Angela asks: >is butler a social constructionist?
Her reply would be that this is the wrong question to ask. In her final chapter in _Gender Trouble_ she outlines a performative politics in order to answer the 'so what?' or 'what is new?' question. I recall being entirely repulsed when I read it, as it seemed a politics incapable of addressing class exploitation in any substantive way. I still think this is true, though I think Alex argued a couple of months ago that I was wrong about this. If Butler's changed her mind or Pomo Theory has gone in some other direction, then someone will have to clue me in here as I haven't read this stuff in nearly a decade.
Here's Butler, excerpted from p 146ff in _Gender Trouble_ where she stakes out what a politics might look like and what she thinks is different about what she is saying. I've injected concrete examples as a way, I hope, of concretizing her abstract language:
"Practices of parody can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phastasmatic, and mimetic--a failed copy as it were..."
In other words, Kelley has been charged with failure: as a woman, as a woman being a man, and as a comic. Charges that invoke some essentialist notion of what constitutes proper man- or womanhood (I can take it from a man because men " tend to express their rudeness in a very simple and simplistic manner.") and what counts as a successful comic.
"And yet this failure to become 'real' and to emobdoy 'the natural' is...a constitutive failure of all gender enactments.... "
Yoshie and Liza have discussed this, nicely grounding Butler's work in feminist political history with regard to white middle class feminismts' attempt to distance themselves from the lesbian contingent.
I'd also add that within the lesbian/gay liberation movements of the 70s a similar sort of charge of failure was lodged at bi's as failed gays/lesbians. Bi's were somehow failing to fully embrace their true gay/lesbian identity in order to take advantage of het privilege. This was prominent enough in the 80s and I experienced it often enough, though for me it was in academia and not among non-academic lesbians/gays who generally really didn't care. Some did, but the vehemence wasn't as strong. Don't know why.
"The parodic repetition of gender exposes...the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an "act," as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of 'the natural" that in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phatasmatic status."
Roseanne's infamous display a few years ago was a performance that came, not from reading Butler, but from her experiences as a working class jewish white woman trying to negotiate the male dominated field of comedians, and later the male and middle class dominated world of Hollywood. That is, she had learned what constituted in/appropriate displays of working class jewish womanhood while growing up. But later, she encountered resistance even to what she considered her appropriate displays of jewish womanhood--her understanding of what was proper was quickly revealed as inappropriate in these worlds.
If I recall correctly, I think she has also related all of this to her experience of being fat. That is, she was acutely aware of how it was possible to be interpreted differently depending on whether she was considered fat or not. And, of course, she always carried around inside the idea that she was fat, even when she might not have been objectively defined as such. So, she was aware of the gap between feeling as if she were fat, though not being responded to as if she were. This surely creates a kind of psychic disjuncture that would force one to reflect on performance and identity.
While Roseanne may not be performing based on some reading of Butler et al., I suspect that is was quite possible for them to see and experience what Butler is talking about: namely, that gender identity is shifting and not stable and that one has to perform it in different contexts in order to avoid the charge of being a failed performance of some essential identity that was clearly not essential and fixed in her experience. Thus, one has some control over the performance precisely because the tools with which to do this are always already there to work with.
"(F)eminist discourse on cultural construction remains trapped within the unnecessary binarism of free will and determinism. Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible. The critical task is to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them."
Here is where ACT UP might be invoked, if we want to talk about purposeful political strategies. Rather than behaving *properly* in order to gain political acceptance, they've decided to work with what ab initio exists--a political ground that defines what is proper/not proper public display of gender/sexuality. Now, on Butler's view, this isn't constructing some identity willy nilly based on 'nothing' nor is it some sort of retroactive justification for just having fun, for being clowns, for flipping the bird at conventional politics--an argument that the cultural right likes to invoke: Oh they're just doing this as a gratuitous display of their sexual perversions. Sickos. Sound familiar?
Another example is the fight against the radioactive nuke dump in my hometown. I've written about this elsewhere, arguing that identity politics didn't work in this instance, but for the purposes of this discussion I'll take a different position in order to utilize an identity that isn't typically associated with Identity Politics.
When the news of the attempted siting hit the fan, a coalition emerged to fight the siting of the dump. The group split into two camps: one wanted to pursue politics by marshalling lawyers and other experts in order to demonstrate that the siting was unconstitutional and irrational based on scientific findings re the geology, effects of radiation on cows, etc. The other was tired of politics as usual and were incensed at the way they'd been constructed by the powers that be. Specifically, the community (among others) was chosen because NYS officials believed that it was a backward, conservative, desperately poor and thus, the gov't figured, unlikely to fight.
Well, to be sure, that didn't sit well with the farmers and the rednecks nosiree. So there emerged this interesting coalition of leftist activists, academics, and hicks from the sticks. They had some purty interesting conversations, let me tell you. Not only did the hicks from the sticks find that NYS suits were condescending, they realized what they'd already suspected: that the people on 'their' (the leftist academics and activists) side really thought quite the same of them already. Not all of them, of course, but enough to cause some terrible arguments, a lot of hurt feelings, and disillusionment.
And so, the farmers and the rednecks very proudly drove their tractors into town for the demonstrations and parades, flipping the bird at all of them. They also very proudly got out their shotguns and carried them along to participate in a "non-violent" protest. ("Non-violence, fuck that namby pamby bullshit. We's gotta right to bear arms and if'n they want to take our land away then we's gonna fight". Stokely Carmichael anyone?) They knew perfectly well what they were doing with that one: flipping the bird at 'em all and refusing to cater to 'proper' political behavior invoked by both the leftists and the NYS officials.
And they very happily exaggerated their identity-as-appearance by wearing overalls and shitkickers to NYS meetings in Albany. And they very happily paraded these identities at various "politics as usual" events, while the 'let's work within the system' crowd and the NYS officials alike cringed in disgust at the stupid rednecks who proved themselves to be the rabble that they'd always thought them to be. And they very happily donned Simpson family Costumes (signifying a radioactive family) and stitched up homemade costumes so they could dress radioactive mutant dairy cows. ("You think we're dumb cows, dumb animals. Well, hope you enjoy your milk and cheese" And they hadn't even read Hegel, let alone Butler)
In yer face, ey?
"To enter into the repetitive practices of this terrain of signification is not a choice, for the "I" that might enter is always already inside: there is not possibility of agency or reality outside of the discursive practices that give those therms the intelligibility that they have. The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to *displace* the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself"
"The task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua posibility , but to redescribe those possibilities that *alread* exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible."