New Waver’s Weblog

My thesis edits seem to be trundling along at a slow but steady pace. One of the main issues the graders had with my work was that they wanted more in-depth theory. With that in mind I’ve been working on a strictly theoretical chapter for the last few weeks. One of the key components of this chapter is the idea of performance.

Gender performance is a pretty well-established concept in feminist theory. Hell, it goes back to the very beginning. Gender is a social construct: you act ‘like a man’ or ‘like a lady’ because you know that if you don’t, you’ll get in trouble for it—men who aren’t masculine enough are constantly questioned about their heterosexuality. Women who don’t perform femininity well enough are questioned about, well, everything that makes them up as a person. Judith Butler is one of the main proponents of gender performance theory, and I’ve been reviewing Gender Trouble for this chapter. While I find some of it very problematic, it’s been an interesting exercise and has reframed a lot of the ways I think about constructing the ’self’ (not just the masculine or feminine self, but the self as the basic construct of ‘I am’.) Since I am, of course, deeply rooted in the Cartesian dualism that dominates Western thought, this is difficult for me to get my head around. The idea that the self doesn’t exist independently from experience, that the self is an act rather than a thing. Well. It’s something I’ve questioned literally as long as I can remember—since early childhood— but even after twenty years of questioning it’s still a difficult concept to fully wrap my head around. Maybe I’ll succeed one of these days.

On a less mind-bending level, it’s also brought up ideas of other kinds of performance. The way you perform your class, for instance, or the way you perform your place of origin. I’ll explain. At home I don’t stand out because I’m just like everyone else, an American, a Floridian (well, that’s not entirely true, a lot of people in Florida aren’t Floridians). Here, one of my main defining characteristics is my American-ness. The way I talk, the things I talk about, the way I dress, they all mark me out as different and constantly remind me that I am performing my place of origin. I don’t feel particularly ‘American’ in America–I’m performing my nationality, yes, but then, so is everyone around me, so I don’t really notice. Here, I’m acutely aware of the performance aspect.

That probably sounds negative, but it isn’t, at least not most of the time. It’s just interesting, the way performance (whether it be gender, class or place of origin performance) gets reified until it seems natural, and it’s only when you’re taken out of your normal performance space that you realize no, actually, it isn’t ‘natural’ in the sense that everyone is like that. Most people aren’t. It’s a valuable lesson, and one I’m glad to be learning.