Gender and Performativity in Theatre Studies

The structuralist approach to theatre and performance moves beyond character analysis, focusing on the repetition of acts to construct gender identity. Feminist theorists challenge the notion that sex dictates social meanings for women. Gender norms create the illusion of a natural sex, reinforcing compulsory heterosexuality through binary categories. This system ensures the reproduction of cultural norms through marriage and gendered modes of reproduction.

• Theatre Studies
• Gender Identity
• Feminist Theory
• Performance Analysis

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1. Gender and Performativity Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson

2. One of the major contributions of a structuralist approach to the study of theatre and performance has been to move it beyond the kinds of character analysis that has often, in academic and journalistic criticism, in rehearsal halls, and in secondary school assignments, resembled the amateur psychoanalysis or ethical assessment of fictional figures as if they were real people. [ ] The analysis of a fundamentally naturalistic play or performance might involve considering, for example, what forces Nora in A Doll House brings into play among many others within the fictional world of the representation, rather than why she behaves the way she does according to the psychological analysis of cause-and-effect motivations (Ric Knowles, How Theatre Means, Palgrave 2014, pp 49-59)

3. gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts (Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory Theatre Journal, 40,4. Dec., 1988, 519-531 519)

4. In distinguishing sex from gender, feminist theorists have disputed causal explanations that assume that sex dictates or necessitates certain social meanings for women s experience ( Performative Acts 520)

5. there is a sedimentation of gender norms that produces the peculiar phenomenon of a natural sex, or a real woman, or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions [ ] which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to another ( Performative Acts 524)

6. To guarantee the reproduction of a given culture, various requirements [ .] have instated sexual reproduction within the confines of a heterosexually-based system of marriage which requires the reproduction of human beings in certain gendered modes which, in effect, guarantee the eventual reproduction of that kinship system Thus they argue that the one way this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with natural appearances and natural heterosexual dispositions ( Performative Acts 524)

7. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

8. In an understandable desire to forge bonds of solidarity, feminist discourse has often relied upon the category of woman as a universal presupposition of cultural experience which, in its universal status, provides a false ontological promise of eventual political solidarity ( Performative Acts 523)

9. Although individual acts do work to maintain and reproduce systems of oppression, and, indeed, any theory of personal political responsibility presupposes such a view, it doesn t follow that oppression is a sole consequence of such acts. [ ] There are social contexts and conventions within which certain acts not only become possible but become conceivable as acts at all ( Performative Acts 525)

10. Gender reality is created through sustained social performances (528)

11. the act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again ( Performative Acts 526)

12. For me this video is about catharsis, healing from a world that wants to label you as a gender terrorist or a religious terrorist, that wants to fuck you or destroy you. Sometimes words alone aren't enough. Aisha Mizra

13. Absolute freedom Absolute Subjection Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through successive performances of various kinds ( Performative Acts 531)

14. False Consciousness Priests or Despots are responsible. They forged the Beautiful Lies so that, in the belief that they were obeying God, men would in fact obey the Priests and Despots, who are usually in alliance (163) Alienation The cause is the material alienation which reigns in the conditions of men themselves (163-4)

15. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style ( Performative Acts 520)

16. Many girls who are masculine and boys who are feminine show signs of such behavior at a very early age (often before such children have been fully socialized with regard to gender norms), and generally continue to express such behavior into adulthood (despite the extreme amount of societal pressure that we place on individuals to reproduce gender expression appropriate for their assigned sex). (Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, 190) Through this appeal to both biology and psychology, Serano attempts to extend core gender identification into the realm of physical facts. The upshot is that core gender identification is effectively depoliticized. It exists as an innate truth which societies either successfully make cultural space for realizing as a meaningful subjectivity, or else fail to. The resolution Serano s analysis points towards is a simple enough sounding matter of recognition.. [ ] From this position, the prejudices faced by trans women can be simply cast as mere sexism: trans women s oppression is ultimately indistinct in origins to that faced by any other women. While certainly subversive, this argument promotes a dismissal of abolitionist approaches to gender. Jules Joanne Gleeson, Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics, Viewpoint Magazine, July 19, 2017)

18. They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions. . . but homosexuality is workers control of production, not the end of work. More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile. Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

19. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society (Sylvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, 1)

20. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity (Wages 5)

21. A comparative sociological study of East [Communist] and West [Capitalist] Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper. -Kristen Ghodsee Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism New York Times, August 12, 2017