8readings (GTB)

Home News Answers Writing About
< Main Answers
10 JUNE 2020
J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and
Gender Issues
Warning: This piece contains inappropriate language for children.
This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know
it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any
desire to add to that toxicity.
For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater,
a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She
took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a
philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge
Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I
followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans
people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender
specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and
doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my
interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in
the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and
affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about
to explain.
All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans
activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a
‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I
began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself
what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead
of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a
persistent low level of harassment began.
Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns

on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was
dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her
directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in
the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots
for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans
activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.
I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen
when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I
expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my
hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although
one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.
What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails
and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which
were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind,
empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with
gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a
socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding.
They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the
erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear
that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.
I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting
support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I
only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic.
Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and
progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my
speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every
woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.
If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by
trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a
huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the
vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range
from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to
escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed
never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says
they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical
feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism,
because they were born women.
But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people,

institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of
the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What
next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in
positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible,
according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a
dimorphic species).
So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my
head down?
Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and
deciding I need to speak up.
Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in

Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my
trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual
abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in
men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is
having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of
the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and
replace it with gender.
The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity,
which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I
have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and
have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge
explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing
numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because
they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably,
and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they
were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia,
either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this
issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the
opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a
4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are
hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and
researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification

where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified
at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and
peer influences as potential factors.’
Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender
identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’
Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation
about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted
campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and
re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that
suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central
tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual
orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.
The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric
teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned
from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated
that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not
‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with
the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever
people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful
descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the
more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to
transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with
severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t
find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn
myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I
felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’
and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel
indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why
she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to
be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the
sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies
in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my
ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and
musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw
at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own
head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or
who you are.
I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender
dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies
have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow
out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans
people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen
to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful.
Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of
her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s
completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long
and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The
current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust
systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass.
A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure
himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.
Many people aren’t aware of this.
We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I
imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I
ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online
culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen
women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of
the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of
‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that
rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that
TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to
agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up
and sit down, or else.
I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the
assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them,
too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of
denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly
segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as
threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The
hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns
many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must
accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and
themselves.
But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not
an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any
of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the
‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’
strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans
activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve
had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and
alienating.
Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of
the current trans activism.
I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly
about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m
ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and
remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to
claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I
asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she
encouraged me to go ahead.
I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of
solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve
been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.
I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now
married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a
million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault
don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money
you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny –
but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud
noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.
If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a
trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I
have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their
last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I
realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my
attacker.
I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others,
but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve
protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans
women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at
particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I
feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by
men.
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls
and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing
rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender
confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or
hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.
That is the simple truth.
On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its
controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs
to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was
‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social
media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn
for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my
head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a
loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a
man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was
finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my
government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.
Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I
forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and
reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the
importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I
was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are
Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.
It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course

trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke
cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in
conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more
comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too,
are better suited to the earth than the living.”
Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this
because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of
doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.
But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow
down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode
‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few
before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re
standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some
of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women
who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women
are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to
have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to
educate themselves on how prevalent it is.
The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise,
are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them.
Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring
women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other
across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and
widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans
people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first
place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans
adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of
activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women
with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism
than the movement’s seen in decades.
The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that
anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily
fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because,
like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which
shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity
when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to
trans people.
All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be
extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns
to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.
TERMS OF USE P R I VAC Y & C O O K I E S P O L I C Y ENQUIRIES LINKS MEDIA KIT LEGAL
! "
© J.K. ROWLING 2016
Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts Publishing rights © J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts characters, names and related indicia and trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
J.K. ROWLING’S WIZARDING WORLD is a trademark of J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Comparative Literature: East & West
Series 1
ISSN: (Print) 2572-3618 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcle19
Queer[ing] Performativity, Queer[ing]

Subversions: A Critique of Judith Butler’s Theory of
Performativity
Wenjuan XIE
To cite this article: Wenjuan XIE (2014) Queer[ing] Performativity, Queer[ing] Subversions: A
Critique of Judith Butler’s Theory of Performativity, Comparative Literature: East & West, 20:1,
18-39, DOI: 10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486
© 2014 Sichuan University. Published

by China Academic Journal Electronic
Publishing House.
Published online: 06 Aug 2018.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 7412
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcle20
Queer[ing] Performativity, Queer[ing] Subversions: A
Critique of Judith Butler's Theory of Performativity
WenjuanXIE
University ofAlberta, Canada
· ( Nt)
Ui1 .&.
>1 51 JfJ; a. iA.JIJHJIJ·tt

.E..
FR.. cl::
( Nt) ·tintl JL4tfoJ fOJ 4; rJ;J )J!f fOJM.; 1-::J.

