Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

Butler’s article draws on a previous work, “Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault” in which they examine Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quotation “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”—an essential motto of the feminist movement (Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley, Vintage, 1974). In The Second Sex, first published in 1949, Beauvoir articulates the idea that sex—the physiology of the body—and gender (masculinity and femininity) are distinct and that the oppression of women comes from positioning women as the “Other.” Theorists like Monique Wittig argued that oppression is inherent in binary thinking and, therefore, to combat the oppression of women, we must move outside the gender binary. But Butler deprioritizes the idea of binary gender and instead complicates the usual feminist analysis of gender by investigating the way bodies create gender through the performance of gendered acts.

The idea that gender is “performative” is easily misinterpreted, and Butler seeks to prevent these misreadings. For one, the idea of performance in relation to theater suggests that people perform gender acts of their own volition, like theater roles, and thus gender is something a person can freely choose. Butler makes the point that this is not the case. As people embedded in a society where gender is incessantly performed around them, no one has the opportunity to not play a gender role as they might choose not to perform a theater role. Instead, the act of choosing gender is a “pre-reflective” choice, more like impulse or implicit bias, where our behaviors are shaped by what we have learned from experiencing the world around us, and we act without realizing we are making a choice.

Another common misunderstanding centers on the term “performative.” Butler uses it in a technical sense. The idea of a performative act owes its origin to the philosopher of language J. L. Austin. In his collection of lectures How to Do Things with Words, Austin observes that speech not only describes things but also does things. Speech can have concrete effects on the social world. Promising, betting, naming, getting engaged, and many other acts occur because the involved parties said the correct words. Making a promise brings a promise into existence. Austin’s theory has been adopted and adapted by many other fields and can be seen as a method of constructing society itself. By performing acts of all kinds—not limited to speech—members of a culture shape and reinforce their world and their worldview. Butler’s theory includes gender as one of the cultural constructs formed and shaped by such acts.

History and anthropology show that gender roles vary across cultures and time, but those areas of study also reveal the prevalence of patriarchy, which suggests that the oppression of women is in some way natural. The work of anthropologists Claude Levì-Strauss and Gayle Rubin, however, suggests that the ideas of “natural” sexuality (meaning heterosexuality) and “natural” gender roles (meaning the inferiority of women) emerge from a specific type of social structure: one in which women function as an economic commodity, given by one man to another to form kinship ties. The commodification of women becomes a source of power, and those in power codify and formalize procedures for keeping the system in place. This type of cultural arrangement curtails the gender identities people can assume because the functioning of society depends on people falling into one category or the other. Yet, because gender is performed by individuals, each performance includes a degree of interpretation. There is space for challenging expectations and even subverting the usual understandings of gender. Through gender acts, gender meanings are remembered, replicated, and transformed.

Butler’s article was written as the feminist movement was in the process of reinventing itself in the 1980s. Second-wave feminism had been criticized for prioritizing the interests of white middle-class women over Black and working-class women while still relying on their support. The third wave intended to take seriously the diversity of women’s experiences by focusing on connections between gender and race, class, sexuality, disability, and other dimensions of women’s identity. Butler’s reluctance to include oppression as part of the definition of womanhood reflects a determination not to erase the multidimensional nature of women’s experiences. If the only identifiable unifying fact about womanhood is that they are oppressed, Butler says, it is impossible to end oppression without destroying the category of woman as well. Instead of focusing on what it means to be “female,” she encourages readers to be interested in the diverse and varied experiences of women.