Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory
Judith Butler
Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Dec., 1988), pp. 519-531.
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Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory
Judith Butler
Philosophers rarely think about acting in the theatrical sense, but they do have a
discourse of 'acts' that maintains associative semantic meanings with theories of
performance and acting. For example, John Searle's 'speech acts,' those verbal assurances
and promises which seem not only to refer to a speaking relationship, but
to constitute a moral bond between speakers, illustrate one of the illocutionary gestures
that constitutes the stageof the analytic philosophy of language. Further, 'action
theory,' a domain of moral philosophy, seeks to understand what it is 'to do' prior
to any claim of what one ought to do. Finally, the phenomenological theory of 'acts,'
espoused by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and George Herbert Mead,
among others, seeks to explain the mundane way in which social agents constitute
social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign.
Though phenomenology sometimes appears to assume the existence of a choosing
and constituting agent prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting
acts), there is also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that
takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.
When Simone de Beauvoir claims, "one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman,"
she is appropriating and reinterpreting this doctrine of constituting acts from the
phenomenological tradition.' In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or
locus of agency from which various acts proceede; rather, it is an identity tenuously
constituted in time-an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further,
gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood
as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments
of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation
Judith Butler is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University. She is the
author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflection in Twentieth-Century France. She has
published articles in post-structuralist and gender t h e o ~ .
'For a further discussion of Beauvoir's feminist contribution to phenomenological theory, see my
"Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir's The Second Sex," Yale French Studies 172 (1986).
519
520 / Judith Butler
moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to
one that requires a conception of a constituted social temporality. Significantly,if gender
is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of
substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment
which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe
and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized
repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the
possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between
such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive
repetition of that style.
Through the conception of gender acts sketched above, I will try to show some
ways in which reified and naturalized conceptions of gender might be understood
as constituted and, hence, capable of being constituted differently. In opposition to
theatrical or phenomenological models which take the gendered self to be prior to
its acts, I will understand constituting acts not only as constituting the identity of
the actor, but as constituting that identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief.
In the course of making my argument, I will draw from theatrical, anthropological,
and philosophical discourses, but mainly phenomenology, to show that what is called
gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and
taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its
reified status.
I. SexIGender: Feminist and Phenomenological Views
Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality
that assume that the meaning of women's social existence can be derived from
some fact of their physiology. In distinguishing sex from gender, feminist theorists
have disputed causal explanations that assume that sexdictates or necessitates certain
social meanings for women's experience. Phenomenological theories of human embodiment
have also been concerned to distinguish between the various physiological
and biological causalities that structure bodily existence and the meanings that embodied
existence assumes in the context of lived experience. In Merleau-Ponty's
reflections in The Phenomenology of Perception on "the body in its sexual being," he
takes issue with such accounts of bodily experience and claims that the body is "an
historical idea" rather than "a natural specie^."^ Significantly, it is this claim that
Simone de Beauvoir cites in The Second Sex when she sets the stage for her claim that
"woman," and by extension, any gender, is an historical situation rather than a natural
fact."
In both contexts, the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions
of the body are not denied, but reconceived as distinct from the process by which
the body comes to bear cultural meanings. For both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty,
ZMauriceMerleau-Ponty, "The Body in its Sexual Being," in The Phenomenology of Perception, trans.
Colin Smith (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
3Simonede Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), 38.
PERFORMANCE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION 1 521
the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and
historical possibilities, a complicated process of appropriation which any phenomenological
theory of embodiment needs to describe. In order to describe the gendered
body, a phenomenological theory of constitution requires an expansion of the conventional
view of acts to mean both that which constitutes meaning and that through
which meaning is performed or enacted. In other words, the acts by which gender
is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts. My
task, then, isto examinein what ways gender isconstructed through specificcorporeal
acts, and what possibilities exist for the cultural transformation of gender through
such acts.
