These descriptions share the common assumption that gender is
mutable, not fixed. 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. 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.
It’s unfortunate that popular culture often reduces performativity to the idea that ‘gender is a social construct’. 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. But Butler was careful to avoid arguing for a simple split between nature and culture, or sex and gender. For her, gender wasn’t predetermined by nature or biology, nor was it simply ‘made up’ by culture. 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. And crucially, such repetitions are rarely performed freely.
What’s at stake in performativity stretches into the minutiae of the everyday. 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. Such an acquiescence
feels feminine, she said. 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?
Although Butler is its most famous advocate, the concept of performativity is rooted in earlier observations about how language works. 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. To make a promise, for example, is to do the promising, not just to say something about it. In
How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin described these types of statements, which entailed performing actions, as (you guessed it) ‘performatives’. 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 a wonderful way, the neologism did exactly what it was describing – it made things happen in the world.
Roughly 30 years later, Butler linked performativity to gender, making explicit reference to the American philosopher John Searle’s work on speech act theory. 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. 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. 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. Society needs to accept the authority of the judge and the form of her declaration. A performative, then, is as much a repetition or re-creation of what’s expected as it is an act of individual agency.