JL1t I'OJ 4, tzp 51 JfJ !h JLt'f JIJ J.JUl I'OJ 4.
With her publication of Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler's theory of gender
performativity became an immediate cultural buzz word provoking responses and
exerting influences far exceeding its intended scope. Gender Trouble begins with
critical engagements with mainstream, particularly French, feminist theories, and
"seeks to provoke critical examination of the basic vocabulary of the movement of
thought to which it belongs" and "to criticize a pervasive heterosexual assumption
in the feminist literary theory" (GT vii). Before the concept of gender performance
18
?1994-2015 China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House. All rights reserved. http://wwv.
was proposed, sex, gender and sexuality have always been the major analytical
tools for women and gender studies. Nevertheless, Butler decisively dismantles the
ontological status of gender categories, proposing a theory of gender performativity
that gender should only be understood as "the repeated stylization of the body, a set
of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory gram that congeal over time to
produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being" (GT 43-44).
In order to establish gender performance as a rudimental concept that could
compete with well-established concepts of anatomical sex and gender identity,
Butler radically de-ontologizes the latter as discursively constituted. In doing so she
actually reworks feminist issues with a queer, poststructuralist twist, so as "to
facilitate a political convergence of feminism, gay and lesbian perspectives on
gender, and poststructuralist theory", and "to resist the domestication of gender
studies or women studies within the academy and radicalize the notion of feminist
critique" (GT xiii). This new way of discussing gender through performativity is
what Jay Prosser welcomes as "queer feminism"-"a new methodological genre"
that was produced by "analyzing the way in which the sex/gender system is
constructed through the naturalization of heterosexuality and vice versa" in "an
interstitial space between feminism and gay studies" (59). Gender performativity, or
the queering of linguistic speech performance, becomes the key to Butler's project
of bridging feminism and gender studies.
I . Queer(ing) Performance: Reading Gender Performativity against Speech

Act Theory
To a poststructuralist like Butler, there is no prediscursive identity, as all aspects
associated with gender, including the subject, agency, gender norm and even the
biological sex, are invariably produced by and through discourses. It is on the
assumption of gender, including the body, as discursive that Butler relies to claim
that gender is performative. As she stresses, "the body signified as prior to
signification is an effect of signification [ ... ] it is productive, constitutive, one
might even argue performative, inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and
contours the body that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification" (BTM
30). According to Butler, gender, or sex, is always "something that one becomes-
but can never be-then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity" (GT, 143).
This process of gender becoming or gender activity consists in gender performances,
which can never fully present gender as settled in a destination. As Butler describes,
19
"gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static
cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort" (ibid.).
The "incessant and repeated action of some sort" is what Butler would designate as
"gender performance". To be more specific, the action of gender performance is
always understood from a discursive point of view: gender behaviours, such as acts,
gestures, and enactments, "are peiformative in the sense that the essence or identity
that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained
through corporeal signs and other discursive means" (GT 173). However, due to her
discrete and inconsistent articulation, it is hard to grasp what exactly this
performative "action of some sort" means.
It appears that "performative" has triple meanings in Butler's theory: the
theatrical meaning of acting, dramatizing; its linguistic meaning derived from the
verb "perform" in the speech act theory, which is similar to "enact" "embody" and
"do" and its extended meaning of "citation" "signification" and "reiteration" with
poststructuralist modification. Butler starts out with the double meaning of
theatrical "performative" ("ritual social dramas") and speech-act gender doing
("performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives for
instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and
exercise a binding power", BTM 225), but eventually lands on the discursive level
of "resignification" and "reiteration" ("Through a critical engagement with his
[Zizek] theory, then, I consider how performativity might be rethought as
citationality and resignification", BTM21).
Indeed, it is as Eve Sedgwick observes that "Butler's work constitutes an
invitation to, in her words, 'consider gender[ ... ] as[ ... ] an 'act', as it were, which
is both intentional and performative, where 'performative' itself carries the double-
meaning of 'dramatic' and 'non-referential'" (2). Sedgwick also notices that
Butler's "performative" "carries the authority of two quite different discourses, that
of theater on the one hand, of speech-act theory and deconstruction on the other" (2).
However, rather than viewing the stretch between theatrical and deconstructive
meanings of "performative" as productive, I divert from Sedgwick that it is exactly
due to inherent contradictions among these different "performative" discourses that
gender performativity is reduced to a queer, problematic concept.
To better illustrate how Butler queers "performative" we need take a close
examination of the logical route of how Butler arrives at gender performativity from
its linguistic originator in speech act theory. Within speech act theory, "a
20
performative" refers to a discursive practice that enacts or produces which it names;
while "perform" in the term "performative" "indicates that the issuing of the
utterance is the performing of an action" (Austin, 6). The key question Austin tries
to answer is a pragmatic one-"how to do things with words", or how an utterance
can effect an action, or in other words, how discourse can bring about concrete
material consequences in practice. In order to introduce linguistic performative acts
to the thinking of gender issues, Butler has to build up the prerequisite that gender
categories can be discussed on a discursive level and is comparable to discursive
events. Thanks to theories of poststructuralists like Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and
French feminists, such as Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Butler
can easily land on the notion that gender identities (gender, sex, sexuality) belong to
a discursively constituted reality.
By deconstructing gender categories, Butler is in fact able to redefine the
performative with a poststructuralist twist: while Austin assumes the stability of the
referent and the fixed relation between the signifier (gender categories) and the
referent (gender truth), Butler opens up the signification process, renders the
signifier free-floating, and argues even if "the linguistic capacity to refer to sexed
bodies is not denied, but the very meaning of 'referentiality' is altered" (BTM 11).
Here, Butler modifies the meaning of performative by questioning one prerequisite
of speech act theory-the stability of the lexicon, the categories. She concludes:
If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its
cultural signification, are performative, then there is no pre-existing identity by which
an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true of false, real or distorted
acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a
regulatory fiction. (GT 180)
Hence, she is able to dissolve Austin's distinction of the constative and