Merleau-Ponty maintains not only that the body is an historical idea but a set of
possibilities to be continually realized. In claiming that the body is an historical idea,
Merleau-Ponty means that it gains its meaning through a concrete and historically
mediated expression in the world. That the body is a set of possibilities signifies (a)
that its appearancein the world, for perception, is not predetermined by some manner
of interior essence, and (b) that its concrete expression in the world must be understood
as the taking up and rendering specific of a set of historical possibilities.
Hence, there is an agency which is understood as the process of rendering such
possibilities determinate. These possibilities are necessarily constrained by available
historical conventions. The body is not a self-identical or merely factic materiality; it
is a materiality that bears meaning, if nothing else, and the manner of this bearing
is fundamentally dramatic. By dramatic I mean only that the body is not merely
matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. One is not simply
a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does
one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors
and successors as well.
It is, however, clearly unfortunate grammar to claim that there is a 'we' or an 'I'
that does its body, as if a disembodied agency preceded and directed an embodied
exterior. More appropriate, I suggest, would be a vocabulary that resists the substance
metaphysics of subject-verb formations and relies instead on an ontology of present
participles. The 'I' that is its body is, of necessity, a mode of embodying, and the
'what' that it embodies is possibilities. But here again the grammar of the formulation
misleads, for the possibilities that are embodied are not fundamentally exterior or
antecedent to the process of embodying itself. As an intentionally organized materiality,
the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed
by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation,
as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a
historical situation.
To do, to dramatize, to reproduce, these seem to be some of the elementary
structures of embodiment. This doing of gender is not merely a way in which embodied
agents are exterior, surfaced, open to the perception of others. Embodiment
clearly manifests a set of strategies or what Sartre would perhaps have called a style
of being or Foucault, "a stylistics of existence." This style is never fully self-styled,
for living styles have a history, and that history conditions and limits possibilities.
Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an 'act,' as it were, which is both
522 / Judith Butler
intentional and performative, where 'performative' itself carries the double-meaning
of 'dramatic' and 'non-referential.'
When Beauvoir claims that 'woman' is a historical idea and not a natural fact, she
clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender,
as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity. Tobe femaleis, according
to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have
become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to
induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an
historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal
project. The notion of a 'project', however, suggests the originating force of a radical
will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term
'strated better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance
alwaysand variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance
with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what 'humanizes'
individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender
right are regularly punished. Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses
or externalizes nor an objectiveideal to which gender aspires; because gender
is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those
acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly
conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain
discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its
own production. The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions
whereby the construction compels one's belief in its necessity and naturalness. The
historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other
than those punitively regulated cultural fictions that are alternately embodied and
disguised under duress.
How useful is a phenomenological point of departure for a feminist description of
gender? On the surface it appears that phenomenology shares with feminist analysis
a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience, and in revealing the way in
which the world is produced through the constituting acts of subjective experience.
Clearly, not all feminist theory would privilege the point of view of the subject,
(Kristeva once objected to feminist theory as 'too e~istentialist')~and yet the feminist
claim that the personal is political suggests, in part, that subjective experience is not
only structured by existing political arrangements, but effects and structures those
arrangements in turn. Feminist theory has sought to understand the way in which
systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced
through individual acts and practices, and how the analysis of ostensibly personal
situations is clarified through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural
context. Indeed, the feminist impulse, and I am sure there is more than one, has
often emerged in the recognition that my pain or my silence or my anger or my
perception is finally not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural
situation which in turn enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways.
The personal is thus implicitly political inasmuch as it is conditioned by shared social
'Julia Kristeva, Histoire d'amour (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1983), 242.
PERFORMANCE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION 1 523
structures, but the personal has also been immunized against political challenge to
the extent that publiclprivate distinctions endure. For feminist theory, then, the
personal becomes an expansive category, one which accommodates, if only implicitly,
politicalstructures usually viewed as public. Indeed, the very meaning of the political
expands as well. At its best, feminist theory involves a dialectical expansion of both
of these categories. My situation does not cease to be mine just because it is the
situation of someone else, and my acts, individual as they are, nevertheless reproduce
the situation of my gender, and do that in various ways. In other words, there is,
latent in the personal is political formulation of feminist theory, a supposition that
the life-world of gender relations is constituted, at least partially, through the concrete
and historically mediated acts of individuals. Considering that "the" body is invariably
transformed into his body or her body, the body is only known through its gendered
appearance. It would seem imperative to consider the way in which this gendering
of the body occurs. My suggestion is that the body becomes its gender through a
series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time. From a
feminist point of view, one might try to reconceive the gendered body as the legacy
of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or
fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic.
