Research note:
source http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/cober/marx/jobs.html
Judith Butler, in speaking
about gender, says that identity is "performative in the sense that it
constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to
express."1 Action does not represent an identity; instead,
it creates it. For example, in Monkey
Business, one must perform the role of a gangster to be a gangster.
Groucho gets a job with Alky Briggs when he displays his fearlessness.
Chico and Harpo must perform toughness in order to be hired as
bodyguards. They're so certain of their ability to perform this role,
that when they end up guarding the wrong body, they assume that their
boss has simply disguised himself.
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Hello Goldmine MA Dissertation to read and extract sources from
http://www.hardav.co.uk/MA%20-%20HTML/chapter%202.htm
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From the Identity Book in next blog post
-20 Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse
-Judith Butler
Tend to agree that women have been written out of history that has been written by men p201
The question of being a woman is more difficult, refers to not only a social category, but a felt sense of self, culturally conditioned or constructed subjective identity p201
psychoanalysis has tried to identify where gendered identity is acquired
--->JACQUES LACAN
category of women internally fragmented by class, colour, age, and ethnic lines p203
ego is a perpetually unstable phenomenon - Lacanian theorists
Perhaps when I read Frued it will influence other chapters and I can always go back and re-write, add additons to sections ETC
"...most psychoanalytic feminist theories maintain that gender is constructed, and they view themselves (and frued) s debunking yhr claims of essential femininity or essential masculinity" p204
"...Freuds claim in the three essays on the theory of sexuality, thst heterosexuality is not a given of biological life but a developmental accomplishment, his theory on primary bisexuality and further claim in new introductor lectures on psychoanalyss that to become a woman is a laborous construction which takes the repression of primary bisexuality as its premise" p204
Interesting things here to read into + devleop...
notes 9 + 10 - 3 essays p7 , the ego and super ego, pp22-3 , chapt33, femininity p116 new introductory lectures
some identifications are more primary than others
girl-mother identification is founding
first identifications serve to unify the other ones
gender identities emerge, sexual desires shift so different identifications come into play p205
Juliet Mitchel asserts it;s only possible to be in one position or the other in a sexual relation and never in both at once. p206
Interplay between bisexuality and how this can arise between each other... "one identifies with a sex or desires it, but only those two relations are possible" p206
identity + fantasy....
Foucault challenges the language of internalisation as it operates in the serivice ofthe repressive hypothesis
Rewrites Nietzsche internalistion
the soul - precisely what the body lacks
"but the body becomes the prisoner of the soul" p207
'The gendered body is performative' p208
if gender a fantast then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false but are only produced as the truth effects of a discource of primary and stable identity" p209
performance of drag, femineine exterior, masculine interior
three seperate dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity and gender performance. p209
Revisiting Butler may be very useful for bumping up my section about Cindy Sherma
"it seems crucual to resist the myth of interior origins, understood either as naturalised or culturaly fixed. Only then, gender coherance might be understood as the regulatory fictio it is - rather than the common point of our liberation." p210
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-On Judith Butler and Performativity
-Sara Salih
Chapter 3: On Judith Butler and Performativity.
p55
The body is not a "mute factity" (means the fact of its existence) (GT: 129)
Agency is an important concept - subverting the law against itself to radical, political ends.
PERFORMATIVITY
sex/gender distinction collapsed
All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence, means there is no "natural body" that pre-exists its cultural description
Suggests that gender is not something someone IS, but what someone DOES
(GT: 25) elaborates in the first chapter of Gender trouble
Gender is not just a process, but a particular type, a set of repeated acts within a regulatory frame.