performative; instead, she suggests "in philosophical terms, the constative claim is
always to some degree performative" (BTM 11). For instance, Butler believes
gender utterances, such as first medical interpellations for the baby: "It's a girl" or
"It's a boy" are performative in that it defies true/false evaluation, for "[g]enders
can be neither true nor false" (GT 180). Moreover, this utterance belongs to the
process of constituting the girl, performing the "girling" of the person, while the
referent "girl" does not have ontological existence outside the discursive event.
However, by Austin's definition, this act will be considered as constative since in
the Austin's time, gender identities were still regarded as factic instead of
21
constructed and the ontology of "a girl" or "a boy" remains stable and
unquestioned: a girl/boy remains locked to a specific anatomic sex, specific gender
attributes and specific sexuality orientation. It would probably never occur to
Austin that the uttering "It's a girl/boy" is not describing or expressing gender but is
actually performing the action of gendering, calling "it" into becoming "a girl/boy".
So far, Butler has successfully made the case that gender is not only discursively
but also performatively constituted, that is, gender not only consists in discourses,
but in a specific type of performative discourses. Butler further revises the speech
act theory through employing the poststructuralist notion of citation and reiteration
of the law, or gender norms in the case of gender. Extending above example, Butler
furthers her argument:
[I)n that naming, the girl is "girled," brought into the domain of language and
kinship through the interpellation of gender. But that "girling" of the girl does not end
there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation is reiterated by various authorities
and throughout various intervals of time to reinforce or contest this naturalized effect.
The naming is [... ] the repeated inculcation of a norm. (BTM 8)
More precisely, the "founding interpellation", the "naming" is itself a citation, a