The feminist appropriation of the phenomenological theory of constitution might
employ the notion of an act in a richly ambiguous sense. If the personal is a category
which expands to include the wider political and social structures, then the acts of
the gendered subject would be similarly expansive. Clearly, there are political acts
which are deliberate and instrumental actions of political organizing, resistance collective
intervention with the broad aim of instating a more just set of social and
political relations. There are thus acts which are done in the name of women, and
then there are acts in and of themselves, apart from any instrumental consequence,
that challenge the category of women itself. Indeed, one ought to consider the futility
of a politicalprogram which seeks radically to transform the socialsituation of women
without first determining whether 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. In
an understandable desire to forge bonds of solidarity, feminist discourse has often
relied upon the category of woman as a universal presupposition of cultural experience
which, in its universal status, provides a false ontological promise of eventual
political solidarity. In a culture in which the false universal of 'man' has for the most
part been presupposed as coextensive with humanness itself, feminist theory has
sought with success to bring female specificityinto visibilityand to rewrite the history
of culture in terms which acknowledge the presence, the influence, and the oppression
of women. Yet, in this effort to combat the invisibility of women as a category
feminists run the risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be
representative of the concrete lives of women. As feminists, we have been less eager,
I think, to consider the status of the category itself and, indeed, to discern the
conditions of oppression which issue from an unexamined reproduction of gender
identities which sustain discrete and binary categories of man and woman.
When Beauvoir claims that woman is an "historical situation," she emphasizes that
the body suffers a certain cultural construction, not only through conventions that
sanction and proscribe how one acts one's body, the 'act' or performance that one's
524 1 Judith Butler
body is, but also in the tacit conventions that structure the way the body is culturally
perceived. Indeed, if gender is the cultural significance that the sexed body assumes,
and if that significance is codetermined through various acts and their cultural perception,
then it would appear that from within the terms of culture it is not possible
to know sex as distinct from gender. The reproduction of the category of gender is
enacted on a large political scale, as when women first enter a profession or gain
certain rights, or are reconceived in legal or political discourse in significantly new
ways. But the more mundane reproduction of gendered identity takes place through
the various ways in which bodies are acted in relationship to the deeply entrenched
or sedimented expectations of gendered existence. Consider that there is a sedimentation
of gender norms that produces the peculiar phenomenon of a natural sex,
or a real woman, or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and that
this is a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which,
in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist
in a binary relation to one another.
11. Binary Genders and the Heterosexual Contract
To guarantee the reproduction of a given culture, various requirements, wellestablished
in the anthropological literature of kinship, have instated sexual reproduction
within the confines of a heterosexually-based system of marriage which
requires the reproduction of human beings in certain gendered modes which, in
effect, guarantee the eventual reproduction of that kinship system. As Foucault and
others have pointed out, the association of a natural sex with a discrete gender and
with an ostensibly natural 'attraction' to the opposing sexlgender is an unnatural
conjunction of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interest^.^ Feminist
cultural anthropology and kinship studies have shown how cultures are governed
by conventions that not only regulate and guarantee the production, exchange, and
consumption of material goods, but also reproduce the bonds of kinship itself, which
require taboos and a punitive regulation of reproduction to effect that end. LeviStrauss
has shown how the incest taboo works to guarantee the channeling of sexuality
into various modes of heterosexual marriage,6 Gayle Rubin has argued convincingly
that the incest taboo produces certain kinds of discrete gendered identities
and se~ualities.~My point is simply that one way in which this system of compulsory
heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into
discrete sexes with 'natural' appearances and 'natural' heterosexual dispositions.
