“discourses do actually live in bodies. They lodge in bodies; bodies in fact carry discourses as part of their own lifeblood.”

-Judith Butler, Interview, 1998[1]

“What we might call ‘agency’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘possibility’ is always a specific political prerogative that is produced by the gaps opened up in regulatory norms, in the interpellating work of such norms, in the process of their self-repetition. Freedom, possibility, agency do not have abstract or pre-social status, but are always negotiated within a matrix of power.”

-Butler, “Critically Queer”[2]

I. Introduction: Performativity and Gender

To what extent is it possible to signify a gender other than male or female? We live in an age in which, over the past decades, we have seen a proliferation of discourses, subcultures, and politics around gender and gender identity. In my own experience as a (gender)queer person involved in queer communities, including online ones, I have encountered a wide variety of terms used to signify non-normative gender, including butch, femme, butchfemme, hard femme, soft butch, boi, grrrl, wimmin/womyn, genderqueer, non-binary, genderfuck, genderbender,“third gender”,[3] agender, bigender, genderfluid, ladyboy/boi, transgender, tranarchist, neutrois, androgyne, sissy, dyke, cross-dresser, drag queen, drag king, bio-queen, and faux queen, to give a non-representative sample. These new and not-so-new identity configurations challenge our thinking of gender within a binary conceptual framework, and encourage new and imaginative ways to navigate a social and political space that is dominated by discourse which is thoroughly limited by a two-gender system.

However, the process of signification inevitably escapes the intentions of the person who endeavors to communicate. A person may easily describe themselves in any of the above ways, and yet their dress, behavior, demeanor, voice, primary and secondary sex characteristics may signify something other than this within various structures for conceptualizing gender. More often than not, the conceptual structure in question will be one which insists upon classifying different gendered attributes as either male or female, man or woman, masculine or feminine. Following Derrida, we know that concepts are defined differentially – what is masculine is so because it is not-feminine, and vice versa. This pairing of concepts defined against each other forms a system in which no third space arises between them. Their pairing ensures that even signifiers that ambiguously signify male or female, such as androgyny, are either defined negatively against the two poles (and thus bear the trace of that which they oppose) or else contain positive features of both (as we will see, such signification lacks the performative authority to become “real” gender). This is because the conceptual structure itself is defined differentially: gender constitutes a closed system which defines itself against the entirety of signifiers which cannot (within this system) signify gender. Thus a whole array of social features are necessarily excluded from our understanding of gender in order to negatively constitute what we understand as masculine or feminine: a hat does not mark one as male or female (or something else) until it has some positive feature which might be described as “feminine” or “masculine”. The male/female gender binary is thus an epistemologically arbitrary conceptual structure that organizes clusters of signifiers under the rubrics of the maleness or femaleness signified.

These signifiers are pervasive in culture and social life. Indeed, there is no way to strip a person of all of those signifiers which signify gender and be left with a totally genderless subject. That is because the discourses through which gender signification is made meaningful precede the subject – they are part of the process of signification through which one becomes an intelligible subject. As Judith Butler notes, discourses “live” in bodies; they are also pervasive in the social sphere. Given the above limitations inherent to a binary signifying structure, and given the pervasiveness of the discourse which carries such a system of signification, what hope is there for the semiosis, or making meaningful (discursively) the imaginative possibilities described above?

In order to understand the semiotic potential for possibilities that exceed the bounds of such a limited classificatory system, we must understand how such possibilities are opened up and navigated, as Butler notes above, “within a matrix of power.” To this end, Butler’s notion of performativity is essential. Butler clarifies the notion of performativity, famously put forward in her book Gender Trouble, in her 1993 essay “Critically Queer”. Butler first explains what performativity means in a general sense:

Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements which, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power. Implicated in a network of authorization and punishment, performatives tend to include legal sentences, baptisms, inaugurations, declarations of ownership, statements that not only perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action performed. The power of discourse to produce that which it names is thus essentially linked with the question of performativity. The performative is thus one domain in which power acts as discourse.[4]