This is useful to think of a way to apply the Butler to my work, is if Gender is something that is something we do, then it goes to show that identity could follow the same suit and allows us to attain different identities.. this seems to make sense with how we live our daily lives and how different we are with different people.. pragmatic realist.
p56
But this doesn't suggest we are FREE to choose "script" is always determined withinn the regulatory frame and has a limited number of costumes... wardrobe eg
Performativity introduced in 1st chapt of GT "gender proves to be performance---that is, constituting the identity it is puported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, thought not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed" (GT:25)
Quoting Nietzsche which is important "there is no being behind doing, acting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction imposed on the doing-the doing itself is everything" (N 1887 p29 geanealogy of morals)
p25 for better quote
The quote has confused many people, how can there be a performance without a performer and performativity.
p56
SEXUALITIES AND COMMUNICATION
How is linguistic performativity connected to gender?
Gender identities are constructed and constituted by language. If you like, it is not that an identity DOES discource or language, other way around, language and discourse do gender.
This makes me think of French use of the un and une when using feminine or masculine traits in language which I always thought was weird t do, especially if the writing was something anon then that would be a giveaway... intriguing..
Gender constituted in the same way that ones choice of clothes is curtailed, or even predetermined by society/context/economy
SURFACE/DEPTH
Butler argue that there is no identity outside language.
Leads her to reject the commonly accepted distinction between surface + depth (Cartesian dualism between body and soul) oh oh....
3rd chapter of GT challenges from Foucault doctrine if internalisation...
GT 134,135,136 GIVE IT READ
PARODY AND DRAG
“If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity,” GT 136
all gender is a form of parody
drag effectively imitate natyre of all gender identities
“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency,” Butler claims; “part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a rad- ical contingency in the relation between sex and gender” (GT: 137–8; her emphasis)
p58
Those who don't 'do' their gender correctly are punished by society (GT 139-40)
Gender does not happen once and for all when we're born
sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something thats always been there
process of repition isn't it...
So here it would suggest that with gender it is a repeated appearance that gives rise to an identity that we might attribute to ourself such as male or female... would this not be so with other things such as being black or gay? or even for our created identities, we make ourselves into something by our repeated actions and in art and photography we have an even greater freedom to have a created identity which may not be exactly ours but something we can assume if we are percieved as such... how often have we met celbrities who we know everything about them typically fropm what they have reported to have done/ what films they have been in, I suppose rthe occasional tweet with new forms of social media bringing us closer to our stars... and then in person/reality they are completely different to our intiial perceptions of them. They may have assumed a different identity, and so here we have again perhaps a difference to how we think we are and how others percieve us as well given all the available context to us.
"regulated process of repetition" taking place in language
problem with taking up the tool you are given....
subversion constrained by discourse???
All gender is parodic
Do we not mimic others when we are little and how we should act, boys with robots and girls with dollys and prams? we look to motherly and fatherly figures for guidance on how we are supposed to act.. although we have a phase where we can be treated the same, (grls in pink, boys in blue)
describe identity as an effect not as fatally determined
gt148
p59
constructed nature of heterosexuality
opposed foundationalist modelsof identity that suggest identity is there fixed and final
MAIN PROBLEM who is it then who is doing the doing(parodying) seem to presupposed an 'I'
THE TROUBLE WITH GENDER TROUBLE
worry over the meaning of 'performativity'
To me this is a good and apt description of photography and self-portraits that is a representation of the person being portrayed
p60
Benhabib to beleive there is a subjective entity behind the curtain, which butler refutes
Perhaps this would be a criticism of Butler as the photographer would be the one behind the curtain of identities that we are creating here and so would make sense to think of it in this way... although we would run into troub le when we are thinking of identitiy in the traditional sense... However yes, perhaps I don't entirely agree with Butler here, we seem to have something behind our created identities which stay the same, which is subject to changes in time but there is a sense that something remains numerically (forgot the word) the same. You still remain yourself
Distinction between linguistic and theatrical performativity ... now regards them as related
PERFORMATIVE BODIES
performative utterances - heterosexual man saying 'i do' when asked to take this woman
'it's a boy/girl example.. it's not merely a statement it's performative not just a statement of fact
p62
CITATIONAL SIGNS ----- X
etc etc... seems to go on about some other books which might not be as relevant to me at this time.
