Shara Worden a.k.a. My Brightest Diamond does a fabulous rendition of Kurt Weil’s Youkali: Tango Habanera. It’s amazing what classical training can do when applied carefully.

Explain why performative speech acts can also be “gender acts” or “gender performatives”. How does this affect gender identity for the subject and in specific societies? Can Butler’s idea of “discursive resignification” explain how such enforcement of gender identities can be resisted or subverted?

In this essay I will explore how a performative speech act, “Act like a man!”, can also be a gender act or gender performative. I will investigate Austin and Searle’s definitions of the performative speech act and Butler’s gender performatives. 

I will then explain Butler’s concept of discursive resignification using the ‘queer’ example, explore the subject and agency in the light of this and highlight a few criticisms of the negative agency of Butler’s subject according to Magnus. I shall also present Magnus’ exposition of later developments in Butler’s work and its influence on the subject’s agency. 

Finally I will use the example of the term ‘genderqueer’ to show how discursive resignification is employed to subvert binary gender identity enforcement and systemic bigenderism. 

“Act like a man!” is a command that is quite common in the western discourse, whether it be a sergeant screaming at his troops, an article in a men’s magazine or a wife urging her husband to ‘do the right thing’.

A command is a type of speech act, an utterance that does or performs something. According to JL Austin, who first started lecturing about speech acts, “a performative utterance names the act that is performed with its utterance”, or plainly stated, “utterances in which saying so makes it so” (UNISA 2007: 231).  

John Searle extended later Austin’s definition and tends to view all speech as a type of action. 

Austin asserts that certain felicity conditions have to be present for a performative to be successful. These include institutional conventions and people who are duly authorised by convention to perform these acts. These are especially apparent in naming and marriage ceremonies. 

Successful speech acts as thus felicitous, but if an unordained layman were to pronounce two people ‘man and wife’ with the exchange of popsicles on the playground, this speech act would be infelicitous. 

According to Austin’s classification of performative utterances, “Act like a man!” would be an exercitive with an implied verdictive, whereas in Searle’s A taxonomy of illocutionary acts it would be a directive with an implied declarative of disapproval.

A locutionary act is the act of uttering the words while the illocutionary act defines the performative utterance. Illocutionary acts consist of two parts; an illocutionary force and a propositional content. “Act like a man!” implies “I order you to act like a man”.  It has the illocutionary force of an order or command and the propositional content that you will act like a man. Any declaration brings about the state that it declares. By uttering the command “Act like a man!”, the speaker is in fact executing the act of ordering the listener to act like a man. (UNISA 2007: 229-37)

Judith Butler’s work, especially Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993) and Excitable Speech (1997), offers a complex but compelling account of identity, gender and politics in general as ‘performative’ in ways explicitly indebted to J.L. Austin, even if he would not readily have recognized them. (Bennet & Royle 2009: 269)

Whether or not Butler’s definition of the performative strictly conforms to Austin or Searle’s categorisation seems to me immaterial. It is quite clear from her constructive view of gender that gender is a socially co-ordinated and coerced act (so to speak).

“Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an ‘act’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.” (Butler, 2003: 44)

In this ‘act’ or performance, each pronoun used is a performative speech act. I pronounce by referring to Butler as ‘she’ that I recognise ‘her’ (performance) as female – and in so doing perform such recognition.

“Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or a locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space though a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of the abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts that are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment that the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.” (Butler, 2003: 46) and (Butler, 2004a: 900)

Bollobás demonstrates the utility of this view when he asserts that “performative subjectivities present convincing counter-arguments to the essentialist position. Nowhere do the texts of gender performativity refer to any kind of female essence or principle, even where gender is constructed in a performance of passing. Gender is shown as a construct, social and linguistic, and is constituted by a body whose biological markers are quite irrelevant.” (Bollobás 2008)

The performative speech act, “Act like a man!”, itself unmasks the constructed gender role as a performance. This becomes clearer when, as in Butler’s example, a man acts like a woman in a drag performance.

“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency... [W]e see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance that avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.” (Butler, 2003: 43) (Author’s emphasis)

A strange inversion of this drag imitation of gender happens in an episode of a BBC comedy, The Thin Blue Line. The notoriously camp Constable Kevin Goody is told by co-worker Frank that to impress Constable Habib, a female colleague that he has a crush on, he is to act like a man. Kevin does a hilarious pastiche of aggression and force while repeating the words “act like a man”.

Here we have a man, who usually acts like a woman (or least like a camp pastiche of femininity), who is acting out a camp pastiche of acting like a man. The expected gender role, that Kevin is not very good at, is aimed to impress a lady – the audience for his gender performance.

“If gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not ‘do’ one’s gender alone. One is always ‘doing’ it with or for another, even if that other is only imaginary. What I call my ‘own’ gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself).” (Butler, 2004b: 1)

According to Bradley (2001: 5), masculinity is defined in negative terms, to this end he quotes Kimmel: “Masculine identity is born in the renunciation of the feminine, not in the direct affirmation of the masculine, which leaves masculine gender identity tenuous and fragile…This notion of anti-femininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood, so that masculinity is defined more by what one is not rather than who one is.”

The Thin Blue Line’s Kevin tries again. Frank tells him how act like a man.

This time Kevin in camp mode, limp wrists flailing, asks if he should ‘be himself’. To which simply Frank replies “No”, intimating that Kevin, who is male, would have to ‘act’ like someone else to act like a man.

Frank is correcting Kevin’s errant gender behaviour. It is the type of behaviour that causes offence, because a “man who moves his hips in a feminine way or whose eyes behave in a feminine manner is sending sexual signals—intentional or not. This has nothing to do with being provocative; rather it concerns sex categorization and ambiguities therein.” (Gilbert 2009: 101-02)

This circular ‘queering’ (more of this later) of gender roles in The Thin Blue Line illustrates what Butler means by saying that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself’’. (in Gilbert 2009: 100-01) To this same effect, and perhaps more to the point, Bollobás (2008) quotes Butler’s assertion that “‘imitation’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations”.

In Excitable Speech (described in UNISA 2007: 256-57), Butler presents the idea of discursive resignification. This is the notion that injurious speech can be appropriated and used against its perpetrators, and thereby negated. The process involves severing the link between the (speech) act and the injurious consequences in order to find a way of ‘talking back’, to “thwart the performative power of assaultive speech” (Lloyd 2007: 131). Resignification thus, “is the social use (discourse) of a certain established (discursive) sign in such a way that it signifies (or means) the opposite of what it previously signified.” (UNISA 2007: 256)

Lloyd agrees with Butler that theoretically all language has the “capacity to be resignified”, but argues that some words cannot easily be redeployed because they are so deeply entrenched in their discursive contexts. “Here Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation that not all words ‘submit equally easily to appropriation’ appears apposite; ‘many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them’ and some ‘fall out’ of their new context.” (Lloyd 2007: 138)

Butler’s argument for resignification is based, in part, on her assertion that legal prosecution by the state of hate-speech increases the power of the state as regulator and instantiator of hate-speech. She argues instead for a ‘politics of resignification’ at the level of civil society. (Lloyd 2007: 130)

Resignification depends on the fact that all language is citational and, according to Derrida, “is subject to a universal propensity to be deployed in novel and unforeseeable ways”. Signs can thus break with previous contexts and create new ones. Usage deviations can therefore alter meaning radically.  (Lloyd 2007: 131)

The linguist Melinda Yuen-Ching Chen, cited in Brontsema (2004: 1), gives us a definition of linguistic reclamation (another term for discursive resignification): “The term ‘reclaiming’ refers to an array of theoretical and conventional interpretations of both linguistic and non-linguistic collective acts in which a derogatory sign or signifier is consciously employed by the ‘original’ target of the derogation, often in a positive or oppositional sense”.

