The performativity of gender seems almost transparent to those of us who unthinkingly

reinscribe our own, but it becomes suddenly opaque when errors occur—where performance
does not line up with accepted norms—or when one performs gender consciously for any
number of reasons: to avoid awkward confusion, to conform to a certain environment, or even to
please an ever-caviling mother. Those who fit more easily into the normative frame are not as
likely to consciously do gender as daily practice. Others, however, do.
Many transsexuals practice or perform gender with conscious attention to appearance,
action, and bodily style. Butler emphasizes that performativity is not a single act; it is “a
repetition and a ritual” (94). Not to delve very far into reader response, but reading this, I
couldn’t help but think of a friend of mine, Jamie, a MTF transsexual relatively near the
beginning of the transition process. To watch her get ready is to see a quite literal performance of
gender and the acts that might compose repetition. It is a ritual she performs daily: the
knowledgeable application of foundation, highlight, and lipstick, the selection of clothes that
create or reveal particular curves, the adjustment and readjustment of the expensive wig she’s
wearing until her hair grows out. These are all conscious repetitions, reiterations, which might be
multiplied if one considers the bodily moves that also contribute to gender performance. Through
these types of mindful performances, many transsexuals play at gender in Butler’s deeply-rooted
sense of the word. This performativity is not drag, not parody; but neither parody nor passing is
subversive.
What then would make the transsexual body or its presentation subversive? I think the
answer may lie in “coming out” as a person who has some relation to transitioning between
gender (Butler’s categories of pre-op, post-op, and transitioning may be unintentionally
exclusionary). To pass may exemplify Foucault’s internalization of the law that produces bodies
which “signify the prohibitive law as their very essence, style, and necessity” (109). If the law is
that of a binary gender system, and it has been internalized, then transsexuals (along with the rest
of us) may produce one of the approved categories (man/woman), inscribing it on the body and
thus reaffirming the system. However, if the “law” is resisted in some way, if the body refuses to
be read as man/woman, the “reality of gender” is put into “crisis” (100). If a transsexual person
was to refuse to pass, to transition completely to fit man/woman, to align sex with gender and
perhaps desire, then this crisis is effected, and those who attempt to read the resistant body must
deal with the breakdown of preconceived notions.
In a wonderfully brief sentence, Butler dismantles these normative notions: “There are no
direct expressive or causal lines between sex, gender, gender presentation, sexual practice,
fantasy and sexuality” (131). Doing gender “right” supports these imaginary connections, and the
idea of a gender core or essence is, according to Butler, maintained in order to regulate sexuality
(110). The idea of some inner core is constructed through the reiterated acts of gender that seem
to perform it (110): the core does not exist. In one way, this is liberating. If there is no proper
gender, meaning that masculinity does not belong to the male and so forth (127), then
transgender, and to return to my prolonged example, transsexual individuals specifically, might
lay claim to whatever (recognized?) gender they want to regardless of how their bodies are
sexed. But, what does this lack of a core gender mean for the transsexual individual who reports
feeling that their material body doesn’t match their true self or essence? If there is no core, where
does this feeling originate? Is it socially constructed? Is the resistance to gender or the desire to
do gender wrong socially constructed?
In the case of those attempting to perform a gender that does not reflect their anatomy as
per normative standards, even momentary failures to perform gender “correctly,” a brief
alteration in reiteration, can expose them to variations of the “violence of gender norms,” from
embarrassment to social censure to physical harm. (There is more subtle violence that occurs
even as one meets norms that are not suited for them.) Gender is performed not to express an
individualistic self or a central essence, but for “cultural survival” within compulsory systems
(113). Categories of identity, like gender, “tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes” (121).
Why then, cling to these labels that facilitate reproductive heteronormativity and produce
violence in multiple forms? This seems to return us once more to ideas of categorization and the
human tendency to sort, place, and name in order to control.
To be named is to be hailed is to be recognized as coherent; isn’t this also to be relegated
to a category that may or may not truly fit? To facilitate a better fit, Butler desires to expand the
“realm of gender possibilities” (98). To avoid a normative view of “what the gendered world
ought to be,” she refuses to prescribe a certain form of gender subversion (99). Still, this
subversion takes place in a “gendered world.” So there would be more than two or five or eleven
genders, more boxes to choose between, but still the mandate to check one. She does not want to
label everything, I think. But wouldn’t proliferating genders ultimately be working to “bring in
every marginal and excluded position within a given discourse” that “will domesticate all signs
of difference” (Bodies 174)? Perhaps it is the word “genders” (which connotes kinds or
categories) alone that is complicating impressive ideas of radical difference.
The most promising course here lies again in Mary Douglas’s “untidiness” which Butler
refigures as “a region of cultural unruliness and disorder” (106). The transsexual individual who
cannot or, even more so, will not pass, presents a threat to “cultural coherence” (105). Even more
exciting is the possibility that we are all capable of presenting a bit of incoherence, of not
passing, and if we accept that sex, gender, and sexuality are not hinged together, then perhaps
there is a chance not only for proliferations of genders, but proliferations of incoherence and
unnamablility. However, being recognized as real is contingent on coherence, on being named,
categorized, understood (Bodies 171): there is a true threat of erasure in the status of the unreal.
But, if somehow that which is “unreal” is able to speak and claim a certain position, to speak
from the unruly margins, and to be real and to refuse accepted names or to name itself, then it
may become a position of empowerment. While Butler expresses hopes that her writing will
increase “the possibilities for a liveable life for those who live, or try to live, on the sexual
margins” (103), her theories might be utilized not only to make the margins liveable, but to make
them powerful.