What is Gender? Part 2
Part 2 of my talk from the Brooklyn Public Library "Sips and Scholars" Series
This July, I was lucky enough to be invited to give a lecture at The Bush through a partnership between the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where I’m a member of the associate faculty. The lecture was part of BPL’s Sips and Scholars series, which features BISR faculty giving public seminars at bars and venues across Brooklyn. I love these kinds of events, ones that introduce people to local resources like the library and provide access to rigorous thought-provoking conversations on important topics, without the traditional gatekeeping of higher education. There are more Sips and Scholars events coming up this August and the line-up is pretty fantastic. I recommend taking a look at the webpage and making time in your schedule to see some of my incredible colleagues speak.
Without further ado, here is a lightly edited version of part 2 of my talk “What is Gender?” You can check out Part 1 of my talk here.
By the time Judith Butler published their highly acclaimed book Gender Trouble in 1990, Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that the situation of “woman” in the world might be mutable, rather than fixed, had made its way into mainstream American culture.
In the 1960s and 70s, women’s liberation movements in the United States and Europe had upended social norms of gender in Western democracies, facilitated the integration of women into democratic politics, changed the way women experienced employment, and legalized certain forms of birth control and abortion, among other things. In these same years, Black and Third World liberation movements had overthrown colonial governments in places like Algeria, overturned legal segregation in some Western democratic nations, and created a vast canon of postcolonial theory dedicated to the philosophical and moral situation of the colonized. These movements intersected with contemporaneous liberation movements by sexual minorities: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and self-identified “transsexuals” (more on this terminology later) who publicly asserted their quest for liberation as a legitimate political goal from the 1960s onward.
By 1990, the HIV/AIDS epidemic had raised the stakes of social acceptance for what were soon to be called “queer” people; direct actions from groups like ACT-UP aimed to dramatize and publicize the deadly consequences of social stigma against sexual minorities as well as the human cost of government negligence and abuse.
It was in this fraught political landscape that Judith Butler entered the academic scene as a highly trained scholar of Western philosophy. They had written their dissertation and subsequent first book about contemporary French philosophers’ engagements with Hegelian phenomenology. It was from this years-long engagement with French theory that Gender Trouble emerged; not just as an intervention aimed at feminist theory, but also as a philosophical intervention aimed at the perennial question of subjectivity, refracted through the lens of gender.
In Gender Trouble, Butler explicitly engages the existentialist foundations of Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of sex to build their argument about the “trouble” of gender, asking what is lost when feminism is theorized through a purely heterosexual matrix.
It is rather surprising, all things considered, that Gender Trouble would come to have such a profound impact on academic discussions of gender, let alone become widely recognizable as the face of queer theory, considering how very academic it is in both its content and its style—something Butler has reflected on in their later work.1
Butler, like Beauvoir, departs from the notion that feminism might be in some sense finished by the 1990s—that this was a period considered by some to be “post-feminist.”
“It may be time,” Butler wrote in Gender Trouble, “to entertain a radical critique that seeks to free feminist theory from the necessity of having to construct a single or abiding ground” of identity. They go on to ask: “Do the exclusionary practices that ground feminist theory in the notion of ‘women’ as subject paradoxically undercut feminist goals to extend its claims to ‘representation’?”2
Part of what differentiates Butler’s critique of the category “woman” from Beauvoir’s is Butler’s engagement with lesbian feminist theory, something that did not exist as such in 1949. Lesbian politics and theory had cohered in the early 1970s as women’s liberation movements flourished, and by the late 1980s a whole host of lesbian writers, theorists, and philosophers had written about the philosophical and political positioning of women who were not sexually or romantically connected to men.
French theorist Monique Wittig, cited by Butler, had famously argued that “lesbians are not women,” but rather a kind of third sex capable of undoing heterosexual relations of power.3 Adrienne Rich, a contemporary of Butler’s, made waves when she published her seminal essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in 1980, where she argued that “Feminist theory can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of ‘lesbianism’ as an ‘alternative lifestyle,’ or make token allusions to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue.”
Butler, themself a queer person who has been variously identified as “butch, queer, trans* for over 50 years,” was active in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and intersex social movements before and during the writing of Gender Trouble. As they explain in their 1999 preface to the book, Gender Trouble “was not produced merely from the academy, but from convergent social movements of which I have been a part […] 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.”4
Their purpose in Gender Trouble, then, was not so different from Beauvoir’s purpose in writing The Second Sex. Just as Beauvoir aimed to understand why she, a renowned existentialist philosopher, defined herself primarily as a woman, Butler sought to “link the different sides of my life”—academic and activist—through a philosophical exploration of gender.
“One might wonder,” Butler writes, “what use ‘opening up possibilities’ [of gender] finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is ‘impossible,’ illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.”5
I emphasize Butler’s positionality as a queer activist and scholar because one major critique of their work in recent years has been that their arguments in Gender Trouble were too abstracted, thus divorced from political reality, and that their deconstruction of words and concepts like “woman” and “gender” went too far, rendering their theory of gender useless for the practical politics of queer and feminist social movements.
