ideals of sexuality.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the movie. It was eye opening and showed me things I have never thought of before. I have heard of the movie so I am glad I finally got to watch it. I liked the readings but had some trouble understanding them. I don't think I completely grasped all of her points. I think I might be confusing some of her arguments and beliefs with those of the critics of the film and other perspectives she mentions. Drag can be used as a way to break down the barriers and black/white-ness of sex and gender. Life is grey. She mentions that imitating the dominant norms may calls these into question and get people thinking. It makes things ambivalent. Heterosexuality is our default and seen as the norm. She mentions that this is seen in movies.In movies where there is drag, "heterosexuality can concede its lack of originality and naturalness but still hold its power" (126).
ReplyDeleteI have always thought of drag as big, flamboyant, and showgirl, much like one of them was talking about how it used to be. It surprised me that they had all kinds of categories and how some of these were "normal" or everyday living. They were trying to be something they are not. I think I understand how that can be fun or helpful but it made me sad that they wanted to pass off as real. They wanted to be able to blend because they were not accepted in society. No one should have to change who they are.
So lets talk gender identification. Personally, I identify as being a straight female... although I guess that could be argued a million different ways by the different theorists we've looked at. Judith Butler identifies as a lesbian, which also means that she identifies as a female just by virtue of what the word "lesbian" means... but wait, aren't all women lesbians? Where Wittig at??
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this is deteriorating. Butler says that she has identified as being a lesbian since she was sixteen years old, which I feel is a pretty standard age to start really understanding your sexuality. But then I started thinking about "Paris is Burning"... some of the people in the film were as young as thirteen, and although they did not say outright that they were gay, it was pretty clear from the context. It amazes me that we can readily identify with sexuality so early in our lives when there really are so many grey areas in sexual preference alone (at least, according to everything we've read). I tried to imagine being thirteen years old and trying to wrap my mind around the concept of drag balls and the world of homosexuality portrayed throughout the film. I imagine Freud would have so much to say about all of this.
All in all, I really enjoyed both the Judith Butler reading and Jennie Livingston's "Paris is Burning." I felt that the movie really helped with the understanding of the reading. Seeing the video a second time allowed me to listen more to the nuances of the different interactions.
Butler asks some important questions regarding the function of the camera and the role it plays in the transubstantiation of the men into women. Along with their desire to become or imitate women, the black and latino men also share a desire to gain social and economic privilege. Therefore, their performances do not end when the filming of the balls end, but continue in the interviews with Livingston. These men believe that their portrayals in the film could lead to great fame and fortune (and it does for Willi Ninja), but that is a misconception. Butler asks: "What does it mean to eroticize the holding out of that promise, as hooks asks, when the film will do well, but the lives that they record will remain substantially unaltered?" Essentially, the camera and Livingston end up holding a sense of power over the men in the film, and this power is associated with the possession of the phallus (furthermore, Butler calls the camera a "phallic instrument"). Although Livingston is herself a lesbian, she is white, and this seems to create an establishment of power over her colored subjects. I think it will be interesting to discuss how power functions in the film and how Butler interprets it in class on Friday.
ReplyDeleteIn a very self-contradictory manner, I believe that gender is a fixed biological concept - if someone has a vagina, she's female in my mind - and also believe that people should be allowed to classify themselves however they would like to. As many people, Butler included, have commented, clothing is the most obvious indicator of a person's gender; people don't rely on exposing themselves to others in order for their sexual identities to be known. But, if a man can pose as a woman successfully enough, his facade is almost believable. While reading "Gender Trouble" I was almost convinced that gender was mostly a show; that drag was simply a freedom of expression that couldn't (or shouldn't?) be offensive to us 'real' women. However, upon watching specific drag queens in "Paris is Burning," Butler was replaced by Freud's "The Uncanny". He describes this uncanniness as something that should be familiar, but is slightly 'off' or 'wrong'. I noticed this especially through Venus Xtravaganza's performance throughout his/her interviews. I'm not trying to be close-minded, but Venus struck me as uncanny because I truly might have believed that she had been born with the physiological traits of a woman if I didn't look too closely (or hear his voice that was exaggeratedly disconcerting due to the forced girlish purr he was using.) Additionally, I was slightly offended by his portrayal of what a woman is; I am not money-obsessed, I do not think that because genetically I'm a tiny person I am a better woman, and I am not consumed by others' perceptions of me. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about dressing in drag yet, but I'm very fascinated by it and am glad that I was exposed to the concept.
ReplyDeleteI had never thought about drag as being fundamentally misogynistic before, and it's an interesting consideration, but I agree that the issue is a lot more complex than that. There is certainly a difference between the people we saw in the film and the guys I see every Halloween dressed as exaggerated/degrading caricatures of cheerleaders. The people in the film didn't seem to have any ill will or ill intention towards women in general. Some of them seemed to idolize women, or at least the idea of women. The younger ones especially seemed to put the concept of the woman up on a pedestal. However, they are yearning for an ideal without seeming to fully understand the implications or the reality of this ideal. One of the older men in the film points out that women really aren't treated much better, on the grand scheme of things. If Venus had been female genetically, or had a sex change, this would likely not have awarded her much more money or status than she already had. Being female wouldn't make her rich, and she would have been just as likely to be killed or mistreated by her clients.
ReplyDeleteI thought Paris is Burning was an eye-opening documentary about the portrayal of performing in drag and performing at balls. I had never been aware of such a large community of people who have come together over the act of dressing in drag. I thought it was particularly interesting how they viewed the “mother” of the houses as having the most power and respect and being the hardest workers, while in society and history, the role of mothers as generally been ignored or taken for granted. Maybe it’s because these people have no home and can therefore appreciate what they don’t have better, and have since filled that void in their life with someone they can choose to respect. I also found it interesting the types of people they want to portray: people in roles they would usually never fit into, including college/university student, school girl, an executive, or a “town and country” person. These roles are considered as the societal norm and what everyone should aspire to be; if you don’t actually fit into these roles, you are other. The opportunity to portray these roles at balls gives them a momentary chance to be what society tells them they should be but can never be. One person said specifically that drag is not a satire, rather, being able to be.
ReplyDeleteWhile some of Judith Butler’s arguments were a bit difficult to follow, some that I was able to grasp the concept of I thought were rather interesting. One that particularly stood out to me was her claim in Gender is Burning is that “subversion might be derived from the very conditions of violation.” She goes on to give examples, such as “sex” is an instrument or effect of “sexism” or how “gender” only exists in the services of heterosexism. It brings us back to what we discussed earlier in the semester about how once “homosexual” was given a label and definition, people began to feel even more threatened by it since it was named and brought into the public social dialogue, rather than being left behind closed doors (both literally and metaphorically).
P.S. Gender isn’t a “fixed biological concept”…………..?????????? (It’s a social construct?? Maybe I’m being oversensitive about this but felt obligated to respond…ish…)