Butler
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Troubling Gender
I deal with sex, gender, and desire everyday, every hour, every minute. I have to assume that they matter because they matter to me. But do gender, sex, and desire really matter? Does identity matter? How can we understand desire without understanding sex and/or gender? Do my identities located at the intersections as a white, middle class, femme, lesbian, woman and the other multiplicity of categories and identifications matter? Does my body matter?
I begin with something near and dear to my heart-“drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch and femme identities”(187) or what Butler terms subversive bodily acts. While I want to go into this subversive performance by offering a selection of a narrative piece I am working on-I want to contextualize the subversion of these bodily performance through Judith Butler’s work on sex/gender/desire.
Butler aims to denaturalize the connection we associate with sex/gender/and desire saying that they produce one another that they are rooted in a place of discourse, culture, social construction, and history. We often understand or are told that sex is biological, determined by one’s genitalia and their chromosomes. It is “only natural” to classify a person as male or a female-to make people intelligible. A common assumption is that this essentialized understanding of sex leads to the cultural inscriptions of masculine or feminine practices upon a sexed body. Then based on the notions of male/female, masculine/feminine we can decipher normative sexuality. The dichotomous bodies “belong” together-they “complete” each other. Anything other than that is considered deviant, abnormal, or at the very least non-normative. This is what Butler considers the “heterosexual matrix,” or the “respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire”(31).
If we eradicate the naturalization and the stability of the categories of sex and gender then how can we understand desire? We attempt to categorize sexual practice based on whether or not they are engaged in by “same” or “different” sexed people. But what if our attempts to gender and sex people are a matter of making them fit into a pattern of heteronormativity? Then the politics of the body of sex/gender/and desire cannot be said to create one another but are instead produced through one another.
But these categories of sex/gender/desire have to be important-they have to matter because bodies live them everyday. All bodies to some degree, but especially those bodies, which make a point of defying the heterosexual matrix, are implicated in structures of power, which, condemn them and attempt to re-discipline their bodies back into normative conceptions of gender/sex/and desire. But what about those people who choose not to conform despite the pressures? Are their subversions actually subversive- are they resistant? Again I have to believe they are because I experience the effects of people’s non-conformity everyday both positive and negative.
I am going to offer a short passage from a paper I will be presenting at NCA on a narrative performance panel. My paper is something like “Femme Drag: Subversive Performances of Female Same-Sex Desire.”
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I wake up in the morning and I put on my gender and sexuality identity. Everything I do in the morning while habitual is done with intent.[1] The eyeliner I put on my top lid, lining it with careful precision, the grey ankle boots I place on my feet-they are intentional choices. How am I going to put on my white, femme, lesbian, self today? You see I need my eyeliner and boots in this crazy world we live in because for a femme lesbian they are both my resistance and my protection. They are my subversion, my empowerment, and my survival. You see they are my resistance-something that makes me feel my queer-ness, something that while everyday and mundane, set me apart from all of those people who “subconsciously” perform femininity and masculinity according to the way society has told them to. But they are also my armor against being called a dyke and queer (and not in that good way.)
And isn’t that just a little bit radical? Maybe I am laughing at my own joke here but isn’t it a little bit queer to perform femininity and do it for the purpose— no not the purpose— the desire of other women-preferably those already lesbian (but that’s always negotiable.) And what about performing it for women who don’t look like women at all? I like my girls to look like boys. I say eff the patriarchy—the system that tells me my eyeliner and my boots can’t be my resistance— that these things normalize instead of queer me.
Because my queerness…I want it to stand on it’s own.
My femme drag performance should be— no it is enough to cast me in the role of lesbian, of queer, of gender norm defying queer lesbian.
*****
So I include this here to sort of take Butler up on her notions of subversive bodily performances, but also to problematize her the notion that these resistive practices are taken up solely by those defying the “heterosexual matrix.”
Butler writes, “If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance. As much as drag creates a unified picture of a ‘woman’…it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which falsely naturalized as a unity through regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence”(187).
I am indebted to these performances of a gender that doe not cohere with its sex -I am in a relationship based off of butch/femme performance. I am indebted to the way these performances stand out and actually mark my own body as a lesbian or a queer. These are the performances which, on a daily basis are marked as “different” performances, performances that categorize people as others. These are the bodies that walk around constantly scrutinized and marginalized. They are the gender-queer bodies the ones usually seen as fragmented, unfixed, “fluid.” These are not the bodies in “happy limbo of non-identity” (Butler 143) as assumed by Foucault; they are the bodies on trial. But I want to suggest that the performances need not be solely based on those who do not conform their gender to their sex but those who make choices to either conform or not in the little everyday practices. I believe femme drag is a subversive performance because it also defies the heterosexual matrix, through the everyday practice of putting on eyeliner and strapping on boots. The femme in drag is not a unified subject but a subject full of inconsistency, fragmentation, and multiplicity. While maybe the gender and sex are coherent in the femme lesbian performance, the connection to desire is anything but. And if we believe that sex/gender/desire operate under some naturalized connection instead of as an entangled process of production and performance than a woman performing femininity but desiring women blows that connection apart. It proves Butler's theory correct there is no cohesive subject, no subject that just because she is female who performs femininity-and should for all intensive purposes be heterosexual-is not. There is no sex and gender which is beyond desire, nor desire beyond sex and gender, however, there are ways to resist the normative ideas of all three. Femme drag is one way I see this subversive performance occurring through fragmenting the performance of femininity with same-sex female desire-same-sex butch desire. While the femme in drag is fraught with constraints of identity categories, categories that inform her ability to perform her femininity, racial and class constraints, identities that do "indeed" matter, this performance is subversive because it is never fixed as one thing. Always changing, sometimes in corsets, sometimes times in business suits, and other times simply a form of becoming, of consciousness, of desiring. Of changing desires, of changing identities, all while maintaining the consciousness the constraint of femininity. It is complicated, it is complex, it is performance, it is conscious choice, it is limited choice, it is an existence unlike any other.
All bodies to some degree are on trial. All of our bodies are implicated in a system, which is quite rigid in its categorization.
But we have ways to create subversive bodily performances, while limited to exist within the discourse as nothing can intelligible can exist in this abject space, we have ways to resist. These performances may involve only a certain level of heightened consciousness, others, are put into practice. These little moments of resistance, of defying a gender norm (not shaving legs or allowing oneself to cry), of practicing same-sex desire while being identified as a femme, these practices do carry weight. While they may not be the large social movements of our time, they are the mini revolutions within the everyday. And they matter, because I can work with preschoolers as a femme lesbian and be a good teacher, a role-model, and a leader, not a pedophile or molester as some would claim. I see my girlfriend-a butch- in a Speedo swimsuit with a mohawk teaching swimming lessons at the pool where she works, simply giving children and adults the insight into non-normative gender performances-ones they may not see anywhere else during their day. Raising new consciousness, changing people on a micro-level, forcing them to deal with the queers, the people they may reject. I see these performances as subversive, see them working in covert ways, creating resistance and promoting social change and awareness simply to other non-normative ways of being.
These things have to matter.
Identities have to matter
Queering Identity has to matter
Theorizing desire has to matter
I have to believe it matters.
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