The Queering of Queer

One of the foremost examples of resignification is that of the word ‘queer’. As Bennet & Royle (2009: 216) say, “Queer’s a queer word”, with a strange history full of twists and turns.

Queer was originally a word that signified ‘otherness’, but not in sexual terms. Later ‘queer’ became associated almost exclusively with non-normative sexuality. In New York before in the 1910s and ‘20s, ‘queer’ referred to a more masculine set of mostly middle class homosexual men than the flamboyant ‘fairies’. These terms were conflated by heterosexual society labelling all homosexual men as effeminate and calling them ‘queer’. Most homosexual men later adopted the term ‘gay’ which was originally a covert code word used by the ‘fairies’. Gay later also included lesbians and grouped all homosexuals into one category based solely on sexual preference, regardless of gender. (Brontsema 2004: 1-4)

Queer became a common pejorative. This was partly the reason for people not wanting to self-identify as queer. The word was reclaimed in the 1990s by activist groups and then used in various forms of queer theory.

Self-identified queers familiar with queer theory do not employ the term, as commonly believed, as a simple replacement for gay or lesbian. Rather, it serves as a conscious contestation of those very terms: by highlighting the bounds of legitimacy, queer simultaneously contests them. Furthermore, queerness is not based, in stark contrast to gay and lesbian, on sexual object choice, and as such, is not limited to or by same-sex desire. Its inherent inclusiveness allows among its ranks not only queer gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered, but also queer straights, sadomasochists, fetishists, etc.—any non-normative sexuality or sexual practice could theoretically claim queerness. (Brontsema 2004: 12)

Bennet & Royle (2009: 217) give us a concise summary of discursive resignification when they refer to “this brilliant queering of ‘queer’, its (re)appropriation as a device for the social and political empowerment of certain more or less defined, more or less discreet, more or less oppressed sexual identities.”

Agency

Butler’s discursive resignification shuns the self-help discourse of self-determination and choice, and suggests instead a reframing of agency according to the tenets of resignification. The subject, produced in and through discourse, can act and resist this social order. The subject achieves this by infusing new meanings into existing words by articulating them in transformative contexts. (Magnus 2006: 83)

In her article, The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency, Magnus (2006: 87) points out that Catherine Mills and Lois McNay have also noted Butler’s concept of agency, specifically in Excitable Speech, is essentially negative. The subject’s power lies only in the ability to “repeat, recite or recontextualize her inaugurating call”. In so doing, Butler relegates agency and action to the realms of resistance and reaction. She goes even further to claim (2006: 88) that Butler’s agency is reduced to such a point that it “remains unclear whether the linguistic subject performs these acts of resistance or whether it is actually only the power of ‘language’ that does the work and uses the subject as its instrument.”

Magnus, however, does grant Butler a reprieve. She illustrates that Butler, in her Adorno Lectures (published as Kritik der ethischen Gewalt in German), expanded her thoughts of how a subject is produced socially and remedied the concerns with her theories. Butler’s notion of agency, as a result, is extended and is more empowered. (Magnus 2006: 90-91) Butler introduces the possibility of “intersubjectively constituted action” by adding recognition as a core idea in discursive performativity. She recognises that the discursive structures that define subjects are themselves formed by “collective action of concrete subjective agents”, thereby granting the subject the agency to partake of her defining discourse. (Magnus 2006: 101)

Genderqueer

A prime and current example of subjects taking part in the shaping of a discourse, which tries to define them, through discursive resignification is that of transgender and gender non-conforming youth; more specifically through the use of terms such as genderqueer.

Usage of genderqueer is an attempt to subvert what Gilbert calls bigenderism and the matrix of oppressive practices linked to this concept that she calls systemic bigenderism.

