UNIT X: Marry Wollstonecraft and Judith Butler: Feminism/Gender, Vindication of
Rights of Women
Judith Butler
In "Gender Trouble" Judith Butler undermines the distinction between sex as a natural
given category and gender as an acquired cultural- social category.
Butler argues that sex also is a socially constructed category which stems out of social
and cultural practices and in the context of a discourse that has a history and its own
social and political dynamics
Butler goes far as to argue that gender, as an objective natural thing, does not exist: “
Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent
that it is performed“
Gender, according to Butler, is by no means tied to material bodily facts but is solely and
completely a social construction, a fiction, one that, therefore, is open to change and
contestation:
"Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an
objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of
gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.
Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis“
That genesis is not corporeal but performative so that the body becomes its gender only
"through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time"
By illustrating the artificial, conventional, and historical nature of gender construction,
Butler attempts to critique the assumptions of normative heterosexuality: those punitive
rules (social, familial, and legal) that force us to conform to hegemonic heterosexual
standards for identity
In "Gender Trouble" Judith Butler develops her famous performative theory of gender
which tries to account the manner in which a subject identity is formed while establishing
Butler's claim that gender identity is not a manifestation of intrinsic essence but rather the
product of actions and behaviours, that is, performance.
In other words, Judith Butler argues that everyday actions, speech utterances, gestures
and representations, dress codes and behaviours as well as certain prohibitions and taboos
all work to produce what is perceived as an essential masculine of feminine identity.
She questions the belief that certain gendered behaviour are natural, illustrating the ways
that one's learned performance of gendered behaviour (what we commonly associate with
femininity and masculinity) is an act of sorts, a performance, one that is imposed upon us
by normative heterosexuality.
Butler thus offers what she herself calls "a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution
that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts"
In other words, Butler questions the extent to which we can assume that a given
individual can be said to constitute him- or herself; she wonders to what extent our acts
are determined for us, rather, by our place within language and convention.
She follows postmodernist and poststructuralist practice in using the term "subject"
(rather than "individual" or "person") in order to underline the linguistic nature of our
position within what Jacques Lacan terms the symbolic order the system of signs and
conventions that determines our perception of what we see as reality.
Unlike theatrical acting, Butler argues that we cannot even assume a stable subjectivity
that goes about performing various gender roles; rather, it is the very act of performing
gender that constitutes who we are
Butler aims at deconstructing this notion of integrated, stable identity as the extension of
an inner essence, and the illusion of the sexual body, which are in Butler's view
repressive and dangerous, but also undermineable
Butler takes her formulations even further by questioning the very distinction between
gender and sex.
In the past, feminists regularly made a distinction between bodily sex
(the corporeal facts of our existence) and gender (the social conventions that determine
the differences between masculinity and femininity).
Such feminists accepted the fact that certain anatomical differences do exist between men
and women but they pointed out how most of the conventions that determine the
behaviours of men and women are, in fact social gender constructions that have little or
nothing to do with our corporeal sexes.
According to traditional feminists, sex is a biological category; gender is a historical
category.
Butler questions that distinction by arguing that our "gender acts" affect us in such
material, corporeal ways that even our perception of corporeal sexual differences are
affected by social conventions.
For Butler, sex is not "a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially
imposed, but... a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies"
Sex, for Butler, "is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time.
It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory
norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of
those norms"
Butler here is influenced by the postmodern tendency to see our very conception of
reality as determined by language, so that it is ultimately impossible even to think or
articulate sex without imposing linguistic norms: "there is no reference to a pure body
which is not at the same time a further formation of that body“
The very act of saying something about sex ends up imposing cultural or ideological
norms, according to Butler.
As she puts it, "'sex' becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively
installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access
Nonetheless, that fiction is central to the establishment of subjectivity and human society,
which is to say that, even so, it has material effects: "the 'I' neither precedes nor follows
the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender
relations themselves" That linguistic construction is also not stable, working as it does by
always re-establishing boundaries (and a zone of abjection) through the endlessly
repeated performative acts that mark us as one sex or another. "Sex" is thus unveiled not
only as an artificial norm but also a norm that is subject to change. Butler's project, then,
is "to 'cite' the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power, to expose the heterosexual
matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity"
Butler on Performativity
Her theories explore the ways that social reality is not a given but is continually created
as an illusion "through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign“
A good example in speech-act theory is what John Searle terms illocutionary speech
acts, those speech acts that actually do something rather than
merely represent something.