Although the enthnocentric conceit suggests a progression beyond the mandatory
structures of kinship relations as described by Levi-Strauss, I would suggest, along
with Rubin, that contemporary gender identities are so many marks or "traces" of
'See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Random House, 1980), 154: "the notion of 'sex' made it possible to group together, in an artificial
unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled
one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle . . .".
%ee Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).
'Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an
Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 178-85.
PERFORMANCE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION 1 525
residual kinship. The contention that sex, gender, and heterosexuality are historical
products which have become conjoined and reified as natural over time has received
a good deal of critical attention not only from Michel Foucault, but Monique Wittig,
gay historians, and various cultural anthropologists and social psychologists in recent
years.8These theories, however, still lack the critical resources for thinking radically
about the historical sedimentation of sexuality and sex-related constructs if they do
not delimit and describe the mundane manner in which these constructs are produced,
reproduced, and maintained within the field of bodies.
Can phenomenology assist a feminist reconstruction of the sedimented character
of sex, gender, and sexuality at the level of the body? In the first place, the phenomenological
focus on the various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and
assumed provides a felicitous starting point for the feminist effort to understand the
mundane manner in which bodies get crafted into genders. The formulation of the
body as a mode of dramatizing or enacting possibilities offers a way to understand
how a cultural convention is embodied and enacted. But it seems difficult, if not
impossible, to imagine a way to conceptualize the scale and systemic character of
women's oppression from a theoretical position which takes constituting acts to be
its point of departure. Although individual acts do work to maintain and reproduce
systems of oppression, and, indeed, any theory of personal political responsibility
presupposes such a view, it doesn't follow that oppression is a sole consequence of
such acts. One might argue that without human beings whose various acts, largely
construed, produce and maintain oppressive conditions, those conditions would fall
away, but note that the relation between acts and conditions is neither unilateral nor
unmediated. There are social contexts and conventions within which certain acts not
only become possible but become conceivable as acts at all. The transformation of
social relations becomes a matter, then, of transforming hegemonic social conditions
rather than the individual acts that are spawned by those conditions. Indeed, one
runs the risk of addressing the merely indirect, if not epiphenomenal, reflection of
those conditions if one remains restricted to a politics of acts.
But the theatrical sense of an "act" forces a revision of the individualist assumptions
underlying the more restricted view of constituting acts within phenomenological
discourse. As a given temporal duration within the entire performance, "acts" are a
shared experience and 'collective action.' Just as within feminist theory the very
category of the personal is expanded to include political structures, so is there a
theatrically-based and, indeed, less individually-oriented view of acts that goes some
of the way in defusing the criticism of act theory as 'too existentialist.' The act that
gender is, the act that embodied agents are inasmuch as they dramatically and actively
embody and, indeed, wear certain cultural significations, is clearly not one's act alone.
Surely, there are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender, but that one
does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions, is
clearly not a fully individual matter. Here again, I don't mean to minimize the effect
'See my "Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault," in Feminism as Critique,
ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucila Cornell (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987[distributed by University of
Minnesota Press]).
526 / Judith Butler
of certain gender norms which originate within the family and are enforced through
certain familial modes of punishment and reward and which, as a consequence,
might be construed as highly individual, for even there family relations recapitulate,
individualize, and specify pre-existing cultural relations; they are rarely, if ever,
radically original. The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense,
an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an
act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who
make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and
reproduced as reality once again. The complex components that go into an act must
be distinguished in order to understand the kind of acting in concert and acting in
accord which acting one's gender invariably is.
In what senses, then, is gender an act? As anthropologist Victor Turner suggests
in his studies of ritual social drama, social action requires a performance which is
repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of
meanings already socially established; it is the mundane and ritualized form of their
legitirnati~n.~When this conception of social performance is applied to gender, it is
clear that although there are individual bodies that enact these significations by
becoming stylized into gendered modes, this "action" is immediately public as well.
There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public nature
is not inconsequential; indeed, the performance is effected with the strategic aim of
maintaining gender within its binary frame. Understood in pedagogical terms, the
performance renders social laws explicit.