Thus, performative semiotic processes, such as the declaration of a judge, do not merely convey a certain meaning; they also enact that meaning in the social/discursive realm. As forms of authoritative speech (“speech” here being understood as any kind of signification), they cite the discursive powers that authorize their speech as they carry it out. Butler makes clear how we are to understand gender in this context: “Gender is performative insofar as it is the effect of a regulator regime of gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social constraints, taboos, prohibitions, threats of punishment operate in the ritualized repetition of norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender construction and destabilization.”[5] Butler explains how the performative declaration of the doctor – “it’s a girl!” – is citationally linked to an entire discourse leading up to the performative declaration of the priest – “I now pronounce you man and wife!”[6] The doctor’s performative utterance not only anticipates but effects, applies, and sustains this discourse which indexes not only female gender but also female heterosexuality. Thus, we must understand “girl” not as a signifier—“girl” means that one will dress and behave in a certain way—but rather, as a signified—the dress and behavior are interpreted through a certain discourse to mean “girl”. Further, it is not merely “girl” that is signified, but “girl!”—the exclamation indicating the performative force to make one a girl that the repeated repetition of feminine signifiers carries.

Gender is thus a repeated series of performances in which “the performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame.”[7] There is no ontologically “real” gender that signifies a certain mode of sociality; rather, gender is itself the effect of that same mode of sociality. The fact that gender is not “real,” however, does not mean that gender can be simply tossed aside; one is always-already enmeshed in a discourse which produces gendered signification around gendered subjects. However, this is only one side of the story. The other side is the potential for subverting its own discourse that the process of performative signification inevitably and inadvertently enacts. For Butler, “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 in-credible.”[8] This rendering of “in-credibility” to gender has the effect of opening up space in which alternatives can emerge; however, my interest is not in how hegemonic systems of signification are made in-credible, but rather, in how alternative systems of signification can or cannot be made credible. In order to see how this may or may not be possible, I propose a movement in this essay that will take us through fiction, abjection, performance, and play, through children’s T.V. shows and queer zines, with the ultimate goal of understanding how performativity can move from destabilization to a kind of stabilization of alternate gender paradigms.

II. Imaginative Horizons: Animacy, Gender, Anthropomorphism

To begin our movement, let us first consider what it would be like to live in a world in which the semiotic processes of signification were divorced from their performative force. In doing so, we are already in the world of fantasy, and so appropriately I turn to the world of the fantastical. The Cartoon Network show Adventure Time (2010) is one such fantastical universe in which magic, absurdity, and most importantly, anthropomorphism abound. From Candy People to rocks that talk, just about anything in the land of Ooo, in which the story takes place, can be animate and anthropomorphized. Adventure Time is thus an interesting example of how non-human fictional creatures who are depicted as animate (living) and anthropomorphic (having the ability to speak, etc.) often are depicted as gendered. Creatures who have no relation to human culture, do not share our genome, and are not even biological are depicted as conforming to humanlike gender expectations. Even aliens from outer space often are depicted as gendered, although it often depends on what level of anthropomorphism is involved (compare the humanoid and intelligent alien species of Star Trek to the terrifying insect-like Xenomorph of Alien). All of this reflects how conceiving of a being as a subject, even in the case of fiction, necessitates mediation by gender, as argued above. However, there is at least one character who does not conform to this paradigm.

PBS Digital Studios released an “Idea Channel” video which explored the curious way gender is signified with reference to one Adventure Time character, BMO.[9] BMO is a small, video-game robot (with many other functions) who lives with the main characters of the show, Finn and Jake. BMO is unique in that, as a robot with no particular signs or makers of gender identification, he does not embody gender in any clear cut way. Further, she is referred to variously with terms that signify both masculinity and femininity (an ambiguous practice that I am here maintaining). As the “Idea Channel” video points out, BMO has described herself as a “little living boy” and a “real baby girl,” has role-played as a film noir-like masculine protagonist (although the episode title, “BMO Noire” uses the feminine French adjective), and has been referred to by other characters as “he,” “she,” “m’lady” and “man”. BMO also bears affection for other non-gendered creatures, such as a talking bubble, thus refusing any normative sexuality that could index gender. “Idea Channel” reminds us BMO is distinct from other famous fictional robots such as R2D2 (Star Wars) and Rosie the Maid (The Jetsons), who have clearly defined roles in conformity with a clearly defined gender.