The tyranny of systemic bigenderism shows itself in the terminology applied to those who do not meet classical gender expectations. There are sissies, tomboys, and more recently girlie boys and men. In addition, any sign of the feminine in a man or masculine in a woman leads to charges and/or assumptions of homosexuality. Moreover, the rules and regulations of systemic bigenderism are extraordinarily far ranging and strict…  Systemic bigenderism delineates the kinds of behaviors that are acceptable and not for each of the two genders. By implication it leads to a hierarchy of masculinity and femininity where individuals are rated depending on how well they do or do not compare to the ideals of the bigenderist ideology. In this sense, bigenderism is a trap: first it declares that one must belong to one of the two genders, and then judges the great majority not to be up to the standards of the gender to which they are assigned. (Gilbert 2009: 98)

Organisations such as The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (The Center) in New York and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) are actively involved with members of the sexually and gender non-conforming community to change the discourse regarding gender identity.

As part of The Center’s advocacy programme, they, together with Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, submitted a response to the proposed diagnosis of ‘Gender Incongruence’ in the draft revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, version 5 (DSM-5). They proposed various interventions, most notably that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) “formally renounce reparative therapy addressing gender non-conformity in children, adolescents and adults while supporting and advocating for a viable transgender-specific medical diagnosis in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)” and that LGBT organisations be included in the reform process (The Center 2010).

The Center’s Gender Identity Project (GIP) provides video explanations and a glossary of acceptable and offensive terms. In this glossary, genderqueer is defined as follows:

Genderqueer : A term used by some individuals who identify as between genders, or as neither man nor woman. Genderqueer identity may be seen as an identity under the gender non-conforming umbrella. Genderqueer individuals may or may not pursue any physical changes, such as hormonal or surgical intervention. Genderqueer individuals may or may not identify as trans. (The Center n.d.)

GLAAD publishes media guides and distributes these to media organisations containing terminology and guidelines on how to report on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. These measures, in a very practical way, affect and help form the public discourse surrounding LGBT issues. Large amounts of speech acts (exercitives / declaritives) in the media and medical professions are thus affected and these are institutions that inform our subjectivation or assujettissement, according to Foucault; “which denotes both the process of becoming a linguistic subject and the process of assuming agency through processes of subjugation, ‘which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate out behaviors’” (Bollobás 2008).

"I use the phrase genderqueer to describe my gender identity in the same way that I use queer to describe my sexuality. When I tell people that I'm queer, I do so in order to withhold access from intimate knowledge about my sex life. In the same vein, with the word genderqueer, my intention is to obfuscate any assumptions people would make about my physical body, either past or present (or future). Of course, people will make judgments based upon appearance, voice and body movements, but by using genderqueer I am refusing to confirm or deny their appraisal.

       Unfortunately, this is not always practical or possible in everyday life. I would like for gender neutral language to be established and used universally. This could help remove some of the stigma for anyone who doesn't easily fall within the range of acceptable gender expression." (The Center n.d.)

BBC 2007. YouTube - Act Like a Man! [Online] Available at:   HYPERLINK "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzK-pGxIa2g"    [Accessed 2 September 2010].

Bennet, A & Royle, N 2009. An Introduction To Literature, Criticism and Theory. 4th ed. Harlow, England: Pearson.

Bollobás, E 2008. Making the Subject: Performative Genders in Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and David Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, 4(1), p.http://americanaejournal.hu/vol4no1/bollobas.

Bradley, D 2001. Searching for a Gay Masculinity. [Online] Available at:   HYPERLINK "http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/lib/s01/lib397-01/ReStructuring_Masculinities/documents/gaymasc.pdf"  http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/lib/s01/lib397-01/ReStructuring_Masculinities...  [Accessed 3 September 2010].

Brontsema, R 2004. A Queer Revolution: Reconceptualizing the Debate Over Linguistic Reclamation. Colorado Research in Linguistics., 17(1), pp.1-17.

