Gender Performativity: Beauvoir and Butler
Introduction.
Starting with the concept of otherness we can say that it is the concept that describes the situation of women with respect to men, while this is the other;She is in a world that is alien in which it is the men who create culture and possess power. This concept of otherness explains the unilateral, not reciprocal relationship between the construction of men and women, where women are the other and man is the same. In this sense and starting from Hegelian philosophy we find an analogy between master and slave and man and woman.
In this relationship the master can only be when he is recognized by the slave. While the master is recognized as free awareness, the slave contemplates him as an ideal, as if he had no awareness. (Padina). The woman is only recognized in men, in her interests;She is a dependent consciousness. Of the contario will be "little feminine". The man, like the master, is the one who does "things" and the one who thus grants his status to the woman.
Developing.
We understand then that for relations between men and women, they stop supposing female subordination both subjects must be recognized as independent, therefore, otherness is the category that describes this situation as long as man reaffirms as a subject and denies the subjectivity ofThe woman requisiting her.
This is closely related to the concepts of transcendence and immanence. While the man transcends, that is, it exceeds limits and breaks borders, the woman is marked by immanence, by essence, does not transcend, does not have a life project. It is in the same place, it is stagnant, oppressed, subordinate.
As we know, "that becoming" of the woman, who showed that biology was not a destiny, gave rise to the understanding that the female sex to the "being a woman" was a great distance, and that this distance wasThe one of human praxis: if, according to Beauvoir, we must grant that in nature we could find something like "females", it is unquestionable that in any case "being women" arises from their gaze as aHumanity’s own phenomenon, humanity understood as a historical reality.
For Beauvoir the body, biology, does not allow to build a hierarchy between the sexes, does not explain why woman is the other. Women only manage to collect consciousness of themselves through the consideration of men, that is, women’s considerations about their body come from male inventions. Then women have to mean their bodies in different ways to those that men mark and therefore resignify the bodies captured by patriarchy.
This, then, qualifies the body as a problem. In the second sex we see how two speeches coexist;The first proposes the idea that the body has been socially built;On the other hand, it defends the existence of a body that marks a final feminine essence oppressed by the social order that inferiorizes the natural characteristics of that body, mainly gestating, which constitutes its alienation. (MOI, 2008). This would lead us to conclude that for Beauvoir there is a body before social construction, that the brand from the moment of its birth based on its biological characteristics. Women find a limit in their body.
In the words of the author, men are an infinitely privileged being: their genital existence would not contradine their personal life, which develops continuously, without crisis, and, generally, without accidents. Men transcend their body, can form the masculinity found in a constant future, while women remain within the limits of their corporeality. What is then the strategic horizon of women for Beauvoir? Recover the body, be able to transcend, deploy your future, be conscious, emancipated subjects.
Judith Butler’s feminist theory
Butler’s theory also has its own concepts that we will explain to explain as a performativity of the genre or deconstruction. The author treats the sex-gender dichotomy in terms other than what is exposed by Beauvoir, who is part of the second wave of feminism, while Butler does it within the third wave. This author, as will be seen later is very influenced by Foucault.
For butler both gender and sex are culturally constructed and historically located. The binary categories that define us in society and within which we frame ourselves, see "man", "woman", "heterosexual", "homosexual", etc., They are not natural, but are understood as the repetition of performative acts. A performative act could translate it into Spanish as "scenographic", that is, related to gestures, actions, and other characteristics that we project when expressing ourselves. Butler explains that he develops this concept because he grew up seeing as his mother, a Jewish woman, was becoming an American woman, based on women like Joan Crawford and reproducing her roles and attitudes.
Our author makes hard criticism of Beauvoir because although he introduced the concept of "gender", she considered sex as a body, material and binary issue through which gender would develop or that would serve the genre to justify in some way in something"Natural" and "immutable" through history. For Butler and as the title of one of the articles on which we will base this monograph: “Why do they call sex when they want to say gender?”, Sex and gender, despite the fact that other feminisms have differentiated it, are the same, since both are the result of a construction.
The body in its materiality will suffer the consequences of not assuming the rules of the prevailing heterosexuality. There is no "natural sex" organized based on two opposing biological positions (justification of gender binarism) and complementary (justification of hegemonic heterosexuality), but is a device by which gender has stabilized within the heterosexual matrixand binary.