As a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or project
that reflects a merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed or inscribed upon
the individual, as somepost-structuralist displacements of the subjectwould contend.
The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient
of wholly pre-pen cultural relations. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the
cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies. Actors are always already on
the stage, within the terms of the performance. Just as a script may be enacted in
various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the
gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts
interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.
ySeeVictor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1974). Clifford
Geertz suggests in "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Thought," in Local Knowledge, Further Essays
in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983),that the theatrical metaphor is used by
recent social theory in two, often opposing, ways. Ritual theorists like Victor Turner focus on a
notion of social drama of various kinds as a means for settling internal conflicts within a culture
and regenerating social cohesion. On the other hand, symbolic action approaches, influenced by
figures as diverse as Emile Durkheim, Kenneth Burke, and Michel Foucault, focus on the way in
which political authority and questions of legitimation are thematized and settled within the terms
of performed meaning. Geertz himself suggests that the tension might be viewed dialectically; his
study of political organization in Bali as a "theatre-state" is a case in point. In terms of an explicitly
feminist account of gender as performative, it seems clearto me that an account of gender as ritualized,
public performance must be combined with an analysis of the political sanctions and taboos under
which that performance may and may not occur within the public sphere free of punitive conse-
quence.
PERFORMANCE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION / 527
Although the links between a theatrical and a social role are complex and the
distinctions not easily drawn (BruceWilshire points out the limits of the comparison
in Role-Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaph~r'~),it seems clear that,
although theatrical performances can meet with political censorship and scathing
criticism,gender performances in non-theatrical contextsaregovernedby more clearly
punitive and regulatory socialconventions. Indeed, the sight of a transvestite onstage
can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the
seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence. The conventions
which mediate proximity and identification in these two instances are clearly quite
different. I want to make two different kinds of claims regarding this tentative distinction.
In the theatre, one can say, 'this is just an act,' and de-realize the act, make
acting into something quite distinct from what is real. Because of this distinction,
one can maintain one's sense of reality in the face of this temporary challenge to our
existing ontological assumptions about gender arrangements; the various conventions
which announce that 'this is only a play' allows strict lines to be drawn between the
performance and life. On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it
does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely
imaginary character of the act, indeed, on the street or in the bus, there is no
presumption that the act is distinct from a reality; the disquieting effect of the act is
that there are no conventions that facilitate making this separation. Clearly, there is
theatre which attempts to contest or, indeed, break down those conventions that
demarcate the imaginary from the real (RichardSchechnerbrings this out quite clearly
in Between Theatre and Anthropology"). Yet in those cases one confronts the same
phenomenon, namely, that the act is not contrasted with the real, but constitutes a
reality that is in some sense new, a modality of gender that cannot readily be assimilated
into the pre-existing categories that regulate gender reality. From the point of
view of those established categories, one may want to claim, but oh, this is really a
girl or a woman, or this is really a boy or a man, and further that the appearance
contradicts the reality of the gender, that the discrete and familiar reality must be
there, nascent, temporarily unrealized, perhaps realized at other times or other places.
The transvestite, however, can do more than simply express the distinction between
sex and gender, but challenges, at least implicitly, the distinctionbetween appearance
and reality that structures a good deal of popular thinking about gender identity. If
the 'reality' of gender isconstituted by the performance itself, then there is no recourse
to an essential and unrealized 'sex' or 'gender' which gender performances ostensibly
express. Indeed, the transvestite's gender is as fully real as anyone whose performance
complies with social expectations.
Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to
the extent that it is performed. It seems fair to say that certain kinds of acts are
usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts
either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some
"Bruce Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity: The h i t s of Theatre as Metaphor (Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1981).
"fichard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1985). See especially, "News, Sex, and Performance," 295-324.