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Judith Butler
Sara Salih
2002
abbreviations
GT = Gender trouble (first edition 2009)
GP = Gender as performance (1994) Read this??
I will try and skim some bits to make sure I focus on the identity part as I need to be quite harsh qwith what I read now or shall be doomed to too much information
Butler's work concerned with 'subject formation' p2
Bodies that matter is the follow up to GT
Butlers subject is not an individual, but a linguistic structure in formation
Influences for Butler: Hegel, nietsche, freud, lacan, derrida, jj austin
Refer back to these if need be
p9-
Performativity
discussed in detail in chapt 3 of this book I think this is what I just read above... woops
Butler is less interested in the individual experience, Identity is constructed with language and discource. Butler puts it: Genealogy
a moment of emergence that is not finally distinguishable from fabrication
sex + gender are the effects rather than the causes of institutions and practices...
Butler explains how subject-effect will come about, and how it might be effected differently
The things aren't 'out there' from the beginning (i.e from birth)
The things are subjectified then and reinforced after
Beauvoirs famous insight '[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman (1949:281)
suggests a woman is something we do than something we are
THIS MAKES MUCH SENSE
Think about how to translate thtis into the photography side releveant to my dissertation
Butler doesn't suggest gender identity is a performance since it presupposes existence of a subject or actor doing he performance... performance pre-exists the performer... counter inuitive :S
performativity + performance confusion...
performativity is a shifting concept that evolves over the course of Butlers books
THE SUBJECT
analysis of the subject in her first book subjects of desire
initially it dealt with Hegels phenomenology of spirit
Phenomenology - study of consciousness, way things appear to us.
Dialectic - reasoning in which thesis leads to antithesis, resolved in synthesis.
Ontology - science or study of being
SELF AND OTHER
Hegel writes that it is only through recognising and knowing another that the self can know itself
self-consciousness negative process it seems
ETC...
GENDER
FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TO 'FEMININITY'
"Rather than starting from the premise that the subject is a pre-existing metaphysical journeyer, Butler describes it as a subject in process that is constructed in discource by the acts it performs p44
SUGGESTED HERE TO NOT SKIP ANY OF BUTLERS WORK.... perhaps....
assert gender is a process hat has neither origin nor end p46
sees gender as unatural, so that assumption that male has to be masculine and hetersexual
if gender is a proces or a becoming rather than an ontologiucal state of being that one simply 'is' then what determines what we become, as well as the way in which we become it? p46
Discourse - she refers to Foucaults formulation of discourse 'large groups of statements' governing the way we speak and percieve specific historical moments.
'free floating artifice' p6 GT, if Butler describes sex and gender as not connected at all
production + matrix are key words for Butler
MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA
readings of Freud, difficult at times, some help with these bits
uses the above Freudian text + The Ego and the Id
In M+M F distinguishes between mourning - reaction to a real loss + melancholia - unaware of what has been lost...... instead of getting over it, take the loss into the ego by identifying with it....denotes procvess of identifying with others
Butler will argue Introjection is not the only way in which identification takes place
introjection - process whereby objects from the outside world are taken into and preserved in the ego.... not a clue how that would be achieved.... interesting enough... is this really relevant??
PERHAPS - for my own sake I will read the bits I wanted to for the sake of identity and when it comes to redoing this bit I can of course come back and spend some more time reading gender trouble for a more comprehensive view and revisions to make on it
dispositions- whether from birth onwards, you desire memebers of the same or the opposite sex
MELANCHOLIC HETEROSEXUALITY
what Butler does with Freud...
She is interested in these dispositions
-how masc + fem dispositions can be traced to an identification + where they take place
Surface/ depth
rejection
ALREADY READ THIS SECTIOn... see chapt 3 above
That seems to be it for the first book gender trouble which I will focus on... now to the purity of the original text to see what little gold mines I can dig out.
