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

“Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.”

Butler takes the basic idea of the inessentiality of gender and interprets Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman,” as an assertion that “becoming a woman” is an act. Rather than conceptualizing this act as singular, it is iterative, where repeated instances evoke the illusion of consistent gender identity.

“If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.”

Butler’s goal is not to destroy the gender binary. Instead, they propose an incremental approach to dismantling the gender roles that support patriarchy. By questioning and changing the acts that constitute gender roles, the roles can transform, dissolve, or multiply over time.

“The ‘I’ that is its body is, of necessity, a mode of embodying, and the ‘what’ that it embodies is possibilities. But here again the grammar of the formulation misleads, for the possibilities that are embodied are not fundamentally exterior or antecedent to the process of embodying itself. As an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation.”

The idea that gender is an act suggests that embodying gender is a choice, but that is not the kind of act Butler is talking about. The act of embodying gender is a pre-reflective choice, one that begins before consciousness and therefore can only be altered by deliberate volition. This form of embodiment is both “being” a gender and dramatizing gender for others. Because of the pre-conscious choice involved, “doing gender” reproduces the historical gender definitions that one is born into.