Butler's Performative Interpretation

The work for which Judith Butler is perhaps most famous revolves around the idea of gender as a performance; according to Butler, gender is not immanent or fixed, but rather a fluid social construction that is both held up as a cultural idea toward which individuals should aspire and to which individuals contribute through their own inevitably incomplete performances of gender. This performativity does not simply describe the process of gender construction, however, but rather the construction of all social and political identities; thus while individuals appear to be just that--discrete, independent (and embodied) subjectivities--they are in fact always already radically dependent on others for their self-definition. In this way, Butler deconstructs the concept of the cohesive (gendered) subject in her book Undoing Gender and posits a postmodern community of humanity that is radically dependent on intersubjective relations.

If one were to read this deconstruction as a simple, uncomplicated truth, however, one might be a bit confused: if gender "undoes" the discrete subject, why is the commonly accepted perception of the human an individualistic one? Why has this radical sense of community not instituted itself in the world as we know it? And why do we still define ourselves in the rigid terms of ideal gender, sexuality, race, etc.?

The key to these questions relates to the mechanism by which Butler deconstructs gender, which in turn relates back to her famous work with gender performance because, in a sense, the way in which she deconstructs gender is itself performative. In "Conjuring--Marxism" (in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International), Jacques Derrida argues that the only way to properly inherit Marx's original ideas and apply them to a socio-political situation that is radically different from that in which Marx himself wrote, theorists must "performatively interpret" Marxism: they must alter Marxist dogma through the very act of interpreting it. This type of performative interpretation is precisely what Butler mobilizes in her deconstruction of gender. She performs this interpretation on two different levels simultaneously, invoking both Foucauldian though and gender in order to shape them into new versions of themselves.


In his History of Sexuality: Volume I, Foucault suggests (among myriad other things) that sexuality is a.) socially constructed as a positive means of controlling individuals (as opposed to the negative threat of death) and b.) in a sense an agent of its own (e.g. the West has a historical obsession of making it speak itself and speak for us). Butler draws on both of these ideas but frames her interpretation of them in terms of gender: as I previously mentioned, she sees gender as a social structure that is both produced by subjects and produces subjects (more of a reciprocal relationship or process between the individual and society than a rigid signifier of identity); and she argues that "gender is for and from another before it becomes [one's] own" (16), that it is in fact an independent technology of power that works on both the subject and the social system she inhabits. Thus she performatively interprets Foucault, mobilizing his philosophy in service of her own agenda.


Her interpretation of gender as deconstructive is performative in that the concept of "identity" does no political work itself until it is engaged with. Identity discourse can be engaged in various ways toward various political ends (see Wendy Brown's "Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting 'The Jewish Question'" in Identities, Politics, and Rights, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns for an example of how special rights discourse can be variously interpreted), and Butler here engages gender as a fluid and changeable process. Her very claim that gender deconstructs the subject itself deconstructs the subject. Her performative interpretation is inherently a political action (it clearly does not have any effect on the anatomical or neurological configuration of individuals, but it has the ability to radically alter the political avatar of the social individual: the citizen),  and her very engagement with gender through a postmodern, phenomenalist paradigm articulates a new politico-discursive situation in which gender becomes de-essentialized.


Butler's performative interpretation of gender as subject-deconstructing is compelling and represents an important step toward the political recognition of abject individuals (e.g. intersexual individuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, transgendered individuals) as human, the formation of a democratic and radically intraconnected human community, and the development of constantly evolving perception of the species in the context of "a certain openness and unknowingness" (Butler 39). True political and social progress, however, will only be achieved when the majority of humanity (not just an single gender theorist or mode of gender discourse) engages with gender and sexual identity through the same performative framework in which Butler experiences and theorizes the world.