Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

This chapter draws from theatrical, anthropological, and philosophical discourses, but mainly phenomenology, to show that what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality that assume that the meaning of women’s social existence can be derived from some fact of their physiology. For both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities, a complicated process of appropriation, which any phenomenological theory of constitution needs to describe. In order to describe the gendered body, a phenomenological theory of constitution requires an expansion of the conventional view of acts to mean both that which constitutes meaning and through which meaning is performed or enacted. The feminist appropriation of the phenomenological theory of constitution might employ the notion of an act in a richly ambiguous sense.

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Part 1: Gender and Educational Theory 1.Gender Theory and Research in Education: Modernist Traditions and Emerging Contemporary Themes 2. Troubling Boys and Disturbing Discourses on Masculinity and Schooling: A Feminist Exploration of Current Debates and Interventions Concerning Boys in School 3. Education and Gender Identity: Seeking Frameworks of Understanding Part 2: Difference and Power 4. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory 5. Identity, Abjection and Otherness: Creating the Self, Creating Difference 6. Masculine Domination: Permanence and Change 7. The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History Part 3: Identity Work 8. `Spice Girls', Nice Girls, Girlies and Tomboys: Gender Discourses, Girls' Cultures and Femininities in the Primary Classroom 9. `Lads and Laughter': Humour and the Production of Heterosexual Hierarchies 10. Gender-blind Racism in the Experience of Schooling and Identity Formation Part 4: Knowledge and Pedagogy 11. Boys don't Write Romance: The Construction of Knowledge and Social Gender Identities in English Classrooms 12. Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Constituting a Discourse of Erotics in Sexuality Education 13. Power, Bodies and Identity: How Different Forms of Physical Education Construct Varying Masculinities and Femininities in Secondary Schools 14. Masculinity, Violence and Schooling: Challenging 'Poisonous Pedagogies' Part 5: Reflexivity and Risk 15. Working Out Intimacy: Young People and Friendship in an Age of Reflexivity 16. Uneasy Hybrid: Psychosocial Aspects of Becoming Educationally Successful for Working-Class Young Women Project 4:21 - Transitions to Womanhood 17. Nomadic Subjects: Young Black Women in Britain Part 6: Gender and Citizenship 18. Citizenship Education and Gender 19. Citizenship and the Self Made Girl

This study critically analyzes the paradigm of “migration” as a problematical state of postwar humanism that affects ethnic and racial identity and gender and sexuality of the “Indian-Trinidadian” and “Mexican-American” migrants and diaspora. The postcolonial diaspora narrative in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984) depicts a series of real and imaginary “house(s)”, which are identical of internal and external displacement of the migrants and the diaspora subject(s). The identity crisis of first person author-narrator(s) and major subject(s) are critically mapped in this study under the effectiveness of “postcolonialism”. This study contextualizes postcolonial identity crisis and displacement of the migrant subject(s) via symbolic projection of defective and liminal “house(s)” by manifestation of dystopian states vis-à-vis dreams and fantasy in literary imagination. Research in this study is carried out by postcolonial theoretical frameworks in Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays, Homi Bhaba’s “The World and Home”, Bill Ashcroft’s Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures, Robin Cohen’s Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, and Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”. The study finds that the real and imaginary house(s) in fictional imagination and autobiographical writings signify the desire to survive in destinations that tend to acquire legitimacy of citizenship as affected by upward social mobility which is denied to migrants and diaspora subject(s) of the “Indian-Trinidadian” and “Mexican-American” origin historically.

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”

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Introduction to the New Edition Art History: Making the Visible Legible 1. ART AS HISTORY Introduction Preface to Part III of 'The Lives' Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History Patterns of Intention 2. AESTHETICS Introduction What is Enlightenment? Philosophy of Fine Art Impure Mimesis, or the Ends of the Aesthetic Fetish 3. FORM, CONTENT, AND STYLE Introduction Principles of Art History Style 'Form', Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description 'Style' 4. ANTHROPOLOGY AND/OR ART HISTORY Introduction Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman 'Kunstwollen' Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America Warburg's Concept of 'Kunstwissenschaft' and its Meaning for Aesthetics Silent Moves: On Excluding the Ethnographic Subject from the Discourse of Art History 5. MECHANISMS OF MEANING Introduction Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art Semiotics and Iconography Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Contexts and Senders Meaning/Interpretation 6. THE LIMITS OF INTERPRETATION Introduction The Temptation of New Perspectives The Origin of the Work of Art The Still Life as a Personal Object - a Note on Heidegger and van Gogh Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [Pointure] 7. AUTHORSHIP AND IDENTITY Introduction What is an Author? The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory Postmodern Automatons 'Every Man Knows How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure': Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics Queer Wallpaper 8. GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS Introduction Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order The Museum as Ritual The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version) Can Our Values be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progessive Politics Visual Culture Studies: Questions of History, Theory, and Practice 'Life-Like': Historicizing Process in Digital Art Epilogue: The Art of Art History Coda: Plato's Dilemma and the Tasks of the Art Historian Today

