![]() ![]() What Butler fails to fully address are the staple issues that black feminism has brought up since its inception. For LGBTQ+ groups who often experience oppression in the form of erasure and invisibility, exercising self-agency in order to command attention and acknowledgement is a subversive act within itself. The posing individual accepts awareness of being watched and develops that awareness into a decisive pose or attitude that holds the spectacter in its power. As Dick Hebdige states, “to strike a pose is to pose a threat… the fact of surveillance into the pleasure of being watched.” Posing arrests the line of sight and transfixes the one who is looking. I also contend that the liberatory power of theatre and performance comes partly from the agency exercised in striking a gendered pose. In the case of AIDS activism, performing gender plays an integral role in political change. Queer history is enriched with “traditions of cross-dressing, drag balls, street walking, butch-femme spectacles… kiss-ins by Queer Nation, drag performance benefits for AIDS.” These performances can all work to disrupt the heteronormative, dichotomous conception of gender by exposing the associated gender norms as fiction. Drag performances are liberatory only to the extent that they subvert stereotypes, creating a dissonance between the original meanings accorded to gender and the reframing of it.Īdditionally, drag is not the only form of theatre that provides possible opportunities for queer liberation. Doubtfire, or in Dustin Hoffman’s “high het entertainment” in Tootsie, drag can sometimes perpetuate harmful notions of gender identity by amplifying sex-role stereotypes and solidying those stereotypes for the audience. As in Robin Williams’ cross-dressing performance as a nanny in Mrs. As a consequence, not all drag performances function as previously stated. However, while drag performers have some control over the way that their gender identity is perceived and interpreted by their audience, it is ultimately the audience members who inscribe their notions of gender onto the performers. For the most subversive performances of drag, there are no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity is revealed as a regulatory fiction just as Butler claims. Secondly, “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.” If gender is a fluid process of repetition, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do. ![]() To Butler, drag consists of two functions: firstly, to reveal the possibility of non-judgemental pluralism when it comes to gender expression and identity. ![]() This will prove to be important in the following analysis of drag, a performance that does well in destabilizing the gender binary and exposing the fictional construction of gender. As Elin Diamond states in Performance and Cultural Politics, “each performance marks out a unique temporal space… contain traces of other now-absent performances, other now disappeared scenes.” Thus, gender always exists as a fluid and contested space where meanings and desires are generated, occluded, and multiply interpreted depending on culture and historical context. Since gender is constructed differently across time and space, the performing of gender does not focus on completed forms. I assert that this is both the source of performativity’s liberatory power, and its greatest liability in effecting progressive cultural change. However, Butler’s writing encourages us to think about the ways that the “doing” of gender is not merely a performance that one has control over, as in taking on a role, but also one that is unfolding in accordance with already socially inscribed performatives. Performative acts can be broken down into two parts: a thing doing and a thing done. Butler adopts the idea by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman,” highlighting that gender is constructed through repetition it is formed entirely of acts, both past and present, which constitute its reality. To begin our analysis, it is necessary that we define performativity and discern what it means for gender to be performative. ![]()
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