The classic example is the "I pronounce you man and wife" of the marriage ceremony.
In making that statement, a person of authority changes the status of a couple within an
intersubjective community; those words actively change the existence of that couple by
establishing a new marital reality: the words do what they say.
As Butler explains,
"Within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or
produces that which it names"
A speech act can produce that which it names, however, only by reference to the law (or
the accepted norm, code, or contract), which is cited or repeated (and thus performed) in
the pronouncement.
Butler takes this formulation further by exploring the ways that linguistic constructions
create our reality in general through the speech acts we participate in every day.
By endlessly citing the conventions and ideologies of the social world around us, we
enact that reality; in the performative act of speaking, we "incorporate" that reality by
enacting it with our bodies, but that "reality" nonetheless remains a social construction
In the act of performing the conventions of reality, by embodying those fictions in our
actions, we make those artificial conventions appear to be natural and necessary.
By enacting conventions, we do make them "real" to some extent (after all, our ideologies
have "real" consequences for people) but that does not make them any less artificial.
In particular, Butler concerns herself with those "gender acts" that similarly lead to
material changes in one's existence and even in one's bodily self: “
One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed,
one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one's embodied
predecessors and successors as well"
Like the performative citation of the conventions governing our perception of reality, the
enactment of gender norms has "real" consequences, including the creation of our sense
of subjectivity but that does not make our subjectivity any less constructed.
We may believe that our subjectivity is the source of our actions but Butler contends that
our sense of independent, self-willed subjectivity is really a retroactive construction that
comes about only through the enactment of social conventions: "gender cannot be
understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior 'self,' whether that
'self' is conceived as sexed or not.
As performance which is performative, gender is an 'act,' broadly construed, which
constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority
Butler therefore understands gender to be "a corporeal style, an 'act,' as it were
That style has no relation to essential "truths" about the body but is strictly ideological.
It has a history that exists beyond the subject who enacts those conventions:
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."
What is required for the hegemony of heteronormative standards to maintain power is
our continual repetition of such gender acts in the most mundane of daily activities (the
way we walk, talk, gesticulate, etc.).
For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and
public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal
acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and
ideologies.
Butler underscores gender's constructed nature in order to fight for the rights of oppressed
identities, those identities that do not conform to the artificial—though strictly
enforced—rules that govern normative heterosexuality.
If those rules are not natural or essential, Butler argues, then they do not have any claim
to justice or necessity.
Since those rules are historical and rely on their continual citation or enactment by
subjects, then they can also be challenged and changed through alternative performative
acts.
As Butler puts it, "If the 'reality' of gender is constituted by the performance itself, then
there is no recourse to an essential and unrealized 'sex' or 'gender' which gender
performances ostensibly express" ("For this reason, "the transvestite's gender is as fully
real as anyone whose performance complies with social expectations"
Critique
Some commentators claim that Butler decisively refutes any individualist interpretation
of performativity.
Certainly, Butler’s restatement of the structural constraints surrounding the agent,
condemning the individual to strategies of recuperative or subversive repetition of speech
acts, prevent any voluntaristic interpretation of a subject who wilfully “decides,” on a
day-by-day basis, to adopt this or that subject-position
Specifically, the theory of performativity supposes that illocutionary declaratives
miraculously transform not only the social status of the speaking subject, but also the
sexed materiality of the res cogitans.
For Butler (somewhat incredibly), the performative character of social identity suggests
that the ontological characteristics of the body are conferred by the discursive matrix
which constitutes its gender position
Claiming that formulations of transgendered identity are central to queer studies (and the
transgendered individual is indeed important for both Butler and Foucault), Prosser
rejects the notion that gender is performative, pointing out that “there are transgendered
trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that which this scheme
[i.e. performativity] devalues.
Namely, there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be nonperformative, to be
constative, quite simply, to be
Marry Wollstonecraft
In her essay, Wollstonecraft addresses several of the problems of the time as she saw
them, such as social class, status of women, lack of education for women, and the role of
reason as a God-given attribute
How different are women
Wollstonecraft wonders:Is it the nature of civilisation that has made women so different
to men?