Reviewed by: Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon Kadji Amin Gayle Salamon. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia U P, 2010. Pp. xi + 226. $24.50. Written in lucid and elegant prose, Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality makes paradigm-shifting contributions to transgender studies, to feminist theories of sexual difference, and to psychoanalytic and phenomenological work on embodiment. Salamon argues that, despite the understandable political desire to root transsexual identity in the materiality of the body, transgender studies stands to gain much from psychoanalytic and phenomenological accounts of bodily materiality as something that is never merely factual or fully knowable. Attending to the ways in which bodily materiality is accessed through matrices of gendered social power, she demonstrates how practices of erotic relationality and chiastic crossings between social meaning and internal feeling can yield a non-pathologizing account of transgender embodiment that foregrounds the importance of an ethics of sexed relationality. Part One mines psychoanalytic and phenomenological thinkers such as Didier Anzieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Kaja Silverman for a non-pathologizing theory of transgender embodiment as a play between bodily substance and immaterial feeling. Part Two challenges both feminism’s failure to keep pace with non-normative genders as they are currently being lived and the investment, at play in transgender studies work by authors such as Jay Prosser and Jason Cromwell, in the autonomy of the agential transgender or transsexual subject. Salamon’s account of social construction theory is capacious enough to do justice to a range of non-normative experiences of sexed embodiment without jettisoning the social structures that, feminists argue, give meaning to gender in the first place. Part Three offers critical readings of writings by feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz that posit sexual difference as the absolute limit of the cultural pliability of bodily meaning. Salamon’s queer critique repurposes Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference in order to conceive of an ethical relation to non-gender normative others that would neither annihilate them nor cordon them off into absolute unknowability. The book concludes with a reading of Jan Morris’s transsexual autobiography, Conundrum, that critiques the way in which, for transgender and transsexual people, sex is defined as state, rather than private or bodily property. Assuming a Body demonstrates the saliency of the field of transgender studies by displaying the generative effects of readings canonical texts in philosophy, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminist theory with multiply sexed differences in mind. Salamon misses several opportunities, however, to expand her theory of embodied differences to consider racialized, geographic, and historical differences that are of growing import to work in transgender studies. Readers would also have benefitted from a clearer explanation of the book’s turn to Irigaray and sexual difference theory in Part Three. These concerns are outweighed by the book’s major strengths: its deft guidance of the reader through the intricacies of theory, its ability to zero in on the crux of debates between feminist and transgender studies, and its gift for opening theory up to more capacious conceptions of sexed difference. Within the fields of transgender and feminist studies, the effects of Assuming a Body’s timely and important interventions will continue to be felt for years to come. [End Page 167] Kadji Amin Stony Brook University Copyright © 2013 L’Esprit Créateur

I take it as a given that phenomenology needs feminism. There has been some excellent work by feminist theorists, some of whom I will discuss briefly in this paper, showing that the body of phenomenological work in the canon has been indelibly imprinted with a masculine orientation in its development of the constitutive categories of experience. This suggests that if the phenomenological tradition is to continue in any useful way, and avoid becoming a mere artifact in the museum of philosophical history, it needs to acknowledge and explore the ways in which it has been affected by masculine and, I would also argue, racialized and Eurocentric assumptions.

Identifying herself as a philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir took the phenomenological ideas of the lived body, situated freedom, intentionality, intersubjective vulnerability, and the existential ethical-political concepts of critique, responsibility, and justice, in new directions. She distinguished two moments in an ongoing dialogue of intentionality: the joys of disclosure and the desires of mastery. She disrupted the phenomenological account of perception, revealing its hidden ideological dimensions. Attending to the embodied experience of sex, gender, and age, she challenged the privilege accorded to the working body and introduced us to the unique humanity of the erotic body. Her categories of the Other and the Second Sex exposed the patriarchal norms that are naturalized in the taken-for-granted givens of the life-world. In translating the phenomenological-existential concepts of transcendence and freedom into an activist ethics of critique, hope, and liberation, her work continues to influence phenomenology, existentialism, and feminist theory and practice.

Murray’s contributions were written partly from the lived experience of being a professional practitioner within the physical theatres ‘boom’ in the 1980s-1990s, and from cumulative academic research since 2001. The book refuses to accept the restricting frame of ‘textbook’ whilst acknowledging an anticipated readership of under- and postgraduate students and informed/curious practitioners. Insisting on the plural construction, ‘physical theatres’, this volume is an exploration of the hybridity and plurality that mark contemporary theatre forms over the last three decades. It acknowledges, traces and interrogates the heterogeneity of traditions and influences that have shaped contemporary physical theatres; at the same time, it suggests that any theatre must be performed and read kinaesthetically. Applying this lens to a selection of plays, both classical and modern, the book argues that the languages of gesture and movement should be as valued as the spoken word when realising a text for the stage. Challenging the validity of its own terms of reference, the book critically examines a range of pedagogical and performance practices often ascribed to the canon of contemporary physical theatres. In addition, it contextualises the practices it examines by locating them within a range of contemporary theoretical discourses, in particular: cultural materialism, feminist theory, phenomenology, and reception theory.

This chapter seeks to begin to fill a gap that thus exists in both existential phenomenology and feminist theory. It traces in a provisional way some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space. The chapter provides intelligibility and significance to certain observable and rather ordinary ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways that men do. A focus upon ways in which the feminine body frequently or typically conducts itself in such comportment or movement may be particularly revelatory of the structures of feminine existence. The chapter also provides a general phenomenological account of the modalities of feminine bodily comportment and motility. The feminist denial that the real differences in behavior and psychology between men and women can be attributed to some natural and eternal feminine essence is perhaps most thoroughly and systematically expressed by Beauvoir.

Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world. Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of “haptic visuality”—a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste—to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.