BMO thus gives us an imaginative horizon in which we can picture a world in which gender does not have performative force. It is not as though the semiosis of gender in Adventure Time disappears – not only do other characters have genders, but BMO is himself referred to with gendered signifiers. These signifiers do indeed properly attain the signification of gender (we know precisely what is meant when referring to someone as “m’lady” versus “man”); however, these signifieds are not performatively mapped onto BMO’s identity. In other words, BMO is able to be signified as gendered without actually being discursively produced as gendered. Thus, Adventure Time and BMO offer insight into a world in which the performativity of gender, at least in certain contexts, does not attain. However, we cannot move from this semi-utopian vision into a world outside of gender discourse. On the contrary, we must be attentive to how being deprived of the performative semiosis of such discourse can have disempowering and even dehumanizing rather than freeing effects.

III. Abject Bodies and the Semiosis of Gender

“Bodies that do not matter are ‘abject’ bodies. Such bodies are not intelligible (an epistemological claim), nor do they have legitimate existence (a political or normative claim).”[10]

The above quotation, taken from an interview of Judith Butler by Irene Meijer and Baukje Prins, is part of a conversation that explores the ways in which normative gender discourse deprives certain subjects, identities, or bodies of both intelligibility and value. As Eva Kittay put it, “When we fall outside the norm, we fall outside the set of categories and concepts by which we can be understood and be made intelligible to others…[T]o the extent that we come to be identified with the anomaly, we simply are identified as someone who lacks value and even intelligibility.”[11] In this conversation, Meijer and Prins ask about the ways in which individuals thus become “abject,” challenging Butler to expand her understanding of this process by noting that “Feminist historians have shown that the stability of gender identities does not automatically depend on heterosexual negotiations but also on the differences between “proper” women and other women, between “proper” men and other men (Costera Meijer 1991).”[12] They further observe that

Disabled women suffer from being stigmatized as less feminine than their more ablebodied counterparts. On the other hand, black women are sometimes stereotyped as more female, whereas in other contexts they are considered less ladylike than white women. The construction of gender identities, we suggest, was made not only by repeating the difference between female and male, femininity and masculinity but also by constantly affirming the hierarchical opposition between femininity and unfemininity, between masculinity and unmasculinity.[13]

Butler responded to this challenge by saying, “I very much like the idea that the opposite of masculinity is not necessarily femininity.”[14] Thus we see how the differential process of signification takes place in a social space that is marked by differences other than gender.

This last point’s implications with respect to dis-ability are drawn out by Edward Ndopu and Darnell Moore:

As Eli Clare brilliantly puts it, “the mannerisms that help define gender—the way in which people walk, swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space—are all based upon how non disabled people move…The construct of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also on the non disabled body.” Ableism renders invisible those bodies not privileged by dominant definitions of ability, those bodies that do not fit the conceptions of gender that we often imagine.



We “read” the movement of bodies, the ways people walk, hair styles, and the ways our bodies interact with other bodies in social spaces without ever realizing that all of the aforementioned performances are gendered expressions that center on the privilege of physical movement. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on the body, and one’s use of the body, without attending to the fact that for some the use of the body is an impossibility. Indeed, for one of us, a queer who relies on attendants for personal care and grooming, such understanding wholly ignores the ways he exists in the world.[15]

We can thus see that standing outside of discursive practices that performatively en-gender one’s subjectivity is not to stand in a utopian space but a disempowered space.[16] Discourse is that which carries us through the social world. It constrains us as it moves us; performativity is simultaneously the closure of an otherwise boundless possibility and the grounds for all possibility to socially be in the world. Thus, when we speak of the semiotics of non-binary gender, we cannot speak of an absolute break with the norms of signification, for to do so would be to cut ourselves from the performative power of discourse by which all social transformation occurs. It is only by inhabiting this discursive space that we can ever hope to destabilize it.