Butler has also been at turns lauded and critiqued for theorizing the “performativity” of gender. When it comes to Gender Trouble, most people would tell you that it is a book about “gender as performance” and would reference Butler’s analysis of drag to explain this argument.
This aspect of Gender Trouble, however, takes up only a small portion of the text and, like Butler’s deconstruction of gender, the “gender as performance” argument has been largely misunderstood in the years since the book’s publication. It is also important to note that Butler has expanded and revised their theory of the performativity of gender in subsequent writings.
So, what does it mean to describe gender as “performative”? These days, we might think of the word “performative” as a kind of derogatory judgement. We might link it to the phrase “virtue signaling,” and imagine someone on social media who we think of as being “performative” about a particular social issue. “Performative,” in other words, tends not to be a very positive concept in our contemporary culture. Using this set of connotations, we might assume that performative gender is a surface-level, infinitely changeable, and perhaps even inauthentic identity. By this definition, performative gender might seem like a suspicious conceptual framework because of its potential to dismiss gender identity as a fiction, something we cannot afford to do in a society that is actively trying to erase and criminalize non-normative genders.
This, however, was not Butler’s meaning. Drawing on the linguistic meaning of “performativity,” Butler analyzes gender through the lens of the performative speech act. A performative speech act not only describes a particular reality but changes that reality. A performative speech act not only says something but does something. The phrase “That is a tree” does not create a tree, for example, but the phrase “I do,” when said in the context of a marriage ceremony, changes social reality in that moment. The speaker goes from being unwed to being wed.
Butler explains that gender is not a “noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes,” instead “gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.”6 In other words, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”
To put it simply, and maybe rather crudely, gender is something like the idiomatic quandary: What came first, the chicken or the egg?
To return to Simone de Beauvoir, one “is” not a gender, one “becomes” a gender. This is clear from the moment when a baby is born, or even earlier, when a fetus is identified as female or male in utero. The doctor proclaims “it’s a girl,” creating the social reality the doctor claims only to describe. The birth certificate is filled out with an F marker under the category sex, a name is chosen by the family that aligns with the assigned sex, clothes are purchased that are either “girl’s” clothes or “boy’s” clothes, gendered pronouns are used by adults to refer to this new human, who eventually learns that these pronouns refer to her differently than they refer to so-called boy children. The child becomes that/it: becomes girl. Gender is done, and it continues to be done, every day through every small gesture, aesthetic choice, behavior, and word a person engages in or is engaged in, the two being effectively inseparable.
Butler describes gender as a “ritual social drama” in that it requires a performance that is repeated: “This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation.”
There is no clean slate before gender to which a human subject can refer. There is no “I” before there is a “she,” not because gender ontologically exists as a natural fact, but because there is currently no social reality in which gender does not constitute the subject.
Potential disruptions to gender cannot take place on the level of negation, according to Butler: one cannot simply escape gender. Instead, change happens at the level of repetition and resignification, a slow, collective, cumulative process by which gender begins to do something other than reiterate the naturalized truth of the heterosexual male/female binary.
It may surprise readers to learn that the word “queer” does not appear anywhere in Gender Trouble, even though the book is considered a foundational work of queer theory. This would certainly come as a surprise to many so called “anti-gender” activists or “gender-critical” (i.e. trans-exclusionary feminists), who claim that “gender ideology extremism,” to quote Trump’s executive order, is a threat to both American national identity and feminism.
But does “gender ideology” actually exist? And if so, is it really a creation of queer theorists like Butler?
Butler rejects the term “gender ideology” as a fictional category, arguing that it is a social construction. In an article from April of this year, Butler explains that “if there is no such thing as ‘gender ideology,’ if it is a phantasm conjured up for the purpose of opposing a raft of social policies benefitting women, children, and trans, queer, non-binary and intersexed people, then gender ideology itself can be said to be ‘constructed.’”
What reality, Butler asks us to consider, does this kind of language seek to create and normalize? What is the purpose of naming and defining “gender ideology,” something that does not in fact exist, only in order to prohibit it? What is someone like Trump trying to achieve by evoking this “phantasm” of gender? What is he trying to erase, distract from, or elide?
Stay tuned for part 3 of my talk, where I will delve into essays on transness and intersectionality by Susan Stryker and Cathy Cohen.
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“Both critics and friends of Gender Trouble have drawn attention to the difficulty of its style. It is no doubt strange, and maddening to some, to find a book that is not easily consumed to be ‘popular’ according to academic standards. The surprise over this is perhaps attributable to the way we underestimate the reading public, its capacity and desire for reading complicated and challenging texts, when the complication is not gratuitous, when the challenge is in the service of of calling taken-for-granted truths into question, when the taken for grantedness of those truths is, indeed, oppressive.” From “Preface (1999)” in Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2007. p. xix.
Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 7.
See Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Beacon Press, 1992.
Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xvii.
Ibid., p. viii.
Ibid., p. 34.