Gender Performativity - Political Potential and Limits

Political Potential and Limits

Butler suggests that "he critical promise of drag does not have to do with the proliferation of genders…but rather with the exposure of the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals", although such remarks fail to indicate how the inadequacies of heterosexual regimes might be explicitly exposed. Much of the discussion surrounds Butler's inability to differentiate clearly between notions of performativity and performance, even when pressed to define a clear division. In general, performativity is considered as describing the process of discursive production, whereas performance is a specific type of self-presentation.

According to Butler, gender performance is only subversive because it is "the kind of effect that resists calculation”, which is to say that signification is multiplicitous, that the subject is unable to control it, and so subversion is always occurring and always unpredictable. Moya Lloyd suggests that the political potential of gender performances can be evaluated relative to similar past acts in similar contexts in order to assess their transgressive potential: "Even if we accept that there are incalculable effects to all (or most) statements or activities, this does not mean that we need to concede that there are no calculable effects." Conversely, Rosalyn Diprose lends a hard-line Foucauldian interpretation to her understanding of gender performance’s political reach, as one's identity "is built on the invasion of the self by the gestures of others, who, by referring to other others, are already social beings". Diprose implies that the individual's will, and the individual performance, is always subject to the dominant discourse of an Other (or Others), so as to restrict the transgressive potential of performance to the inscription of simply another dominant discourse.

Martha Nussbaum argues that Butler's concepts of gender performativity, while not without merit, is a misguided retreat from engaging with real-world concerns:

"Butler suggests to her readers that this sly send-up of the status quo is the only script for resistance that life offers Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?"