Notes on Butler from April 13th.

Judith Butler (Introduction to Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”)

Definitions of Sex, Gender, and Material

- Materiality of the body – the physical substance of my body

- “Sex” as something different than both material and gender – so where does it fit in?

- “Sex is between the legs, gender is between the ears” (she is saying it is more complicated than this because material is between the legs, gender is between the ears, sex is somewhere in between)

- Perhaps also, that this sex is what I choose to present but society won’t let me perform that gender

- Runner in South Africa who’s gender is materially questionable (if she isn’t performing it, and we still can’t locate her


Where discourse fits in
- Discursive practices – the talking which can emerge from both received wisdom and assumptions

- I.e. Discourse (and cultural context) has shaped my male sex not just my male gender

- How is biology itself a discourse?

- When people say “Judith, you’re suggesting that only because you spoke it, it became so”, she defends herself by arguing that while discourse doesn’t cause sex, sex can’t be disassociated from discourse

- Association and/or correlation is different than causality (causality occupies time in a different way than association/correlation)

- Regulatory ideal – what keeps the norms in place (on the most basic level, these are things like imposing which washroom you can use based on your sex, what body hair is acceptable, what clothing is acceptable, etc)


Gender Performativity

- Idea that gender is performed (i.e. it is an action it is not a being)

- What is common (ex. heterosexuality) is not necessarily natural (because what is common can still be highly performed thing and require a lot of reiteration)

- Problem: for gendering to be undone, doesn’t it require performativity in the reverse way? In other words, women trained for so many years to dance in a feminine way would have to perform as a male dancer.

- These regulations are what demarcate and produce the bodies it controls (regulation in ballet that dancers are tall and skinny is what produces people that become dancers that are tall and skinny – professional ballet selects for that and so bodies shaped in that way are rewarded, reinforces ideal)

- Note, she doesn’t deny sex as being a fact, she just seems to deny that it is simple

- If I understand this is a process in which there is always a choice being made (my arm is doing this, my arm is doing this again, my arm is doing this again, my arm is doing this again) then there is the potential for change.

- She is also really involved in ideas about disability (what happens to these bodies that do not fit within the norms of the hegemonic force)

- Page 6: “or do these very oppositions need to be rethought such that if “sex” is a fiction, it is one within whose necessities we live, without which life itself would be unthinkable?”

o Understanding that I am always negotiating my gender, but if I have to negotiate my sex all the time to, isn’t that just … well, too much? Doesn’t it make life completely daunting?

o Note that she doesn’t say it’s unfortunate – seems she isn’t critiquing this, she’s just stating it

- Argument for an underlying reality of one’s sex: it does seem to be likely (even if it’s not certain) that the moment we are born that we are naturally inclined to behave according to either male or female gender identity. This may be evidenced by the fact that the same percentage of people across counties, ethnicities, etc are homosexual (so not culturally produced).

- Rebuttal: statistical likelihood is different than an essential character (most humans run, but I don’t have to be able to run to be a human)

- Even if there was an underlying real sex, the desire to take on a role (question of gender performativity) is very different

- Matter or material doesn’t have sex (it is just the concrete flesh of a human) but sex is materialization of matter

- Argument that you can’t actually have a “culturally alive” being until it has been subjected to materialization (I can’t say I am “I” until I am sexed)

- Language is having a tough time catching up to fluidity that has always been present in concepts of sex and gender

- Butler also connected to analysis world and idea that “we are invented by our language” and so to psychoanalyze our culture, we must look at how we speak about ourselves


Butler and Dance

- Dance has very specific regulations (men must be able to lift, for example … and all the rules about women)

- Is this better now? The impact of these regulations on bodies in dance is that things get very gendered, very early, etc. This is where this article becomes relevant to us in the dance world, perhaps.

- Paradox: the gendering of female bodies is essentially un-gendering of female bodies (de-sexing and massive performance of gender)

- Movement in dance towards using things like momentum to lift, so women can do it (techniques allow reversal of traditional gender roles)

- Can art form evolve so that people aren’t required to perform gender to such an extreme form?


Why does she write like this?

Or, on Philosphy and the lived life.

- Her language is a specific code and it is an unfamiliar one to us (perhaps it is because it is more efficient for those who understand it)

- She argues that “writing clearly can make author too reliant on common sense, make language lose its potential to shape the world and shake up the status quo”

- Like Walter Benjamin, who writes in poetry so each word/sentence is a journey in and of itself

- Perhaps her immediate audience is small but the unknowable ripple effects can somehow be traced back to her

- If astrophysicist had to write for me, they’d never get anything done.

- She is not a “scientific popularizer” or a “bridge writer” – that’s not her role

- Maybe if we looked at her work as an artistic practice we would accept and perhaps welcome the obscurity of it (whereas we don’t accept as much fog in academics, the way we do in conceptual art, visual art, contemporary dance, etc)

- Thinking about people who have tiny followings (john cage) but that have immeasurable impact on fields (hip-hop, sampling, etc)

- Experiment and small scale is no guarantee of success, but state funds experimental theatre knowing that although 80% of it will end up in the garbage but the ones that don’t, have importance in terms of stretching the norms and regulations.

- (On a side note, there seems to have been this cultural shift so that audiences now want to understand things quickly and clearly (even moreso than they used to)

- Does this have real-life relevance? Argument that young queer youth hit university and read butler and suddenly feel okay.

- Idea that her text performs her argument (she is trying to show that gender, sex, identity, etc, is blurry and foggy … and so her language does this, makes it foggy)

- Why do we need to be forced to spend so much time and effort in reading?

- Reading process as reminiscent of Alexander Technique (I don’t know what she’s trying to say as I’m reading, or even by the end of reading it, but in the process I learn something about the subject)

- Back to Freire: be a subject when you are reading, and because each word is a praxis, it has the potential to change the world.

- Argument that feelings about value of this kind of writing is influenced by context: in an academic world, we are against this kind of writing (‘get on stage and show me what you mean’) but in an entirely performance-focused world, don’t ignore that your impulses come from somewhere.

- Would you want to see the musical based on this article?

- How do you present ideas to people that are very resistant to or fearful of them?

- Green baby clothing (gender neutral) costs more than blue or pink. What does that mean? That poor families won’t have access to baby clothes.

- The difficulty is also about the medium (it is written, so it can afford to be much more dense)

- Not everything is focused on (nor do they feel responsible for) sending a message to an inexperience audience that isn’t familiar with the medium, argument, terminology, vocabulary, etc.