“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988)
Judith Butler

What is gender?

Gender is generally taken to be the socially constructed set of behaviors and characteristics which comprise identities such as masculine or feminine. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term in a binary manner: “The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones.” Regardless of whether there are two or more genders, most critics agree that gender refers to a socially constructed set of ideas which operate separately from the more essential traits of the biological body.

 

To put this in concrete terms, a person’s sex refers to a set of physical characteristics where most people are defined as either male or female according to the configuration of their bodily organs, hormones, chromosomes etc. Gendered characteristics, on the other hand, refer to things like the sorts of clothes a person wears, the way they style their hair, the way they move their body. One can see notions of gender influencing all aspects of a person’s life: their personality, career choices, interests, family roles etc.

 

This distinction between biological sex and social gender is what underlies Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement that “one is not born, but, rather one becomes a woman.” Writing in 1949, before the word “gender” had developed the above sense, Beauvoir points out that gender identity is taken on in response to a set of social and cultural forces which impose themselves on individuals. In this sense, gender does not come from inside, but from outside. It is not something that one is born with, rather it is something that one learns.

 

Judith Butler uses Beauvoir as their (Butler prefers the pronouns them/their) starting point and proceeds to define gender as “an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” As indicated by the title of the article, Butler understands gender to be a kind of performance. As people go about their lives, interacting with one another, they are like actors on a stage, continuously performing their gender in the way that they walk, use language, dress, stand, use body language etc. 

 

Looking more closely at the above quotation, we see two related ideas. One is that gender identities are tenuous and the other is that the performance of gender is repetitive. Since there is nothing real or substantial about gender, it is a tenuous or weak identity. There is nothing to it aside from a kind of act. And since it is so weak, it must be continuously repeated in order to sustain itself. This weakness therefore presents the possibility of changing gender norms. To change gender identity, the actors (us) just need to perform different roles. 

 

The gendered self

Let’s expand on some of the ideas above. For Butler, the body is “a set of possibilities.” In other words, there is no fixed, inner or essential meaning to the body. The way that people express their bodies is a socially mediated process – everyone does it a little differently according to the possibilities which are socially available at a certain time. So although people perform their genders according to their own choices, there are a set of social constraints within which they must work or struggle against. For example, it is not possible to appear naked in public. People doing this will be arrested. Repeat offenders will be imprisoned.

 

But setting aside social constraints, there is an important consequence to the idea that bodies have no essential meaning which connects to the idea of the self. When people talk of the self, it sounds like they have some kind of fundamental existence which comes first. So for example, someone might say “I am wearing a skirt.” The grammar of this sentence suggests that there is some kind of entity (this “I”) which is describing one of the ways in which it is performing its gender (by wearing a skirt). Butler, on the other hand, notes that “it is [...] clearly unfortunate grammar to claim that there is a ‘we’ or and ‘I’ that does its body.” What they mean is that there is no essential self which performs its gender. Rather, it is the performance of the body which conjures the self up. The self, in other words, is nothing more than the sum total of a particular body’s set of performances. There is no self outside of these performances. The self is brought into being through these performances.

 

Discipline 

“To be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of woman.” On the one hand, if gender is nothing more than a set of bodily acts, then, as we saw above, it is a weak and fragile construct which can be opposed or subverted simply by behaving or acting differently. On the other hand, Butler notes that “those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.” To varying degrees, people who do not conform to gender norms in their dress, language, behavior, mannerisms will likely encounter difficulties extending potentially to real violence. So although gender is performed, it is no simple task for people to write their own scripts.

 

Indeed, so powerful is the repeated performance of gender, that it is easily mistaken for something real. As Butler puts it “the performers of gender become entranced by their own fiction whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness.” To put it another way, gender is a socially constructed fiction masquerading as something natural. In effect Butler argues that social pressure to perform gender is so successful that gender does not look like a performance, it just looks like reality; it looks natural and normal. Anyone trying to resist gender norms will, by this argument, appear unnatural.

