Judith Butler Performativity Quotes

The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both “what” we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought

If performativity requires a power to effect or enact what one names, then who will be the “one” with such a power, and how will such a power be thought? How might we account for the injurious word within such a framework, the word that not only names a social subject, but constructs that subject in the naming, and constructs that subject through a violating interpellation? Is it the power of a “one” to effect such an injury through the wielding of the injurious name, or is that a power accrued through time which is concealed at the moment that a single subject utters its injurious terms? Does the “one” who speaks the term cite the term, thereby establishing him or herself as the author while at the same time establishing the derivative status of that authorship? Is a community and history of such speakers not magically invoked at the moment in which that utterance is spoken? And if and when that utterance brings injury, is it the utterance or the utterer who is the cause of the injury, or does that utterance perform its injury through a transitivity that cannot be reduced to a causal or intentional process originating in a singular subject?

The gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never fully be closed, which is why even those who happily embrace their sex assigned at birth still have to do performative work to embody that assignment in social life. Genders are not just assigned. They have to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the deal. Have I finally achieved the gender I have been seeking to become, or is becoming the name of the game, the temporality of gender itself?

We need instead to ask, what possibilities of mobilization are produced on the basis of existing configurations of discourse and power? What are the possibilities of reworking that very matrix of power by which we are constituted, of reconstituting the legacy of that constitution, and of working against each other process of regulation that can destabilize existing power regimes? For if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again. That subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process, one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power, but which is power's own possibility of being reworked. It is not enough to say that the subject is invariably engaged in a political field; that phenomenological phrasing misses the point that the subject is an accomplishment regulated and produced in advance. And is as such fully political; indeed, perhaps most political as the point in which it is claimed to be prior to politics itself. To perform this kind of Foucaultian critique of the subject is not to do away with the subject or to pronounce it's death, but merely to claim that certain versions of the subject are politically insidious.

The insult, however, assumes its specific proportion in time. To be called a name is one of the first forms of linguistic injury that one learns. But not all name-calling is injurious. Being called a name is also one of the conditions by which a subject is constituted in language; indeed, it is one of the examples Althusser supplies for an understanding of “interpellation.”1 Does the power of language to injure follow from its interpellative power? And how, if at all, does linguistic agency emerge from this scene of enabling vulnerability? The problem of injurious speech raises the question of which words wound, which representations offend, suggesting that we focus on those parts of language that are uttered, utterable, and explicit. And yet, linguistic injury appears to be the effect not only of the words by which one is addressed but the mode of address itself, a mode—a disposition or conventional bearing—that interpellates and constitutes a subject.

The patronym secures its own rigidity, fixity, and universality within a set of kinship lines that designate wives and daughters as the sites of its self-perpetuation. In the patronymic naming of women, and in the exchange and extension of patronymic authority that is the event of marriage, the paternal law "performs" the identity and authority of the patronym. This performative power of the name, therefore, cannot be isolated from the paternal economy within which it operates, and the power-differential between the sexes that it institutes and serves.

Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over.

It is true that dispossession carries this double valence and that as a result it is difficult to understand until we see that we value it in one of its modalities and abhor and resist it in another. As you say, dispossession can be a term that marks the limits of self-sufficiency and that establishes us as relational and interdependent beings. Yet dispossession is precisely what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood, and become subject to military and legal violence. We oppose this latter form of dispossession because it is both forcible and privative.

Se os atributos de gênero não são expressivos mas performativos, então constituem efetivamente a identidade que pretensamente expressariam ou revelariam. A distinção entre expressão e performatividade é crucial. Se os atributos e atos do gênero, as várias maneiras como o corpo mostra ou produz sua significação cultural, são performativos, então não há identidade preexistente pela qual um ato ou atributo possa ser medido: não haveria atos de gênero verdadeiros ou falsos, reais ou distorcidos, e a postulação de uma identidade de gênero verdadeira se revelaria uma ficção reguladora. O fato de a realidade do gênero ser criada mediante performances sociais contínuas significa que as próprias noções de sexo essencial e de masculinidade ou feminilidade verdadeiras ou permanentes também são constituídas, como parte da estratégia que oculta o caráter performativo do gênero e as possibilidades performativas de proliferação das configurações de gênero fora das estruuras restritivas da dominação masculinista e da heterossexualidade compulsória. Os gêneros não podem ser verdadeiros nem falsos, reais nem aparentes, originais nem derivados. Como portadores críveis desses atributos, contudo,m eles também podem se tornar completa e radicalmente incríveis.

Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over. She writes, Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

Judith Butler, a feminist and LGBT scholar and activist who was foundational to the development of queer Theory, epitomizes the opposite approach to this dilemma. In her most influential work, Gender Trouble,17 published in 1990, Butler focuses on the socially constructed nature of both gender and sex. For Butler, “woman” is not a class of people but a performance that constructs “gendered” reality. Butler’s concept of gender performativity—behaviors and speech that make gender real—allowed her to be thoroughly postmodern, deconstruct everything, and reject the notion of stable essences and objective truths about sex, gender, and sexuality, all while remaining politically active. This worked on two levels. Firstly, by referring to “reality-effects” and social or cultural “fictions,” Butler is able to address what she sees as the reality of social constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. For Butler, the specific constructions themselves are not real, but it is true that constructions exist. Secondly, because the “queer” is understood to be that which falls outside of categories, especially those used to define male and female, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, disrupting and dismantling those categories is essential to activism. “To queer” can therefore be used as a verb in the Butlerian sense, and the “queering” of something refers to the destabilization of categories and the disruption of norms or accepted truths associated with it. The purpose of this is to liberate the “queer” from the oppression of being categorized.

We might be tempted to understand the existence of injurious language as posing an ethical question on the order of: what kind of language ought we to use? How does the language we use affect others? If hate speech is citational, does that mean that the one who uses it is not responsible for that usage? Can one say that someone else made up this speech that one simply finds oneself using and thereby absolve oneself of all responsibility? I would argue that the citationality of discourse can work to enhance and intensify our sense of responsibility for it. The one who utters hate speech is responsible for the manner in which such speech is repeated, for reinvigorating such speech, for reestablishing contexts of hate and injury. The responsibility of the speaker does not consist of remaking language ex nihilo, but rather of negotiating the legacies of usage that constrain and enable that speaker’s speech. To understand this sense of responsibility, one afflicted with impurity from the start, requires that we understand the speaker as formed in the language that he or she also uses. This paradox intimates an ethical dilemma brewing at the inception of speech.

But what kind of speech is attributed to the citizen in such a view, and how does such an account draw the line between the performativity that is hate speech and the performativity that is the linguistic condition of citizenship? If hate speech is a kind of speech that no citizen ought to exercise, then how might its power be specified, if it can be? And how are both the proper speech of citizens and the improper hate speech of citizens to be distinguished from yet a third level of performative power, that which belongs to the state? This last seems crucial to interrogate if only because hate speech is itself described through the sovereign trope derived from state discourse (and discourse on the state). Figuring hate speech as an exercise of sovereign power implicitly performs a catachresis by which the one who is charged with breaking the law (the one who utters hate speech) is nevertheless invested with the sovereign power of law. What the law says, it does, but so, too, the speaker of hate. The performative power of hate speech is figured as the performative power of state-sanctioned legal language, and the contest between hate speech and the law becomes staged, paradoxically, as a battle between two sovereign powers.

No desafio de repensar as categorias do gênero fora da metafísica da substância, é mister considerar a relevância da afirmação de Nietzsche, em Genealogia da Moral, de que “não há ‘ser’ por trás do fazer, do realizar e do tornar-se; o ‘fazedor’ é uma mera ficção acrescentada à obra — a obra é tudo”. Numa aplicação que o próprio Nietzsche não teria antecipado ou aprovado, nós afirmaríamos como corolário: não há identidade de gênero por trás das expressões do gênero; essa identidade é performativamente constituída, pelas próprias “expressões” tidas como seus resultados.

Young revient sur les approches féministes des années 1970 et sur l'antagonisme apparemment irréconciliable sur lequel elles ont débouché : d'un côté, un idéal universaliste qui refuse de considérer que le sexe biologique de naissance puisse avoir une quelconque incidence sur les projets d'un individu et sur la façon dont il noue des relations à autrui, de l'autre, une approche différentialiste insistant sur les spécificités corporelles de leur existence et sur l'importance de la maternité pour caractériser l'expérience de la plupart des femmes. Elle évoque ensuite la proposition de Judith Butler de se débarrasser du sujet politique du féminisme, qu'il soit fondé sur une définition biologique (le sexe) ou sur une définition sociale et culturelle (le genre). En montrant que la matérialité des corps sexués est elle-même socialement construite et que le genre est une performance, Butler fait l'hypothèse qu'on s'extirperait de l'opposition paralysante entre options universaliste et différentialiste. Mais, pour Iris Marion Young, aussi pertinent et utiles soit-elle, la pensée queer reste insuffisante quand il s'agit de comprendre l'expérience vécue ordinaire qui s'éprouve au regard de la féminité et de la masculinité hégémoniques. Elle propose donc de revenir à la phénoménologie existentialiste de Simone de Beauvoir dont le cœur théorique est le concept de *corps vécu* défini comme « l'idée unifiée d'un corps physique agissant et s'éprouvant dans un contexte socio-culturel spécifique ; c'est un corps-en-situation ». Une fois ce postulat posé, elle s'attache à déplier la dialectique beuvoirienne de la facticité et de la liberté : la relation entre l'existence concrète et matérielle de la personne et son environnement physique et social constitue sa facticité ; cependant, toute personne est dotée de la liberté ontologique de se construire elle-même dans sa relation à cette facticité. (p. 126-127)