reiteration of gender norms regulated by heterosexual paradigms while
"performativity is construed as that power of discourse to produce effects through
reiteration" (BTM 20). As one may notice here, Butler reformulates Austin's more
literal speech performance of doing into a poststructuralist gender "reiteration".
This reworking of speech-act performative to Zizek, Lacan's citation and Derrida's
reiteration is significant for understanding Butlerian gender performativity at three
aspects: gender law/authority/norm, performative repetition, and performative
subversion.
The notion of norm/authority/law/symbolic also departs from that of authority or
conventions in Austin's theory. In speech act theory, Austin conceives authority as
the reified, substantiated right ascribed to the performer of a performative utterance.
In what Austin terms "felicity conditions" of performative, authority means
appropriateness, that "[t]he particular persons and circumstances in a given case
must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked" (34).
Quite different from Austin, Butler takes the norm/authority/law/symbolic for
gender performance as "the temporalized regulation of signification" or a
Foucaultian "regulatory ideal" (BTM22).
22
In terms of gender, the norm/authority/law would be a compulsory formula for
gender ·configuration that is binary and heterosexual: ( 1) there are only two
possibilities of gender identities-either A sex orB sex, A sexuality orB sexuality,
A gender or B gender; (2) gender identities are coherent-A gender identity
(woman)= [A sex+ A sexuality (desiring only B sex)+ A gender] and B gender
identity (man) = [B sex + B sexuality (desiring A sex) + B gender]. This gender
formula becomes the "an abstraction of commonality" that one has to submit to
(UG 50). As Butler asserts, "'sex' [and other gender category] is always produced
as a reiteration of hegemonic norms" (BTM 107). The gender norm/authority/
law/symbolic, as Butler reworks it, is the power of discourse that regulates and
conceals discrete, incoherent, and proliferated gender performances into illusionary
gender coherence, or what she refers as "heteronormativity" or "compulsory
heterosexuality" (GT 179, 180). It is in this sense that Butler claims that "the
initiatory performative, 'it's a girl!' anticipates the eventual arrival of the sanction,
'I pronounce you man and wife" (BTM231).
According to Butler, gender formula is not imposed from factors outside but is
constituted by discursive gender performances. "In fact, the norm only persists as a
norm to the extent that it is acted out in social practice and reidealized and
reinstituted in and through the daily social rituals of bodily life. The norm has no
independent .ontological status"; rather, "it is itself (re)produced through its
embodiment, through the acts that strive to approximate it, through the idealizations
reproduced in and by those acts" (UG 48, my emphasis). Following this logic, each
gender performance becomes a "citing" to be more specific, a "reiteration" of the
law. The citing is a compelled action in that it not only forces "internally
discontinuous" performative acts (sex, sexuality, and gender) into a coherent gender
formula but also conceals "the arbitrary relation between" those acts with a
naturalized notion of gender idealization (gender identity) (GT 179). In Butler's
words, "this 'law' can only remain a law to the extent that it compels the
differentiated citations and approximations called 'feminine' and 'masculine"'
(BTM15).
This notion of gender performance as "reiteration" is an outstanding break away
from the speech act theory. In the latter, Austin is concerned with a singular
performative and how this particular discursive event brings about consequences.
Yet, Butler shifts the attention to multiple and dynamic gender preformative events,
investigates the accumulated effect of gender performative matrix and the
23
subversive potential within the dynamic process of gender multiplication. Because
Butler construes performativity not a singular act but constant repetitions of norms,
she conceives norm/authority/law as regulating not merely one singular
performative event as Austin does, but the whole set of performances that constitute
an appearance of substance. This departure from speech act theory is central to
Butler's theory because it is precisely the notion of performance as "reiteration"
that provides the discursive occasion for the most important project of her work-
the subversion of gender identities. If Butler stays with Austin's discussion of
performative as a singular speech event, then the possibility of gender
multiplication and gender parody-her strategy of gender subversion-will be
nowhere to locate. Butler views gender "reiteration" or repetition as inherently
paradoxical, that repetitions are both the way gender norm is (re)produced and the
ways it is subverted. She holds that "to the extent that gender norms are reproduced,
they are invoked and cited by bodily practices that also have the capacity to alter
norms in the course of their citation" (UG 52). This possibility of "alter[ing] norms
in the course of their citation" is what Butler repeatedly emphasizes as "inner
subversion" and "subversion from within". She explicitly argues "if subversion is
possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the
possibilities that merge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected
permutations itself' (GT 119, my emphasis ). The mechanism of subversion through
reiteration is justified on the ground that "the formula that 'gender' only exists in
the service ofheterosexism, does not entail that we ought never to make use of such
terms [ ... ] On the contrary, precisely because such terms have been produced and
constrained within such regimes, they ought to be repeated in directions that reverse
and displace their originating aims" (BTM 123).
Though it is unclear what exactly Butler means by subversion; she does not
attempt to define subversion either ("The effort to name the criterion for
will always fail"). She suggests that subversions lie in "failed"
gender performances, repetitions, or reiterations (GT xxi). This is another important
difference between the Butlerian and speech act performative. It is true that Austin
does take into consideration failures of speech acts, noting that if the conditions for
the performative prove infelicitous, the speech performance will not achieve its
intended effects, thus is rendered "unhappy". Failure of the performative in speech
act theory is not due to the productive crisis of language to reiterate but due to
24
"infelicitous conditions" in this situation of speech performance. Austin certainly
focuses more on the successful speech events in "felicitous conditions" than
perforrnative failures. In other words, Austin is aimed to analyze how a
perforrnative will succeed, how to successfully do things with words, and how to
avoid failures in performative speech acts. Quite the opposite, it is precisely in those
failures of gender performances that Butler discovers the subversive potential that
becomes the thrust of Butler theory-gender subversion through "failed" gender
performances. As she declares, "The possibilities of gender transformation are to be
found precisely [... ] in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a
parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a
politically tenuous construction." (GT 179)
The very core of Butler's gender theory thus resides in a reversal of Austin's
theory-not how to do gender with discourse, but how to undo gender with undoing
discourses. Therefore, her whole gender politics revolves around the central issue of
"what possibilities of reworking those constraints [under which gendered positions
are assumed] arise from within its own terms" (BTM 96). These possibilities are to
be found within "reiteration", the paradoxical process of constituting and
deconstituting gender identities, and the magic power that allows Butler to re-think
failures of gender doing as the gender "undoing" and subversion.
Curiously enough, the fmal conclusion Butler arrives at is a new model of gender
subversion exemplified in drag and queer movement. It appears that her purpose in
developing the concept of gender performativity is to theoretically justify the
potential of subverting gender identity in "a subversive rearticulation of that
symbolic", which, from her queer feminist point of view, means in gender parody,
drag, queer and LGBT experience in general (BTM 109). If feminism for Butler
means "politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests, the perspectives, of
'women"', then, her politics is an explicitly queered one, in that gender
performance, reiteration and subversion is ultimately formulated from the
perspective of first a queer, then, a feminist (164). Her arrival at queer practice as
the theoretical solution to the gender trouble defmitely takes feminism to a queer
direction. Instead of focusing on classical feminist issues like gender inequality,
gender stereotypes, gender roles, women's rights, Butler shifts to a new theory of
gender performativity that heightens the role of queer communities play in
challenging gender ideologies. Indeed, Butler queers not only speech act theory, but
25
feminism and poststructuralism, and synthesizes these discourses into gender
performativity, where queer practices become primary forms of gender subversion.
However, will this queer version of gender performativity and gender subversion
will bring about the transformation of gender ideology as Butler imagines? Will in
praxis it achieve the goals that it promise theoretically? How useful Butler's queer
theory of gender subversion is in practice? And what are the logical limitations of
her theory? These questions lead us to take her theory to a critical scrutiny.
IT • Queer[ing] Subversion: A Critique of Gender Performativity

