Philosophers often
discuss 'acts' in relation to performance and acting, with theories such as
John Searle's' speech acts', action theory, and the phenomenological theory of
'acts'. These theories aim to explain the mundane way in which social agents constitute
social reality through language, gesture, and symbolic social signs. However,
phenomenology sometimes assumes a choosing and constituting agent prior to
language, while the doctrine of constitution takes the social agent as an
object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.
Gender is not a stable identity or locus of agency, but rather an identity
tenuously constituted in time through stylized repetition of acts. Gender is
instituted through the stylization of the body, and the appearance of substance
is a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment that the mundane
social audience, including actors themselves, come to believe and perform in
the mode of belief.
Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction
and taboo, with the possibility of contesting its reified status. Feminist and
phenomenological views of sex and gender emphasize the existence and facticity
of the material or natural dimensions of the body, as well as the process by
which the body comes to bear cultural meanings.
In order to describe the gendered body, a phenomenological theory of
constitution requires an expansion of the conventional view of acts to mean
both that which constitutes meaning and that through which meaning is performed
or enacted.
Merleau-Ponty argues that the body is not just a historical idea but a set of
possibilities to be continually realized. This means that its appearance in the
world is not predetermined by an interior essence and that its concrete
expression must be understood as the taking up and rendering specific of
historical possibilities. The body is not merely matter but a continual
materializing of possibilities, and one does their body differently from one's
contemporaries and embodied predecessors and successors.
The body is not a self-identical or factic materiality; it is a materiality
that bears meaning, and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally dramatic.
Embodiment manifests a set of strategies or "styles of being" that
are conditioned and circumscribed by historical conventions. For example,
gender is a corporeal style, an intentional and performative act that is both
dramatic and non-referential.
Beauvoir emphasizes the distinction between sex and gender as cultural
interpretations of biological facticity. Gender is a construction that
regularly conceals its genesis, and those who fail to do their gender right are
regularly punished. The historical possibilities materialized through various
corporeal styles are nothing other than punitively regulated cultural fictions
that are alternately embodied and disguised under duress.
Feminist theory shares a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience and
revealing the way in which the world is produced through the constituting acts
of subjective experience. Feminist theory has sought to understand how systemic
or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced
through individual acts and practices, and how the analysis of ostensibly
personal situations is clarified through situating the issues in a broader and
shared cultural context.
Feminist theory posits that the personal is an expansive category that
accommodates political structures usually viewed as public. The body becomes
its gender through a series of acts that are renewed, revised, and consolidated
over time. From a feminist point of view, the gendered body is the legacy of
sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence,
or fact.
Feminist discourse has often relied upon the category of woman as a universal
presupposition of cultural experience, providing a false ontological promise of
eventual political solidarity. However, this effort to combat the invisibility
of women as a category may render visible a category that may or may not be
representative of the concrete lives of women.
The reproduction of the category of gender is enacted on a large political
scale, such as when women first enter a profession or gain certain rights.
However, the more mundane reproduction of gendered identity takes place through
the various ways in which bodies are acted in relationship to the deeply
entrenched or sedimented expectations of gendered existence.
Binary genders and the heterosexual contract are two concepts that have been
used to guarantee the reproduction of a given culture. Feminist theory suggests
that the association of a natural sex with a discrete gender and an ostensibly
natural attraction to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural combination of
cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests.
Cultural anthropology and kinship studies have shown that cultures are governed
by conventions that regulate the production, exchange, and consumption of
material goods, as well as reproduce the bonds of kinship itself. The incest
taboo works to guarantee the channeling of sexuality into various modes of
heterosexual marriage, producing discrete gendered identities and sexualities.
Contemporary gender identities are many marks or "traces" of residual
kinship.
Phenomenology can assist a feminist reconstruction of the sedimented character
of sex, gender, and sexuality at the level of the body. The focus on the
various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and assumed provides a
starting point for the feminist effort to understand the mundane manner in
which bodies get crafted into genders. However, it is difficult to
conceptualize the scale and systemic character of women's oppression from a
theoretical position which takes constituting acts as its point of departure.
The relation between acts and conditions is neither unilateral nor unmediated,
as there are social contexts and conventions within which certain acts become
possible and conceivable as acts at all. The transformation of social relations
becomes a matter of transforming hegemonic social conditions rather than
individual acts that are spawned by those conditions.
Gender is an act that has been rehearsed, much like a script survives the
particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in
order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again. As a public action
and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or project that reflects a
merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed or inscribed upon the
individual. Actors are always already on the stage, within the terms of the
performance, and enacting interpretations within the confines of already
existing directives.
The relationship between theatrical and social roles is complex, with
distinctions between the two being difficult to draw. In theatre, one can
de-realize an act as a play, making it distinct from reality. This allows for a
sense of reality in the face of challenging ontological assumptions about
gender arrangements. On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous
because there are no conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of
the act.
The transvestite can challenge the distinction between appearance and reality
that structures popular thinking about gender identity. If the'reality' of gender
is constituted by the performance itself, then there is no recourse to an
essential and unrealized'sex' or 'gender' which gender performances ostensibly
express. Gender reality is performative, meaning it is real only to the extent
that it is performed. Certain acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a
gender core or identity, either conforming to an expected gender identity or
contesting that expectation in some way.
Gender attributes and acts are performative, meaning there is no preexisting identity
by which an act or attribute might be measured. This means that the notions of
an essential sex, a true or abiding masculinity or femininity, are also
constituted as part of the strategy by which the performative aspect of gender
is concealed. Gender cannot be understood as a role that either expresses or
disguises an interior'self,' whether that'self' is conceived as sexed or not.
Gender is made to comply with a model of truth and falsity, which contradicts
its own performative fluidity and serves a social policy of gender regulation
and control. Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both
obvious and indirect, while performing it well provides reassurance that there
is an essentialism of gender identity.
Feminist theory does not provide a comprehensive view of gender or its
construction, nor does it prescribe an explicit feminist political program. It
is primarily political interests that create the social phenomena of gender
itself, and without a radical critique of gender constitution, feminist theory
fails to take stock of the way in which oppression structures the ontological
categories through which gender is conceived.
Feminists may worry about the political implications of claiming that women do
not exist, especially in light of persuasive arguments advanced by Mary Anne
Warren in her book, Gendercide. However, it is important to articulate a
normative vision for feminist theory that celebrates or emancipates an essence,
a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found. The
presupposition of the category of woman itself requires a critical genealogy of
the complex institutional and discursive means by which it is constituted.
The critical genealogy of gender should rely on a phenomenological set of
presuppositions, most important among them the expanded conception of an
"act" which is both socially shared and historically constituted, and
which is performative. This prescription is not utopian but consists in an
imperative to acknowledge the existing complexity of gender and bring that
complexity into a dramatic cultural interplay without punitive consequences.
Feminist theory that presupposes sexual difference as the necessary and
invariant theoretical point of departure improves upon humanist discourses that
conflate the universal with the masculine and appropriate all of culture as
masculine property. It is necessary to reread texts of western philosophy from
various points of view to offer alternative descriptions and prescriptions,
establish philosophy as a cultural practice, and criticize its tenets from
marginalized cultural locations.
while there is a lot
of diverse experiences of women, there is no waiting room for femaleness to be
expressed. Gender is an innovative aspect of cultural play, not passively
scripted by nature, language, or patriarchy. It is constantly under constraint,
but if mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished,
allowing for subversive performances to expand the cultural field.
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