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Woman as a category

We started by distinguishing between sex and gender; sex is physical, gender is cultural. We might then assume that sex is real and gender is constructed. Butler, however, is not so sure. For even if we agree that bodies, in most cases, really can be divided into male and female, we need to consider how we come to know male and female bodies. While sexual difference can be reduced to differences in organs, hormones and chromosomes, we only ever come across males and females as bodies, which are performing their genders. As Butler puts it: “the body is only known through its gendered appearance.” In other words, when we encounter bodies, they are always already performing their genders. There is no way of knowing bodies outside of gender.

 

This insight has serious implications for feminism since, as Butler puts it, “the category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be a woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed situation.” If women are only known through gender and if gender is a series of oppressions against women, then the whole category of woman becomes unusable. We can understand this better through an analogy with the category of working class. Marxist theory tells us that under capitalism, the working classes are systematically oppressed. To be working class is to be oppressed. The solution to this oppression can only be found in the abolition of the working classes. Any attempt, for example, to be a proud member of the working classes would simply mean being proud of being oppressed.

 

If Butler is right and to be a woman means to be oppressed, then feminists would be participating in their own oppression by identifying as women. While Butler does not offer a specific solution to this problem, they are skeptical of the possibility of achieving political goals through traditional feminist methods. If, as they claim “it is not possible to know sex as distinct from gender” then new and radical forms of politics are called for.

 

As a feminist, Butler is aware of the strategic importance of rallying behind the category “woman” but is opposed to the celebration of “an essence, or shared cultural reality which cannot be found.” To claim that all women share an essence, is to claim that gender is real. Doing this is likely to confirm the “binary restriction on gender identity and an implicitly heterosexual framework for the description of gender, gender identity, and sexuality.” Butler’s point is that it is difficult to see how queer sexualities can be represented in a system which subscribes to the masculine/feminine gender binary.  

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Expression vs. Performance

Butler is clear that individuals do not express their gender, rather they perform it. This distinction is crucial. To express gender implies that gender is something that exists inside the individual and which people use their bodies to reveal or make known. It implies that gender is essential and preexists its expression. On the other hand, if, as Butler suggests, gender is performed, then gender is something which is created in the act of performing it. Individuals are not expressing some part of their inner being, rather they are repeating a set of cultural codes which they have learned from culture.

 

This is why Butler states of gender that “these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal.” In this understanding, gendered behavior does not reflect someone’s inner core or personality, rather, it is nothing more than the acts and gestures themselves. Gendered behavior does not tell us anything about an individual, it just shows us what the social norms of gender are. As Butler puts it: “the performance renders social laws explicit.” The performance of gender just shows us how people are supposed to behave.

 

In many ways, Butler is building on JL Austin’s ideas of performativity. One of the points that Austin makes about performative statements is that it makes no sense to describe them as true or false. Butler makes this same point about the performance of gender. They state that “if gender attributes [...] are performative [...] there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as an act of regulatory fiction.” For something to be true or false, it needs to be verifiable or to make reference (either correctly or incorrectly) to something else in the world. But if gender is a performance, it is simply what it is. It is not tied to anything fixed or real, but a set of acts which only look natural owing to what Butler calls sedimentation whereby over time, the repetition of gender acts becomes so familiar that it looks real. In this sense, there can be no right or wrong way to do gender.

 

To sum up, we can read the final sentence of the essay:

 

Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and  pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.

Here, Butler once again points to the tensions of gender performance. On the one hand, since there is nothing real about gender, one is free to “put on” whatever gender one wants to perform. On the other hand, there are real and potentially violent social constraints to the performance of gender. These conflicts form a site of fear and pleasure. Butler advocates for the subversive performance of gender since this will inevitably shake up heteronormativity. In further essays, Butler explores, for example, how drag artists reveal the performative aspects of gender.