Despite the innovative strength within Butler's gender performativity and the
theoretical space and promise it creates for queer and transgender studies, her
theory has also undergone severe criticism. Hood Williams and Cealy Harrison
regret that Butler's account merely replaces ontological theories of gender with "an
equally foundationalist conception of gender performativity" (88). Alison Stone
raises an excellent point that what Butler focuses in her theoretical discussion is not
what is subversion or what does subversion target, but the possibility of"subversive
agency" and about the desirability of subverting "gender norms", leaving fundamental
questions regarding subversion unattended.(5) Both Catherine Mills (2000) and
Lois McNay (1999) share a great concern that the notion of agency that Butler
proposes is fundamentally negative if the subject's power is defmed in terms of
her/his ability to repeat, recite, or recontextualize her inaugurating call while agency
is reduced to resistance and action to reaction. It is in this sense that Fiona Webster
concludes that "[Bulter's] account of agency ultimately lacks strength-it provides
neither an account of how individual subjects might actively and deliberately
contest their social construction nor an account of precisely what makes their
actions uniquely their own"( 197).
However, so far, notions of the subject and agency remain the most challenged
aspects in studies on theory of gender performativity. It is thereby my goal to
further these critiques into a more systematic direction, especially in the new
comparative light of speech act theory. I will question Butler's theory in the
following aspects: (1) gender as signifactory practice and the discursive life of
gender; (2) de-ontologizing gender categories and working gender constative into
gender performative; (3) the (un)citing of the law and its paradoxical doubleness;
and (4) Resignification, performative failures, and performative subversions.
26
1. Gender as Signifactory Practice and the Discursive life of Gender
"[I]dentity as a practice, and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally
intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself
in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life." (GT 184)
Through prioritizing the discursive over the material, Butler seems to have
drifted away from a corporeal politics of gender to a fore grounding of the ontology
of language/discourse in gender formulation. As Butler slides more to the
poststructuralist notions of "reiteration" and "citation", this "corporeality" of gender
acts gradually fades from her consideration, and eventually she falls into the trap
where "all that is solid melts into language", to borrow the comment by the critic
Vicki Kirby. As Kirby points out, Butler is "arguing that there can be no access to a
pure materiality outside or before signification, and by extension, no access to a
pure materiality ofbodily life that is separate from language" (41).
Butler's reduction of the materiality of gender events to an abstracted, simplified
level of discursive signification fails to address the specificity of gendered bodies
and the complexity of non-discursive reality in gender experience, such as
oppressions and punitive regulations of non-dominant gender practices, hate to
violence that is done to transgender individuals, and the moral pressures put on
gender minorities. Geoff Boucher is certainly right in pinpointing gender
performativity as an idealist "theory of discursive materialisation" given Butler's
argument that "performative speech acts somehow transubstantiate the referent"
entails the assumption "that transcendental subjectivity constitutes not just the
epistemological forms, but also the substantial materiality of the object-world"
(124). Indeed, despite the new epistemological mode that gender performativity
provides for understanding gender issues, Butler's alliance with poststructuralist
dominance of signs and discourses severely weighs down the materiality of real life
experience. Gender phenomenon will be a subjectless, autonomous, self-sustained
system completely isolated from not only the social, material domain of gender, but
the engagement of individuals.
Most importantly, Butler's autonomous discursive structure of gender "deeds"
precludes the agency of the gender "doer". Butler rejects the notion of a pre-given
subject who would then perform, denying the active role that the subject plays in
the action of subversion. Relying on a Nietzchean assumption that "there is no
'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer is merely a fiction added to the
deed-the deed is everything", Butler dismisses fundamental questions of
27
subjectivity and agency, that is, who is doing gender? (33) Or who is undoing
gender? If gender is merely a discursive deed, is there still a human subject, or is it
simply language itself, that is (un)doing gender? For Butler, gender deeds, or
gender performances, are constituted within discursive activity of repetition and
subverted by resistant repetitions, that is, drag, queer, gender parody, and
transgender existence. However, Butler utterly discounts the role of the subject in
gender performance; what matters for Butler is not the subject who does
"reiteration", but the practice of "reiteration". Here, the subject is understood as
always subjected while agency always in terms of reiteration and resignification:
agency is only possible to the extent that the subject who is produced in and through
discourse reiterate gender norms in new contexts so as to invest them with new
meaning. To contest symbolic authority is not necessarily a return to the "ego" or
classical liberal notions of freedom, rather to do so is to insist that the norm in its
necessary temporality is opened to a displacement and subversion from within (UG
47). As Katy Dow Magnus also points out, "as Butler begins to develop a more
general notion of subjectivity and shifts her focus from gender performativity to
linguistic performativity, her notion of subjective agency becomes increasingly
diminished" (82).
To a certain extent, the discursive life of gender means what political philosopher
Seyla Benhabib criticizes as "the death of the subject" (20). Bodies That Matter
already makes this clear: the subject does not exist "apart from the regulatory norms
which she/he opposes"; rather the subject is constituted by "the very regimes of
discourse/power" (15). If the subject is always manipulated by discourse, agency
conditioned by discourse, then, is there anything left outside language? How can we
be certain whether the agency of subversion comes from the subject or it simply
belongs to language? Is there anything that we, as social individuals and subjects of
gender, can do outside the grip of language? How do we distinguish between the
constituted subject that reacts to discursive regimes and the constitution-in-progress
subject? Is the subject's resistance is merely another form of constitution?
Secondly, even if we concede that the "deed" is miraculously independent of the
"doer," and gender occurs as a discursive signification event, there remains the
question how these decontextulized and dehistoricized signification events on a
locutionary level will reform the contexts that determines their interpretation and
how these discursively subversive gender performances will be translated into real
28
social transformation. It is one thing to argue for a structural possibility of
subversion within gender performance, yet, it is quite another thing to equate this
possibility with realized social transformations of gender. The realization of
performative subversion is always restrained by concrete social conditions. Yet, it is
exactly the social contexts determining the political implications of performances
that are neglected by Butler. Hence, the notion of discursive subversion cannot
explain why a certain level of subversion will occur at a specific historical moment
and geographical location. Take the queer movement for example. The reclaiming
of the word "queer" by American LGBT community in the 1990s is cited by Butler
as an exemplar of performative gender subversion. By owning, redefining and
employing the word that was once used pejoratively, at least Butler achieved certain
sense of agency. In this sense, "queer" has been reiterated as an affirmation rather
than degradation. However, she does not explain why this linguistic "subversion"
hasn't happened earlier and elsewhere. Apparently, homosexual gender
performances did not come into existence suddenly when the notion "queer" was
used as a derogatory term for these non-dominant gender practices, and the
subversive reclaiming of the term did not happen immediately after "queer" was
used. Why it has to be in the 1990s and in America that this notion was to be
subverted? And if by simply reiterating the pejorative notions in an affirmative
context, the term will be subverted, then why other homophobic terms equivalent to
"queer' in other cultures are not subverted through the same performative mode?
What Butler fails to acknowledge here is the historical contexts conditioning
discursive performative subversions. Without the historical achievements of LGBT
rights movement on economical, legal, political and social dimensions in America,
it is doubtful whether performative subversion of "queer" will ever be possible. The
change of the illocutionary force and perlocutionary consequences of "queer" is
only possible through a practical transformation of social conditions that
contextualized the semantic field that gender performances are interpreted.
Therefore, it is not that the discursive subversion of "queer" brings about social
change of gender; quite opposite, the former is merely indicative and reflective of
the change already occurred in social milieu through collectively political struggles
by the LGBT community.
29
2. De-ontologizing Gender Categories and Working Gender Constative into
Gender Performative
As a strategy to denaturalize and resignify bodily categories, I describe and propose
a set of parodic practices based on a performative theory of gender facts that disrupt
the categories of the body, sex, gender, and sexuality and occasion their subversive
resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame. (GTx)
Still on a discursive level, Butler further vitiates the materiality of gender through
deconstructing all gender categories and problematizes them as open signifiers. In
Butler's own words, another aspect of subversion is "to problematize the category,
interrogate its incoherence, its internal dissonance" (BTM 188). Her first breaks
away from the feminist defined sex/gender distinction:
Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity
between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. [ ... ] When the constructed
status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a
free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily
signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as
a female one. (GT6)
In a radical deconstructionist way, conventional gender binary is read arbitrary

