Minutes for 26 March 2014

Emilia Truluck

26 March 2014

Reading: Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988)

I. Business

• When should we turn in final paper?
• Debate between last week of classes and time of the final exam; still TBD
• What will be on the final exam?
• The exam will be large but there will be a study guide
• In the past, there has been 10 quote identifications (what kind of feminism is this), some short answers
• This year, it will be 10-25 questions about something that we’ve had; we will be given a passage, and we should be able to identify the author, the time period in which it was written, and the main points of the argument

II. Butler: Gender Performativity

• We separated into our groups to apply the DAVS model to Butler’s article

Description

• binary, reified, naturalized conceptions of gender and sex (especially in feminist theory and practice) that reproduce and conceal compulsory heterosexuality

Analysis

• feminist misconceptions of gender as expressive
• gender as essential; e.g. born that way/unchangeable; you’re born male/female and are still expressing a natural gender, a sense that gender is natural, if you don’t do you’re gender properly you’re being unnatural
• gender as socially constructed; e.g. socialization averages, “roles”; these were created to critique the gender essentialist argument, draws a line between sex and gender, looks at the ways that roles are socially constructed; however, she says it still relies on a notion that there is an “I” inside which expresses gender, it still relies on a sense of “self” that is doing the expression

VS

• gender as performative and scripted by social sanction and taboo (stylized repetition of acts, citation)
• as a strategy of survival (not something that we happily express)
• gendered selves as compelling illusions that feel real
• we don’t pre-exist the gender that we are doing
• we become gendered selves by a stylized repetition of acts, citation of certain gender, performances; this way of thinking about gender is very attentive to temporality; doing gender must be legible, intelligible, recognizable as gendered; very relational, no matter how you’re doing gender it is referring to the way that other people are doing gender, all people are citing gender
• Gender creates the “I” (the “I” doesn’t pre-exist the gender that we’re doing); it isn’t that I am doing gender by wearing a skirt, it is that by repeatedly wearing a skirt, gender feels real 
• Performative she gets from speech-act theory: classic example is when the minister or rabbi says “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the words themselves do the act, “I quit” (in saying you are doing the act), coming out as a speech act, baby is born “It’s a…”; making it real through language
• We make gender real by the doing
• You also can’t say that there is a pre-existing group (women) that needs to be represented in a certain space

Vision

Subversion

Strategies

Subversion when possible