We can see how another of the arguments that are outlined to understand this issue is the existence of numerous people who have bodily biological characteristics that do not correspond to their genitals, or who have both genitals physically, either inner or exterior or exterior, or both. That is, there is no biologically mandatory binarism speaking. In addition, sex is also a historical construction while sex could have been read differently and one, two or three different sexes. (Seek reference).
Butler expands the gender category to snatch the sex of immutable substantialism and drag it towards a new territory, where parodic resignification is possible. Then, “if the invariable character of sex is refuted, perhaps this construction called‘ sex ’is as culturally constructed as gender;In fact, perhaps it was always gender, with the result that the distinction between sex and gender does not exist as such.
Neither sex is natural nor gender is substantial. The consideration of sex as not built or natural is the effect of gender, understood in normative terms. Gender is not then the cultural interpretation that is made of sexual difference, but the mandatory repetition of norms that in a specific historical and cultural context determine what is understood by male and female.
Each person must reiterate constantly and uninterruptedly the gender norm that corresponds to him and, thus, assume an identity that guarantees the causal linearity between biological sex, gender and sexuality – always heterosexual – that have been assigned. The objective is to undo sex to install the proliferation of new possible ways, including bodily morphologies that escape binary restrictions.
For this author, the sex category is political and founded society as heterosexual. Butler proposes to question gender and sexual difference, end therefore with the identity ‘woman’ and also with the identity "man", which would allow the spectrum to innumerable constructions of identity away from the dualistic approach to the dualistic approach. This calls it "deconstruction" and also goes through the opening of the sexual spectrum, while Butler speaks of the heternonorm imposed. Again without falling into the discursive and performative delimitation of dualist identities, but multiple and indeterminate.
It is imperative to deconstruct all the binary categories of the logic of domination and deconstruct the heterocentrism, which is the hegemonic normative discourse that models the bodies and implicitly prescribes the duty to be erotic-sexual of the subject of the subject. The ultimate goal is not to strengthen or solidify any type of identity, but to deconstruct the dichotomies cited in order to destabilize all fixed identities, in order to promote the emergence of multiple differences, not binary.
Therefore, it aims to dismantle both the conception of a universalist subject that supports the current liberal policy, and the processes of essentialization, naturalization and identification of the theories of the policy of difference in relation to the LGTBIQ sector. Thus, for this theory, sexual orientation, sexual identity and gender expression, are the result of a social, historical and cultural construction-production. The unique nature is culture and everything natural constitutes a naturalization of cultural construction.
Sex and gender are actions, performative acts that are modalities of hegemonic authoritarian discourse. It is this heterocentrated discourse the creator of sociocultural realities, sexual and gender identities. Sex and gender are constructions of the body and subjectivity as a result of a ritualized repetition of acts that end up naturalizing. For Butler, both canonical, hegemonic, transgressive, ‘unintelligible’to a style related to one of the two cultural genres.
This ritualized repetition is not optional, but is based on a regulatory speech. When the expected result occurs, we have a culturally considered gender and sexuality. Butler’s deconstructive vision has the claim to end the dualism of genres and sexes that are nothing more than ideological oppositions aimed at establishing and maintaining the oppression of one over another.
We are no longer on the grounds for the search for social acceptance, tolerance and its usual response calling for privatization and discretion;or making a call to the granting of rights to the so -called ‘group’ or the so -called ‘community’ LGTBIQ, but on the fields of symbolic construction in terms of the construction of radical democracy, which allows the numerousstrata that operate in hegemonic discourse;and in the denaturation and deconstruction of sexual and gender differences.
Conclusions.
Butler proposes its political strategy of performativity. It points out that parody itself is not really subversive, since this can become instruments of cultural hegemony. Starting from the conception of the body, as a politically regulated surface, from the hierarchy of genres and mandatory heterosexuality. Gender as an act of repeated action, is legitimate by constant repetition, with the strategic purpose of preserving it within the binary framework. This succession of repetitions of norms constructed by power is sedimated and normalized until it becomes naturalized.
Butler considers in his book "The genre in dispute" that we must focus on the idea of gender, but not as an attribute of an intrinsic identity to the subject, but as a performative effect of heteronormative power structures. With this performative genre, the author points out that it is the body acts that constitute and reinforce the gender norm. This then implies that through our behavior we can also subvert this gender standard.
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