signifiers. Gender signs like sex AlB, sexuality AlB and gender AlB are not only
devoid of ontological status, but also are postulated in an arbitrary relation to
gender phenomena that they are assumed to signify, in that sex A can designate
body B just as much as sex B can designate body A. In destabilizing identity
categories foundational to feminist politics, Butler opens it up for other possible
significations of a queer kind (187). For instance, the existence of androgyny and
other unconventional genital configurations indicates that there are sex C, D, and X,
and that gender binary is a fabrication concealing the spectrum of sex realities.
Butler takes a step further for her view: "[T]he more insidious and effective strategy
it seems is a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of
identity themselves, not merely to contest 'sex' but to articulate the convergence of
multiple sexual discourses at the site of 'identity' in order to render that category, in
whatever form, permanently problematic." (163)
Through "queering" the speech-act constative and perfonnative into gender
performativity: the gender constative is gender performative, which means the
traditional notion that a person is a gender implies the person is pronounced as
30
/forced into the gender, "gender" itself becomes a myth instead of fact, "because
there is not an 'essence' that gender expresses" and what we take as gender is
merely "the idea of gender" created by various acts of gender (GT 178). It is with
this belief that gender is constructed and can be constructed differently through
gender performances that Butler is able to propose performative subversions
through "multiplication of genders" as "the alternative to the binary system of
gender" (UG 44). Indeed, as Butler contends, "the strange, the incoherent, that falls
'outside', gives us a way of understanding the taken-for-granted world of sexual
categorization as a constructed one, indeed, as one that might well be constructed
differently" (GT 140).
Nonetheless, de-ontologizing gender categories does not mean that "the idea of
gender" will go away. Gender does not need to be real to be operating; in fact, it is
not uncommon that in the signified does not exist as "fact". Therefore,
deconstructing the signifier of gender does not necessarily eradicate the concept of
gender distinction. Regardless of what bodies "masculine" and "feminine" signify,
gender distinction remains. Despite the discursive possibility that "masculine" and
"feminine" may switch referents, in reality their signification remained cemented
into one formula. To signify a male body with "feminine" or a female body
"masculine" will be anything but easy. Thus, it would be mistaken to equate
"multiplication of genders" with "the alternative" to gender conventions. The fact
that gender can be performed and constituted differently does not mean that they
will be equal in real life, equally respected, enforced, and preserved through
complex power discourses and institutions. The quantitative increase of gender
performances does little to subvert dominant gender binary, given that for the
majority of social members, the idea of genders remains powerful, and gender still
means male or female, man or woman. Sad but true, most theoretically crucial
"parodic practices" remain marginal and repressed in reality.
Essentially, the central issue is not how to generate new genders through gender
performances-gender multiplication has always been true throughout history and
across cultures; the real task is how to transfer "multiplication of genders" to "the
alternative to the gender binary". It is far from enough to recognize it as a
discursive possibility; rather the efforts should be focused on its actualization in
state, political, legal and economic arenas. Therefore, Butler is totally missing the
point in bypassing the real subversive task-to establish "other" genders as the
31
alternative when she miraculously equalizes those two on a discursive level and
eschews the discussion of concrete social actions. The core of the gender trouble
lies in neither what other gender possibilities do we have (destabilizing gender
categories) nor how can we produce them (gender perforamtivity and reiteration),
but how to elevate them to an comparable status as that of dominant genders for
norms will stick.
3. The (un)Citing of the Law and Its Paradoxical Doubleness