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PRIMARY SOURCE TEXT
JUDITH BUTLER
GENDER TROUBLE
feminism + the subversion of identity
1990
p. Routledge
PREFACE (1999) - may come back to
CHAPTER 1 - SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE p1
One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one
-Simone de Beauvoir
Strictly speaking, "women" cannot be said to exist.
-Julia Kristeva
Woman does not have a sex
-Luce Irigaray
The deployment of sexuality... established this notion of sex
-Michel Foucault
The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual
-Monique Wittig
1. "WOMEN AS THE SUBJECT OF FEMINISM p2
feminist theory has assumed there is some existing identity
representation - controversial term
"representation is the normative function of a language which is said to reveal or distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women." p2
This sounds very useful to use for my chapter, representation is interchangeable and this sounds like an apt way to smooth judith in
the "subject" crucial for politics
"If one "is" a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered "person" trancscends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts......." p4
Saying I am "this" kind of suggests I am that and nothing else? No, it is saying I cna belong to many categories but it is a term that is not descriptive of the whole... hmm... perhaps not relevant as such but I can stress how multiple identities would work and be pragmatic
2. THE COMPULSORY ORDER OD SEX/GENDER/DESIRE p8
split introduced in the unity of feminist --> sex + gender
ignore the biology is destiny argument, "gender is culturally constructed" p8 "hence gender is neither the casual result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex."
"When the constructed status of gender is theorised as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one." p9 IMPORTANT
This gives way for things being constructed as identities and are how we can do this in photography... however this suggests an UNTRUTHFUL ACCURACY which I will deteste and actuall highlights what I am looking at in the essay.... Again, this "identity" that we portray in the photograph could be truthful to what we construct for ourselves, or perhaps we cannot help but having a constructed identity in itself and a true representation is never possible.... my head hurts now.
"If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called "sex" is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all." p9-10
culturally constructed as is our identity... doesn't the self-portrait give us this temptation to refute and subvert this socially constructed representation by allowing us to maniupulate what they see and their perception... ultimately (death of the author) they may still be the deciding factor in how something is percieved but this doesn't mean the initial sources of information can'tbe manipulated in some fashion
3. GENDER: THE CIRCULAR RUNS OF CONTEMPORARY DEBATE
is gender something person can be said to 'have' or an essential attribute that a person is said to 'be'
constructedness imply some form of determinism?
"Does "construction" suggest that certain laws generate gender differences along universal axes of sexual difference? How and where does the constriction of this gender take place?" p11
This suggests a human prior to construction... hmm this is very interesting because I can see this applying to the case of constructing something such as gender, but identity is made up of many things and some of them can be thought of in a way to suggest that there is a prior human constructor, I can say to myself one day perhaps I want to be 'goth' or emo' and that will be my choice and pre-requisitite to an identity I wish to assume so in this sense it would make sense to talk about bits in that way..... However, some identities may indeed be determined by our biology but are perhaps maleable by the environment (nature v nurture argument) Such as homosexuality appears to be determined by our genes and not a choice that we make, however we have the choice to assert this sexual orientation and reinforce our identity in our actions...
In reply to this: "When the relevant "culture" that "constructs" gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a casem not biology, but culture becomes destiny."
Well this helps, with MEAD (I think it was Mead, the guy after Hegel... well those series of essays I read) suggests it is society that gives us a self-consciousness and so identity because of other people... Also it is culture that constructs our identity and curves it or conditions it to one thing, the example of 'its a girl!'
This avenue is allowed to be subverted through the means of art and photography which are expressions of rebelioon (sometimes) at these types of things and I'm sure there would be a lot of feminism movement arts that move against this notion of fixitivity.
