Page 47 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

38 Cultural change and ordinary life

This sort of argument can be considered in the light of the influence of
the work of Judith Butler, which has raised a number of fundamental issues
about performance and performativity. It is worth exploring aspects of this
approach to consider some potential ways in which further attention to per-
formance and performativity can advance understanding of audiences in the
context of the SPP and ordinary life. Given this aim, my discussion of Butler
will inevitably be selective.
The crucial dimensions of Butler’s approach are clear and now well
known. As Bell (1999a: 3) says, ‘gender to cut a long story short, is an effect
performatively produced’ and ‘identity is the effect of performance and not
vice versa’. Identities such as gender are therefore produced by practice (Butler
1999: 184) and the performance of them in social and linguistic processes,
rather than being something pre-existing that is given expression in action
and practice: As Butler argues, ‘If gender attributes, however, are not expressive
but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they
are said to express or reveal’ (1999: 180).
Salih (2002: 63) argues, that this sort of approach, which she represents
through the following quotation from Gender Trouble: ‘There is no gender
identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively con-
stituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results’ (p. 25), has
confused many people. How can there be a performance without a performer,
an act without an actor? Actually Butler is not claiming that gender is a per-
formance, and she distinguishes between performance and performativity
(although at times in Gender Trouble the two terms seem to slide into one
another).
Such potential confusion was recognized by Butler herself, and she has
sought to address the issue in subsequent work. As she says in the 1999 Preface
to Gender Trouble:
Much of my work in recent years has been devoted to clarifying and
revising the theory of performativity that is outlined in Gender Trouble. It
is difficult to say precisely what performativity is not only because my
own views on what ‘performativity’ might mean have changed over
time, most often in response to excellent criticisms, but because so many
others have taken it up and given their own formulations . . . In the first
instance, then, the performativity of gender revolves around this meta-
lepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces
that which it posits as outside itself. Second, performativity is not a
singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects
through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part,
as a culturally sustained temporal duration.
(Butler 1999: xiv–xv)
To summarize, performance can be said to involve intention and action
on the part of a constituted and volitional subject, whereas performativity is
the processes that constitute the subject (and the body of the subject – Butler
1993). Butler argues ‘that gender identity is a sequence of acts (an idea that has
existential underpinnings), but she also argues that there is no pre-existing
performer who does those acts, no doer behind the deed. Here she draws a