IV. Drag, Performativity, Destabilization

Paradoxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is ‘queered’ into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses. The hyperbolic gesture is crucial to the exposure of the homophobic ‘law’ which can no longer control the terms of its own abjecting strategies.[17]

What is the semiotic effect of the discursive practice of drag? This subject has been explored at length with regards to gay male culture and drag queens in particular. Butler explains how citing a discourse can be made hyperbolic and theatrical in the context of drag, resulting in a destabilization of the naturalness associated with such norms. If performativity relies on the mundane and naturalized repetition of gendered rituals, then playing up such rituals and synthesizing them can give them the force of a parody. However, this parody does not imply an original of which the drag performance is a copy; indeed, drag figures as a parody of a parody, one without a true or original version to appeal to, but only an impossible to achieve idealized femininity.

Drag has also been explored in the context of lesbian culture, in which female drag kings perform as men in an exaggerated form of masculinity. Sharon Cowan argues that “Women dressing as men – wearing wigs, suits, facial hair, prosthetic penises and the like – underscore the most salient and socially recognizable markers of masculinity whilst simultaneously demonstrating that these characteristics are not ‘natural’ but can be appropriated, performed. These practices decouple masculinity from the body, and hence from nature. In this way, ‘kinging’ focuses on the de-authentication and denaturalization of masculinity[.]”[18] Thus we see how the semiotic markers of masculinity can be appropriated by subjects performatively constituted as female. This decoupling of semiosis and performativity via the drag performance shows how easily the signifieds of “man” or “woman” can be accomplished by the “woman!” or “man!” (here I return to my convention of the “!” to refer to the performative repetition by which gender is effected) who is supposed to be discursively barred from such an achievement.

Drag performances have thus been discussed largely in the context of one gender appropriating the signifiers associated with their “opposite” gender in a way that destabilizes both gender norms and sexual identities. However, drag performances can contain more nuanced versions of gender performance that are worth considering. One such instance is explored in an issue of a zine called “Genderbent: Notes from the Drag King Community” that was dedicated to the discussion of femme drag performance.[19] In this issue, a femme-identified drag performer named Cherry Poppins is interviewed about the “Bio-Queen Manifesto” that was drafted during a drag convention in which she participated (a bio-queen is a “biologically female” woman who performs in feminine or femme drag, usually alongside drag kings). She explains how “as kinging grew, so did the theatrics of our performances, and that created larger roles for all kinds of gendered presentations.”[20] This created a space in which it was possible for someone to perform with a gender that matched the performative role they took on outside of such theatrical performances. Poppins says that “historically drag has always been considered in biological terms, and if a woman is a biological woman but butch and performing male drag then that is drag, but we really pushed the community to take biology out of that equation.”[21] She identifies the subversive potential of all theatrical gender performances, and the possibility of anyone of any gender to perform in any form of drag, stating, “we king, and we queen. And they can king, and they can queen. And exploding the gender binary is exciting and sexy, so let’s do it together.”[22] The “Bio Queen Manifesto,” reproduced in the same zine, states further that “Regardless of our specific gender identities off stage, gender is something which can be and is performed on stage. Drag illustrates the performative nature of gender, not just in front of an audience, but in everyday life.”[23]