528 / Judith Butler
way. That expectation, in turn, is based upon the perception of sex, where sex is
understood to be the discrete and factic datum of primary sexual characteristics. This
implicit and popular theory of acts and gestures as expressive of gender suggests that
gender itself is something prior to the various acts, postures, and gestures by which
it is dramatized and known; indeed, gender appears to the popular imagination as
a substantial core which might well be understood as the spiritual or psychological
correlate of biological sex.lZIf gender attributes, however, are not expressive but
performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to
express or reveal. The distinction between expression and performativeness is quite
crucial, for if gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows
or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting
identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; 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 a regulatory fiction. That gender reality is created through
sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex, a true
or abiding masculinity or femininity, are also constituted as part of the strategy by
which the performative aspect of gender is concealed.
As a consequence, gender cannot be understood as a role which either expresses
or disguises an interior 'self,' whether that 'self' is conceived as sexed or not. As
performance which is performative, gender is an 'act,' broadly construed, which
constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority. As opposed to a view
such as Erving Goffman's which posits a self which assumes and exchanges various
'roles' within the complex social expectations of the 'game' of modern life,13I am
suggesting that this self is not only irretrievably 'outside,' constituted in social discourse,
but that the ascription of interiority is itself a publically regulated and sanctioned
form of essence fabrication. Genders, then, can be neither true nor false,
neither real nor apparent. And yet, one is compelled to live in a world in which
genders constitute univocal signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered
discrete and intractable. In effect, gender is made to comply with a model of
truth and falsity which not only contradicts its own performative fluidity, but serves
a social policy of gender regulation and control. Performing one's gender wrong
initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well
provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.
That this reassurance is so easilydisplaced by anxiety, that culture so readily punishes
or margnalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should
be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity
of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.14
I2InMother Camp (Prentice-Hall, 1974),Anthropologist Esther Newton gives an urben ethnography
of drag queens in which she suggests that all gender might be understood on the model of drag.
In Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Suzanne J.
Kessler and Wendy McKenna argue that gender is an "accomplishment" which requires the skills
of constructing the body into a socially legitimate artifice.
"See Erving Goffmann, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959).
14SeeMichel Foucault's edition of Herculine Barbin: The Iournals of a Nineteenth Century French
Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1984),for an interesting display
PERFORMANCE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION / 529
111. Feminist Theory: Beyond an Expressive Model of Gender
This view of gender does not pose as a comprehensive theory about what gender
is or the manner of its construction, and neither does it prescribe an explicit feminist
political program. Indeed, I can imagine this view of gender being used for a number
of discrepant political strategies. Some of my friends may fault me for this and insist
that any theory of gender constitution has political presuppositions and implications,
and that it is impossible to separate a theory of gender from a political philosophy
of feminism. In fact, I would agree, and argue that it is primarily political interests
which create the socialphenomena of gender itself, and that without a radical critique
of gender constitution feminist theory fails to take stock of the way in which oppression
structures the ontological categories through which gender is conceived.
Gayatri Spivak has argued that feminists need to rely on an operational essentialism,
a false ontology of women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political
program.I5She knows that the category of 'women' is not fully expressive, that the
multiplicity and discontinuity of the referent mocks and rebels against the univocity
of the sign, but suggests it could be used for strategic purposes. Kristeva suggests
something similar, I think, when she prescribes that feminists use the category of
women as a political tool without attributing ontological integrity to the term, and
adds that, strictly speaking, women cannot be said to exist.16Feminists might well
worry about the political implications of claiming that women do not exist, especially
in light of the persuasive arguments advanced by Mary Anne Warren in her book,
Gendercide.17 She argues that social policies regarding population control and reproductive
technology are designed to limit and, at times, eradicate the existence of
women altogether. In light of such a claim, what good does it do to quarrel about
the metaphysical status of the term, and perhaps, for clearly political reasons, feminists
ought to silence the quarrel altogether.
But it is one thing to use the term and know its ontologcal insufficiency and quite
another to articulate a normative vision for feminist theory which celebrates or emancipates
an essence, a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found. The
option I am defending is not to redescribe the world from the point of view of women.