Butler, J 2003. Gender Trouble. In AJ Cahill & J Hansen, eds. Continental Feminism Reader. Oxford: Roman & Littlefield. pp.29-56.

Butler, J 2004a. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution. In J Rivkin & M Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An anthology. 2nd ed. Malden, USA: Blackwell. pp.900-11.

Butler, J 2004b. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Culler, J 2009. Literary Theory: A brief insight. New York: Sterling.

Gilbert, MA 2009. Defeating Bigenderism: Changing Gender Assumptions in the Twenty-first Century. Hypatia, 24(3), pp.93-112.

Lloyd, M 2007. Radical Democratic Activism and the Politics of Resignification. Constellations, 14(1), p.129.

Magnus, KD 2006. The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency. Hypatia, 21(2), pp.81-103.

Salih, S 2003. Judith Butler. New York: Routledge.

The Center 2010. DSM-5 Gender Identity Disorder Reform | The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. [Online] Available at:   HYPERLINK "http://www.gaycenter.org/node/5268"  http://www.gaycenter.org/node/5268  [Accessed 3 September 2010].

The Center n.d. Trans Basics: Glossary of Terms | The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. [Online] Available at:   HYPERLINK "http://www.gaycenter.org/gip/transbasics/glossary"  http://www.gaycenter.org/gip/transbasics/glossary  [Accessed 2 September 2010].

UNISA 2007. Literary Theory in Context. Pretoria: University of South Africa.

After – to my horror – being downgraded from Silver to Blue on SAA’s Voyager programme and thus being denied lounge access (unless I forked out R150 a pop), I was delighted when FNB sent me a little note to say that I was entitled to free access for myself and a guest to the SLOW Lounges at domestic airports.

What I found there was a combination of tasteful interiors, tasty snacks, good cappuccino and the friendliest and most efficient service I have come across in a long time (in any establishment). Let’s not forget to mention the Molton Brown handwash and lotion. What a delightful surprise. Thanks and congratulations to FNB / RMB / British Airways!

Most notable though, was the treatment of the South African idea. Instead of poorly conceived Baobabs and zig-zags to represent the “African Mystique” as Esmé Berman might have termed it, we here have original contemporary South African art. Each individual toilet stall even has a numbered lithograph – my stall at King Shaka had a Miriam Makeba by Espoir Kennedy. I remember seeing works by Willem Boshoff, Robert Hodgins, Nandipha Mntambo, Kim Berman, David Koloane, Sam Nhlengethwa, Claudette Schreuders and Mary Wafer (pictured).

Let’s hope that this temporary offer lasts for a long time, because being denied access to the Slow Lounge would be a real downgrade worth many a tear.

(Much credit to Federico Freschi for introducing me to art and the art world, deconstructing the ‘African Mystique’, and also being a great travel companion.)

Honourable Minister (of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana)

We were very disappointed by the fact that you – once again – neglected to open an art exhibition as scheduled. (The opening of SPace at Museum Africa on Monday 10 May 2010)

We staged a small but pointed intervention in your honour. About 100 people wore our “Nation-Building Lesbian” pink triangles. Yes, we do think that you are an Art(less)-Nazi.

Here, we don’t storm out of exhibitions that we were supposed to open (and sponsored) because they contain “pornographic” material (the pictures were very tame).

Here, we bother to find out what is on exhibit when we open an exhibition.

Here, we do not proclaim that art like this does not support nation-building. When did nation-building become Art’s job? This is not the USSR circa 1932*. (At least I hope not)

No More Nora, Lulu

*“Officially approved art was required to follow the doctrine of Socialist Realism. In the spring of 1932 the Central Committee of the Communist Party decreed that all existing literary and artistic groups and organizations should be disbanded and replaced with unified associations of creative professions. Accordingly, the Moscow and Leningrad Union of Artists was established on August, 1932, which brought the history of post-revolutionary art to a close. The epoch of Soviet art began.” (Wikipedia)