The One True Dave

Judith Butler’s seminal article from 1988, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” is still a major conceptual force in feminist theory today.  I was first introduced to her writing in the mid-90s during my undergraduate studies.  Reading her work again, now, it is as powerful and thoughtful as it was then.  Her thesis is that gender is a construction with multiple variations and historically situated separate from the physiological binary of sex.  She engages with theorists like: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Bruce Wilshire and Richard Schechner to support her position that “gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.” (527)  The real societal consequence is that “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.” (528)  More than a decade later, the idea that gender is constructed is accepted more widely but at the time (at least from my perspective in Edmonton), questioning the “natural” essentialist notion that gender and sex where interchangeable was a major shift in thinking.  The fact that punitive reactions to performing gender wrong – to “deviate” from the (historically situated) norm – are still very much in place today demonstrates how important Butler’s work still is.

The 1967 Neil Diamond song, made famous again by the movie Pulp Fiction, entitled Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon demonstrates Butler’s thesis a little too well.  To be a woman, the girl from the song will become woman and fulfill the (expected) gender role successfully, by (assumes the listener) engaging in (gender normative heterosexual) sex with the male singer of the song.  The male voice is the voice of authority and judge of whether she will pass and the assumed female subject (without voice and so, without agency) is the passive recipient of the man’s (and society’s) expectation to perform the expected codified role.  It is not the act of sex that is the turning point, per se, but how she successfully performs the role of passive female to his sexual advance that secures her (expected) gender role.  This song exemplifies Butler’s statement that “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.” (522)  On a greater scale this implicates the gender ideology factories/brands like American Girl, Disney and Barbie who concretize the gender fictions they espouse through their ubiquity and multi-valenced historical situation.