Judith Butlers theory on gender and sex and performativity

Introduction

This paper we will be analyzing two plays that are 'Cloud Nine', and 'M. Butterfly'. Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity provides a useful framework for understanding Salomé, the collaborative effort of playwright Oscar Wilde and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. According to Butler, the categories of gender and sex are merely performances which gain their authority through reiterative practice. In other words, that which we think of as feminine and masculine, or as woman and man, are not based on ideal forms, but are rather the “sedimented” effects of the reiterated practices of “doing” gender and sexuality. Through generations of reiterative performance, the binaristic categories of sex and gender have settled in our culture as conceptual norms. However, the very reiterative and performative nature of the law that enforces such norms creates an opportunity for disruption of that law. Read in conjunction with Butler's seminal works, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Salomé is exposed as a subversive work that attempts to overturn the law of the heterosexual patriarchy - the law which reinforces gender binaries - through performative gestures. Wilde and Beardsley use images of masks and veils, ideas the ambiguity of gender, and a redefinition of the phallus to confuse and undermine the repressive Victorian law that placed both gender and sexuality in such binaristic opposition. Understood through the lens of Butler's theory of gender performativity, Salomé is revealed as a subversive parody of repressive Victorian sexuality.

A highly cerebral philosopher, Butler struggles with her desire to deny the materiality of the body. Although she would like to consider sex as a purely linguistic construct, it is difficult (if not impossible) to deny the materiality upon which such construct is based: “For surely bodies live, and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these 'facts,'…cannot be dismissed as mere construction” (Bodies xi). However, Butler reconciles this conflict by considering “that bodies only appear, only endure, only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas” (ibid.). In this way, Butler can consider both gender and sex as largely constructed through cultural (and thus linguistic) performances. For Butler, gender is “a corporeal style, an 'act,' as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where 'performative' suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Trouble 177). There is no ideal form behind those performances: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results” (Trouble 33, italics mine).

Cloud Nine dept analysis

In 1979, Caryl Churchill wrote a feminist play entitled Cloud Nine. It was the result of a workshop for the Joint Stock Theatre Group and was intended to be about sexual politics. Within the writing she included a myriad of different themes ranging from homosexuality and homophobia to female objectification and oppression. "Churchill clearly intended to raise questions of gender, sexual orientation, and race as ideological issues; she accomplished this ...