On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in the Second Sex that "one is not born a woman, but rather, becomes one" For Beauvoir, gender is "constructed," p11
So we have on one hand, that biology is not a deciding factor it is in fact culture (other people) but then we can have here on the opposite hand that it is a construction, and perhaps a bit of both isn;t it? we are always influenced by everthing and perhaps this is what I wish to portray inmy dissertation... Perhaps it is the case that photography frees us from the culture decisions and grants us a little leeway in allowing us to contruct ouridentity
Can construction in such a case be reduced to a form of choice?
body itself is a construction
IV. THEORISING THE BINARY, THE UNITARY, AND BEYOND p18
n/a
V. IDENTITY, SEX, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE p22
"Within philosophical discource itself, the notion of "the person" has recieved analytic elaboration on the assumption that whatever social context the person is "in" remains somehow externally related to the definitional structure of personhood, be that consciousness, the capactiy for language, or moral deliberation" p22-23
"what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time, the question here will be: To what etent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internl coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person? To what extent is "identity" a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience?" p23
Just had a thought.... which I've instantly forgotten... AH Judith has a lovely style of writing with questions to makeher points which is what I like to do, I think it would be prudent in an essay like mine in which there are no definititive answers and the questions are perhaps more important than any answers
important bits p23
"The notion that there might be a "truth" of sex, as Foucault ironically terms it, is produced precisely through the regulatory practices that generate coherent identities through the matrix of coherent gender norms" p23-4
Interesting, I am looking for truth, and perhaps truth can be found if one regulates their performativity of identity into something consistent thien it would be true to say that is their identity and this is true
matrix of intelligibility
if identity is an effect of discurscive practices
men are only 'persons' the only gender is feminine.... ig
Wittig, destruction of sex
VI. LANGUAGE, POWER, AND THE STRATEGIES OF DISPLACEMENT
--lots of feminist literature ssumed there is a doer behind the deed
without an agency can be argued there cn be no agent
metaphysics of substance
CHAPTER 2 - PROHIBITION, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE HEREROSEXUAL MATRIX
III. FREUD AND THE MELANCHOLIA OF GENDER
loss
" "So by taking flight into the ego, love escapes annihilation" " (178) p78
becomes a new structure of identity
internalisation of the loss
IV. GENDER COMPLEXITY AND THE LIMITS OF IDENTIFICATION
Lacan, Riviere, and Freud ----> competing versions of how gender identifications work p89
"In the first instance, multiple idenitifications can constitute a nonhierarchial configuration of shifting and overlapping identifications that call into question he primacy of any univocal gender attribution" p89
CHAPTER 3 - SUBVERSIVE BODILY ACTS
III. MONIQUE WITTIG: BODILY DISINTEGRATION AND FICTIVE SEX
language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body
-Monique Wittig
De Beauvoir's 'one is not born a woman but rather one becomes one.... nonsensical because how does one become a woman if one isn't a woman in the first place
sex does not cause gender
Wittig says lesbian is beyond the category of sex...
IV. BODILY INSCRIPTIONS, PERFORMATIVE SUBVERSIONS
sex/gender seems to presuppose a generalisation of the 'body' p175
body = mute facility, -Beauvoir/Sartre
dualism
theme of genealogy
"By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form" p177
"we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right" p190
"Gender ought not to be constructed 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 stylised repition of acts" p191
Essential here, the constructed identities are more things that are repeated through repition of acts to make it so... r
gender reality is sustained through social performances
"Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible." p193
CONCLUSION: FROM PARODY TO POLITICS p194
Foundational identity in place first
Butler argues: That there need not be a doer behind the deed... The doer is constructed by doing the deed
VERY IMPORatNT INCLUDE THISS
Sense of an I, I think I will refer to Descartes about the mention of the I, or the I that is thinking is proof of an indvdual self
that cogito
"If identity is asserted through a process of signification, if identity is always already signified, and yet continues to signify as it circulates within various itnerlocking discources, then the question of agency is not to be answered through recource to an "I" that preexists signification." p196
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
JUDITH BUTLER - Performance of Identity
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