What is Performativity

Judith Butler says that identity is constructed over time, through repeated acts which follow a particular “script.” Furthermore, it is the stylization of the body itself, and so an identity such as gender must be understood through the simplest of their actions, or just in the way they do their actions, within a specific social and historical context. It is also something that the actors carry out in what Butler calls a “mode of belief;” in other words the people who carry out these actions, these “performances,” are not intentionally creating any sort of façade. But then, it is possible for an identity such as that of gender to not simply be a binary relationship, but rather that it is defined in a much more lose spectrum by the acts that people carry out.

Butler makes reference to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that bodies are “an historical situation,” rather than “a natural species.” This is seen, for example, in the clear difference between sex and gender. Sex is simply what our biology dictates, while gender is much more nuanced. Gender is the thing that is performative; our acts within the context are what defines it, rather than any preconceived elements.

Merleau-Ponty’s idea has to do with the fact that bodies create their identity by constantly fulfilling expectations – what Butler calls a “set of possibilities” – that the society has ascribed to a certain role. The idea of the body as a “set of possibilities” stems from the existentialist idea that goes agains the Aristotelian concept of every object having an “essence.” Existentialism claims instead that it is our actions which define who we are. But there is also the element of the “set of possibilities” being defined by the historical period where the body exists. The body is not just an object, but it is the realization of possibilities – of a “set of expectations” for the body.

Thus, Butler states that it is the subject of a sentence, the “I,” that represents the body, and the verb, the “what,” that represents the expectations that are constantly being told to us to be the correct thing by the historical situation we find ourselves in. Forming one’s identity is all a matter of performing and reproducing – over a prolonged period of time – the expectations of that specific identity within the historical context.

Then we can talk more about the “mode of belief” mentioned earlier. The historical situation conditions a person to become what they are expected to be. Thus one becomes a sustained and prolonged “corporeal project,” or simply a body that has a “purpose” that was ascribed by the society. For example, Butler argues that heterosexual relationships are only a social construct made to favor reproduction; it is not something that is natural. Thus, society puts in place various systems to ensure that people will remain within this scope of heterosexuality, such as bullying those who do not fit in it and rewarding those who do. This is how the belief gets instilled into people to perform a certain set of expectations.

It is important to understand that the body does not ever exist by itself, so it is always something that is built in relation to the context it is in, but neither is it just some empty mold where society shoves all of its expectations into it so that it becomes a certain way. The individual does have agency over the body, and society does affect the body, and these two are not mutually exclusive. They do happen at the same time.

Then there is the situation of the specific space that the body is located in. Butler mentions that in the theater, bodies can be dismissed as just putting up an act. But outside of that, in a common space that any individual could occupy without any need for a particular perception of them, such as, say, a bus seat, the performance starts to be taken as a reality. So it is important to make that distinction. Performativity can indeed be what we perceive as the reality. It can be what we assume is true, and for all practical purposes, is true. When we perform to either conform to, or break from a certain historical context, and when we do so repeatedly, and without any mind of the space, then we are, from Butler’s perspective, the very thing that the context our bodies are in defines those actions to belong to. So those are the mechanisms that give performativity its pedestal to stand above a “theatrical performance”: being performed consistently over long periods of time and regardless of location, and the fact that within the historical context the actions the body takes are given a specific label.