Page 146 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 137

The cultural politics of difference

set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal
over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural
sort of being’ (Butler, 1990, p. 33). It is thus a discursive practice
rather than a form of essential identity. There ‘is no gender
identity behind the expressions of gender’, she argued, because
‘identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions”
that are said to be its results’ (p. 25). Neither male nor female nor
gay nor lesbian nor straight identities have any essence, there-
fore; they are merely different variants of performativity, some
subversive, some not, but all in some sense ‘regulated’. The debt
to Foucault should be apparent.
This was much more radical than the older culturalist distinc-
tion between sex and gender, if only because Butler saw ‘sex’ itself
as gendered, that is, as something we perform. Sex, she wrote,
‘was always already gender... Gender ought not to be conceived
. . . as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex’, but
‘must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby
the sexes themselves are established’ (p. 7). This can easily be
trivialised as meaning that we simply choose to put on and take
off our gender and sexuality like changing clothes. Indeed, Butler
had cited ‘drag’ as an example of performativity: ‘In imitating
gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—
as well as its contingency’ (pp. 137–8). But she subsequently
clarified the notion of performativity so as to highlight its non-
voluntarist character: ‘Performativity cannot be understood
outside of...a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.
And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition
is what enables a subject’ (Butler, 1993, p. 95). The political impli-
cations for gay or feminist politics ran parallel to Foucault’s
deconstruction of the ‘sexual revolution’ in Freud and Lawrence:
being gay or female was neither an essence to be liberated nor
even a cultural ethnicity, but rather an amalgam of the ‘identity
effects’ of certain institutionally located signifying practices, and
thus itself a site of contestation between the oppressively
normalising and the liberatory destabilising.
Grosz further radicalised the position by challenging the
idea that gender, rather than sex, is at the heart of perform-
ativity. Gender ‘must be understood as a kind of overlay on a

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