Women she says are like flowers planted in too rich a soil ,in whom strength and
usefulness are sacrificed for beauty
The flower blooms for a time but its leaves fade and soon the plant never reaches
maturity
She puts so much blame on education specifically male educators of women who are
“more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives”
The result is that women spend their time looking for love instead of gaining the respect
that their abilities should award them
Wollstonecraft admits that men have physical superiority but observes that not content
with this they seek to make women even lower
Women in turn live only for the attentions and flattery of men and do not seek to obtain
durable interests in their hearts
This is tragic since women as well men are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties
,not spend their time in perpetual childhood
Wollstonecraft argues that love and sensual passion are usually incompatible with mutual
respect and friendship.
She even at one point suggests that an unhappy marriage may be advantageous for a
woman, and that the neglected wife may make the best mother.
She argues that women often waste their lives looking for a husband who will love them
with fervid affection, and that if a woman is not satisfied with her husband, she is less
likely to 'model her soul to suit the frailties of her companion' , and more likely to devote
herself wholeheartedly to the acquisition of reason and virtue and the exercise of these in
bringing up her children
Women have indeed been degraded, Wollstonecraft argues, by the sort of femininity to
which they have been required to aspire.
They have become 'insignificant objects of desire', and their training in coquetry,
sensuality and sensibility has undermined both their strength and their usefulness.
The minds of women, she writes, are not in a healthy state, and she compares the state of
women to the state of false refinement, vanity and immorality into which the aristocracy,
especially in France, had suThe list of pejorative words and phrases she uses to describe
women is long and striking; a few examples will convey the general impression.
Women are enervated, their feelings are false and overstretched, they have factitious and
corrupt manners, a romantic and unnatural delicacy of feeling; they are prone to
sensuality, sentimentality, artificiality, coquetry, doting self-love, vapid tenderness, and a
deluge of false sentiments.
They languish like exotics and supinely dream life away
Women are denied the title of human and given instead the subordinate postscript of
sexual character. Wollstonecraft believes that in order for women to be appreciated as
human beings, and not merely as sexual characters (i.e., female only), they must be
allowed to exist within the same guidelines as do men. "If she [has reason], which, for a
moment, I will take for granted, she was not created merely to be the solace of man, and
the sexual should not destroy the human character"
Education for growth not dominance
In marriage women;s graceful ivy was seen as ornamenting the man’s sturdy oak
Wollstonecraft said if only husbands were so stable and reliable rather than overgrown
children
Yet thanks to upbringing and lack of education women are seemingly weak
They lack order in their activities because they were never taught method or reasoning
They learn only in snatches by observations picked up through daily life and society and
have no body of abstract knowledge against which to test what they discover
Women’s mental understanding has always been sacrificed to the need to look good or
seem charming and even their body is half-developed through lack of exercise and
training
Men are prepared for a profession but women are trained only to expect marriage as the
greatest feature of their lives, the resulting mental vacuum meaning that they are given
small vexations and passions
And will moralists pretend to assert that this condition in which one half of the human
race should be encouraged to remain with listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence ?
Question posed by Wollstonecraft
The purpose of female education was not women’s power over men but simply power
over themselves
At the end of Vindication she proposes a system of national mixed-sex education
Women’s equality in the context of history
Wollstonecraft argued “it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to
man because she has been subjugated
Like soldiers and slaves because they are educated women must be blindly subservient to
authority
Yet their position does not reflect any natural state of affairs but can come through the
diktats of civilisation
Her complaint is not simply about women's position in society but the society itself
which allows idiot sons of rich to coast through life without doing anything productive
while women are nothing more than property
A society should be based on merit and the development of ability and virtue is instead
organised relentlessly according to sex ,class and wealth
She longs for a time when men and women can give each other respect and fellow feeling
with neither the libidinous mockery or gallantry nor the insolent condescention of
protectorship
She decries the lack of electoral representation at a time when less than 1% of the
population property owning men could vote
She hinted that women should be directly represented in future
In the Vindication, it was perhaps above all the idea that virtue was gendered, that it
should be different for women and men, that Wollstonecraft attacked.
'The first object of laudable ambition,' she writes, 'is to obtain a character as a human
being, regardless of the distinction of sex.
Virtue should mean the same thing in a woman as in a man. And it is Reason, she argues,
that is the foundation of virtue.
It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its
own reason. This was Rousseau's opinion respecting men. I extend it to women, and
confidently assert that they have been drawn out of their sphere by false refinement, and
not by an endeavour to acquire masculine qualities