What seems operative to me here is not the particulars of any gender performance but the discursive space in which they occur. The performance and the performative are not the same, even in the case of a woman performing as a femme queen, insofar as the performance exceeds the mundane bounds of the performative and its repetition of gendered semiosis, rendering them theatrical. Thus, a drag performance exceeds the bounds of the performative norms, but “This failure to approximate the norm, however, is not the same as the subversion of the norm. There is no promise that subversion will follow from the reiteration of constitutive norms[.]”[24] What is important to subversion and destabilization is the operation of repetition and non-repetition within a certain discursive space. Drag as a cultural practice has achieved its own discursive world, and as such drag performances cite this discourse and participate in it as the repetition of a certain kind of performance. At the same time, the performance itself stands apart (provisionally, not absolutely) from the performative and mundane practices through which everyday gender is signified and naturalized. As a theatrical singularity within a repeated discursive space, as a performance which, no matter how often it is repeated, is not replicated at the level of the repetition of the mundane, each drag performance denaturalizes the semiosis of gender, raises it to parodic level, and refuses its stabilization through repetition (all drag performers must take off their costumes at some point).

If this is true, then drag is a practice of semiotic destabilization, in which the binary categories through which we understand gender are rendered inadequate and destabilized, and in which the performative authority of such semiosis is to some extent negated. As Cowan notes, “Drag kings reveal the performative status of gender because their performances as men are not wholly convincing (nor are they intended to be) because a single bounded act of performance cannot take the place of multi-layered, repetitive prescriptions of gendered behaviour [i.e. performative ones]. Indeed the imperfect replication provides the parodic humour of the performance.”[25] However, if such acts remain unconvincing, what possibilities are there, on the contrary, for a convincing gender performance? If a performance is that which fails to reach the self-reflexive and repetitive process of signification that characterizes performativity, to what extent can alternate gender paradigms become mundane, stabilized, and performative?

V. Differential Stabilization

At this point we have come to the crux of the issue: how can the force of repetition of the performative be invested with alternate paradigms of discourse and signification and thus harnessed to create a space for alternate social and discursive arrangements of gender? We must recognize that in order to lay claim to the performative force of dominant discourses on gender, some element of sameness needs to be preserved in the process of signification. Creating an alternate discourse ex nihilio is not possible, nor is truly escaping the bounds of the dominant discourse itself. Thus, some degree of identification or semiosis with the dominant system of signification is necessary even as we subvert it. Timothy Mitchell gives us an idea of how this semiosis occurs: “Language depends on the possibility of such diverse and different repetitions of the word, just as it depends upon the differences between words; it occurs only as such differing repetition. On the other hand, what is reiterated must remain the same word. In the midst of different repetitions, through every modification, there must remain a trace of something recognizably the same. It is this trace of sameness that we experience as the word’s ‘meaning’”.[26] In order to compete with dominant gender discourse, we may find, thus, that it is necessary to lay claim to certain ideas contained within this discourse. For example, given the exclusion of signs that do not index gender from the system of signification that is binary gender, it may be necessary to restage the signifiers of masculinity and femininity in new ways. It is this ambiguous process of laying claim to certain signifiers of the dominant system of signification at the same time as their restaging that I want to discuss as differential stabilization.

One productive way to explore the performative force of this differing is found in the discussion that opens up between Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau in their joint work (along with Slavoj Žižek) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. “The reiterative speech act thus offers the possibility – though not the necessity – of depriving the past of the established discourse of its exclusive control over defining the parameters of the universal within politics. This form of political performativity does not retroactively absolutize its own claim, but recites and restages a set of cultural norms that displace legitimacy from a presumed authority to the mechanism of its renewal. Such a shift renders more ambiguous – and more open to reformulation – the mobility of legitimation in discourse.”[27] Note how, here, Butler is talking about “political performativity,” and not subversive parody/performance. Thus, the subversive potential is through repeated acts that deprive established discourse of the power it enacts and restages that power in new and innovative ways. Laclau explores this latter notion of restaging, arguing that innovation and destabilization are processes inherent to the process of semiosis itself:

[T]he performative dimension helps to make more visible an aspect of any meaningful action that a purely logicist notion of language could otherwise have kept in the dark: it is the fact that a strict enactment of a rule via an institutionalized performance is ultimately impossible. The application of a rule involves its own subversion. Let us think of Derrida’s notion of iteration: something, in order to be repeatable, has to be different from itself. Or Wittgenstein’s conception of applying a rule: I need a second rule to know how to apply the first, a third one to know how to apply the second, and so on… so that the only possible conclusion is that the instance of application is internal to the rule itself, and constantly displaces the latter.[28]

Thus, this promise of performative politics is feasible precisely because the performative inherently has a differential relationship to the discourse that authorizes it. It is this differential relationship that is harnessed in a performative politics that displaces the authority of the dominant discourse. Laclau further explains how the notion of “parody” obscures the fact that all semiosis as such is parodic:

[I]f a parodic performance means the creation of a distance between the action actually being performed and the rule being enacted, and if the instance of application of the rule is internal to the rule itself, parody is constitutive of any social action… [Such action] has a parodic component, as far as a certain meaning which was fixated within the horizon of an ensemble of institutionalized practices is displaced towards new uses which subvert its literality. This movement is tropological inasmuch as the displacement is not governed by any necessary logic dictated by what is being displaced, and catachrestical inasmuch as the entities constituted through the displacement do not have any literal meaning outside the very displacements from which they emerge.[29]

By repeating such parodic performance, we arrive at a performativity in which the force of discourse is restaged as if by trope or metaphor in a way that is catachrestic or heterodox to that discourse. Thus, we see how the differential is the process through which the power of dominant discourse is appropriated in the process of signification. Such power can serve to stabilize the meanings being generated by new and alternative systems of signification.

VI. Conclusion: Between Abjection and Discourse

There is no way to counter those kinds of grammars except through inhabiting them in ways that produce a terrible dissonance in them, that “say” precisely what the grammar itself was supposed to foreclose. The reason why repetition and resignification are so important to my work has everything to do with how I see opposition working from within the very terms by which power is reelaborated. The point is not to level a prohibition against using ontological terms but, on the contrary, to use them more, to exploit and restage them, subject them to abuse so that they can no longer do their usual work.[30]

I cannot offer a systematic outline of what this kind of performative politics looks like, nor is any a priori determination of its effectiveness possible. It is certain that such a politics is already at work, in queer communities, in new and changing media, in the heterogeneity of culture produced by postmodern late capitalism. Indeed, the nature of the dominant discourse, which relies on displacement in order to maintain its hold on culture and social life, could not help but produce its own subversion. To what extent will such practices and discourses be re-absorbed into the dominant practices of signification? To what extent can “male” and “female” accommodate notions such as “butch” and “femme” in the long run? Again, an a priori determination is impossible. However, we can be certain that the performative repetition of signifiers and the collective development of new systems of signification in which to arrange these signifiers apart from the apprehension of the dominant discourse carves out a discursive space that mediates between abjection and that dominant discourse. A discursive space in which bodies, genders, and identities become intelligible, if only to those within those spaces. More importantly, such discursive practices provide us with the tools we need to fashion a quasi-utopian vision into a concrete discursive reality.

Dedicated to José Esteban Muñoz, whose utopic vision has been and will continue to be an inspiration for my work and the work of many others.

Acknowledgements

I thank Professor Celine-Marie Pascale of American University for her encouragement and patience as I worked through these ideas, and for challenging me to move forward in the face of uncertainty and inexperience with a new field of theory.

References

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Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso. London, 2000.

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Cowan, Sharon, “The Elvis We Deserve: The Social Regulation of Sex/ Gender and Sexuality Through Cultural Representations of ‘The King’”. Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 6, 2010, pp. 221-245.

“Genderbent: Notes from the Drag King Community—The Femme Issue” Issue #2, August 2008 http://qzap.org/v5/index.php?option=com_gallery2&Itemid=28&g2_itemId=1474.

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Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. University of California Press. Berkeley, 1991.

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Wang, Jackie, “On Being Hard Femme”. Issue #1, 2009. Baltimore. http://qzap.org/v5/index.php?option=com_gallery2&Itemid=28&g2_itemId=1623.