I don't know what that point of view is, but whatever it is, it is not singular, and
not mine to espouse. It would only be half-right to claim that I am interested in how
the phenomenon of a men's or women's point of view gets constituted, for while I
do think that those points of views are, indeed, socially constituted, and that a
reflexive genealogy of those points of view is important to do, it is not primarily the
gender episteme that I am interested in exposing, deconstructing, or reconstructing.
of the horror evoked by intersexed bodies. Foucault's introduction makes clear that the medical
delimitation of univocal sex is yet another wayward application of the discourse on truth-as-identity.
See also the work of Robert Edgerton in American Anthropologist on the cross-cultural variations of
response to hermaphroditic bodies.
"Remarks at the Center for Humanities, Wesleyan University, Spring, 1985.
16JuliaKristeva, "Woman Can Never Be Defined, trans. Marilyn A. August, in New French Femitlisms,
ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981).
"Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld,
1985).
530 1 Judith Butler
Indeed, it is the presupposition of the category of woman itself that requires a critical
genealogy of the complex institutionaland discursive means by which it is constituted.
Although some feminist literary critics suggest that the presupposition of sexual
difference is necessary for all discourse, that position reifies sexual difference as the
founding moment of culture and precludes an analysis not only of how sexual
difference is constituted to begin with but how it is continuously constituted, both
by the masculine tradition that preempts the universal point of view, and by those
feminist positions that construct the univocal category of 'women' in the name of
expressing or, indeed, liberating a subjected class. As Foucault claimed about those
humanist efforts to liberate the criminalized subject, the subject that is freed is even
more deeply shackled than originally thought.IR
Clearly, though, I envision the critical genealogy of gender to rely on a phenomenological
set of presuppositions, most important among them the expanded conception
of an "act" which is both socially shared and historically constituted, and
which is performative in the sense I previously described. But a critical genealogy
needs to be supplemented by a politics of performative gender acts, one which both
redescribes existing gender identities and offers a prescriptive view about the kind
of gender reality there ought to be. The redescription needs to expose the reifications
that tacitly serve as substantial gender cores or identities, and to elucidate both the
act and the strategy of disavowal which at once constitute and conceal gender as we
live it. The prescription is invariably more difficult, if only because we need to think
aworld in which acts, gestures, the visual body, the clothed body, the various physical
attributes usually associated with gender, express nothing. In a sense, the prescription
is not utopian, but consists in an imperative to acknowledge the existing complexity
of gender which our vocabulary invariably disguises and to bring that complexity
into a dramatic cultural interplay without punitive consequences.
Certainly, it remains politically important to represent women, but to do that in
a way that does not distort and reify the very collectivity the theory is supposed to
emancipate. Feminist theory which presupposes sexual difference as the necessary
and invariant theoretical point of departure clearly improves upon those humanist
discourses which conflate the universal with the masculine and appropriate all of
culture as masculine property. Clearly, it is necessary to reread the texts of western
philosophy from the various points of view that have been excluded, not only to
reveal the particular perspective and set of interests informing those ostensibly transparent
descriptions of the real, but to offer alternative descriptions and prescriptions;
indeed, to establish philosophy as a cultural practice, and to criticize its tenets from
marginalized cultural locations. I have no quarrel with this procedure, and have
clearly benefited from those analyses. My only concern is that sexual difference not
become a reification which unwittingly preserves a binary restriction on gender
identity and an implicitly heterosexual framework for the description of gender,
gender identity, and sexuality. There is, in my view, nothing about femaleness that
is waiting to be expressed; there is, on the other hand, a good deal about the diverse
'"bid.; Michel Foucault, Disciplirze nrzd Plitlish: The Blrth of the Prison trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1978).
PERFORMANCE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION / 531
experiences of women that is being expressed and still needs to be expressed, but
caution is needed with respect to that theoretical language, for it does not simply
report a pre-linguistic experience, but constructs that experience as well as the limits
of its analysis. Regardless of the pervasive character of patriarchy and the prevalence
of sexual difference as an operative cultural distinction, there is nothing about a
binary gender system that is given. As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is
a basically innovative affair, although it is quite clear that there are strict punishments
for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations.
Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by
nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. 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.