Gender is also a nonn that can never be fully internalized; "the internal" is a surface
signification, and gender nonns are fmally phantasmatic, impossible to embody. (GT
179)
If gender subversion means non-dominant gender performances could rival,

displace, and alter gender norms, one would expect Butler to explain why gender
norms still prevail. As noted earlier, Butler addresses the formation of gender norms
within her loop of iteration. Gender norms exist only in its reiteration; reiteration is
compulsory, then the only way to break through this loop is through resignification.
More importantly, norms are conductive to this self-destructive resignification, for
the performatively constituted gender norms are inherently incoherent and instable:
gender A does not necessarily mean sex A, sexuality A and gender A; it can also be
sex A, sexuality B (C/D) and gender B (C/D). For one thing, there are no causal
relations between aspects of gender such as sex, gender and desire, if we take into
consideration "the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual,
bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow
from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seems to follow from gender -
indeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or
reflect one another" (173). For another, gender is a process of becoming, which
means one's identity might not be stable: one may embody sex A, sexuality A and
gender A at one time, and enact sex A, sexuality B and gender B at another time.
Therefore, Butler argues that even though "norm acquires its durability through
being reinstated time and again [ ... ] a norm does not have to be static in order to
last; in fact, it cannot be static if it is to last" (UG 126). As Butler adds further "that
heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome,
that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved,
and that it is consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be
excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself' (BTM 125). My questions
32
are, given norms are subject to change (which is true if we only take a look at how
gender norms and our perception of what is feminine/masculine have changed
throughout time) then does it mean that current formulation of gender norms should
also have a history? Was there a different gender norm before ours? Was the
"previous" gender norm subverted in the same performative way as Butler
conceives? Further, if a certain form of gender norms always has a life span and is
doomed to change, does it mean that change is inevitable and evolutionary? How
are we to distinguish this voluntary evolution of norm and its revolutionary
subversion that Butler proposes with gender perforamtivity, especially given that
Butler does not presuppose the subject as accountable for gender deeds? And if the
subversion of gender normativity is hardly avoidable, then how has it still
maintained its position as a hegemonic norm in the social world?
Rather than addressing these questions, Butler turns to analyze how subversion of
gender norm will occur, which would be an "inner subversion" within the terms of
gender law, the regulation of gender normativity, borrowing on Foucoultian theory
of power and discourse and his notion of the paradoxical doubleness of power
regulation that "where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather
consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to
power" (Foucault, 93). Through the action of regulation, gender normativity is
inevitably creating a space where the resistance to regulation sustains, and possibly
grows to the point of breaking through. As Butler reiterates, "the juridical law, the
regulative law, seeks to confine, limit, or prohibit some set of acts, practices,
subjects, but in the process of articulating and elaborating that prohibition, the law
provides the discursive occasion for a resistance, a resignification, and potential
self-subversion of that law" (BTM 109). Put another way, in constituting gender
intelligibility through its regulations, driving those who do not confirm to gender
norms into the realm of unintelligible, gender law opens up the space for alternative
acts, practices and subjects.
Yet, the Foucaultian paradoxical and circuitous hypothesis of norm regulation
greatly discounts Butler's theory of performative subversion. On the one hand,
Butler agrees that gender norm relies on "a set of constitutive exclusions that are
nevertheless internal to that system as its own nonthematizable necessity", and that
gender norms necessarily anticipate both confirmation and resistance to its
regulations (BTM 39). That this logic holds then a certain level of resistance, of
subversive reaction to norms will be perfectly understandable rather than
33
problematic; that resistance is not only coexistent with and inside norm regulation
but also indicative that it is functioning. On the other hand, Butler stresses that this
"constitutive or relative outside" emerges within the regulation of gender norms as
"incoherence, disruption, a threat to its own systematicity" (39). If as Butler affirms
gender regulation always entails a coexistent undercurrent of resistance, and
dissonant gender performances with subversive potentials exist as a prerequisite for
the enforcement of gender norms, then how can one tell when these performances
will bring about real subversive consequences, rather than merely help circumscribe
the reigning domain of gender regulation as the "constitutive outside"? How is one
to distinguish between resistance that does the subversion and those innocuous ones
that are indispensible for skirting the domain of what is normal?
4. Resignification, Performative Failures and Performative Subversions
The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely .. .in the

possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the
phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. (GT, 179).
Butler proposes that gender repetition is mandatory for subject formation, so "the
problem is not whether to repeat or not, but how to repeat" (189). Butler believes if
the repetition is not done according to social expectations (gender norms), not only
can it escape being normal1zed, it can challenge the normalization process. But,
because "the unaccountable subject" in gender performances is not able to choose
how to repeat, it seems that neither the failed, parodic repetition nor the successful
and abiding ones are motivated by the subject's intention. As Moya Lloyd laments,
Butler denies directly the idea that "subjects can instrumentally perform genders in
ways of their own choosing" (137). It is not clear whether resignification should be
understood as the subject's choice or merely an incident within discursive structures.
For instance, whether the subject intends to resignify gender with a clear purpose of
subverting it, or is his/her acts purposeless while him/herself merely
reacting to the manipulations of the discursive system? Is the subject able to realize
whether he/she is resisting or consolidating gender? Can drag or gender parody,
without being resistant to gender norms, be ever possible? Does it matter whether
one drags for fun, say for Halloween, for TV or for special stage effects (e.g. in
Beijing operas), or one drags because of the transvestic desire and psychological
crossgender identification in LGBT communities? Will the conceptualization of
34
subversion through resignification need also to take into account who is
resignifying for what purposes and within what contexts?
Furthermore, if, as Butler claims, gender norms are phatansmatic and devoid of
essence, there will be no authentic gender norms for gender performance to cite.
Hence, each citing of norms can't be true or false, and there is no "truth" of gender
result; no standard of any kind according to which gender abidance and gender
subversions are to be differentiated. As it turns out, Butler radically and
miraculously equalizes all gender repetitions in a discursive utopia, whether it is
obedient or resistant. All gender performances are equally neutral, transcending
truth-value and comparability. She goes as far as to conclude that:
The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into
relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is
to straight not a copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic
repetition of "the original," [ ... ] reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody
of the idea of the natural and the original. (41)
Interestingly, parodic repetitions are justified as equal as the "original" not

through recognizing the outlawed genders as a materialize reality but through
wishfully deconstructing dominant genders as unreal. However, this equality of
gender parody (resignifications) and the heterosexual originals (norms) can only
exist in the discursive realm that Butler hypothesizes. And this utopian discursive
world presents no space for the consideration of the traumatic and risky process of
resignifying, or gender parodying in real life, and trivializes violent discriminations
against gender resistance in practice. Considered out of its theoretical framework,
because gender norms are still exercised coercively and violently, gender
subversions have to confront processes and struggles far more complicated and
violent than discursive resignification. Numerous brutal examples demonstrate
performances of gender doing (abidance) and those of gender undoing (resistant
resignification) are not often received equally; dominant gender performances are
always preferred and encouraged, while others discouraged, humiliated, punished,
and eradicated.
Therefore, the seemingly effortless "resignification", the powerful, heroic gender
"failures" that Butler has so high hope in subverting gender exist merely as
possibility. The reality is never as simple as Butler alleges that discursive gender
resignifications will subvert gender norms. In praxis, even if "categories like butch
and femme were not copies of a more originary heterosexuality", even if "the so-
35
called originals, men and women within the heterosexual frame, are similarly
constructed, performatively established" and "the origin is understood to be as
performative as the copy", it is never the case that "[t]hrough performativity,
dominant and nondominant gender norms are equalized" (UG 209). Not only will
not subversive gender performances immediately establish new gender norms to
challenge the dominancy of current ones, there remains a long way to go before
minority gender performance to gain the same tolerance, recognition and
reinforcement as majority genders would have. Thus, Butler's conclusion "drag is
subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which
hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality's claim on
naturalness and originality" stops superficially at a preliminary level of subversion
(BTM 125).The real task of subversion .remains precisely to negotiate the equal
status between "failures" and "successes" of gender performances, to transform
current social conditions so as to occasion and allow, rather than oppress and punish,
gender resignification and proliferation. Only then, resistant form of gender X (sex
X + gender X + sexuality X) is likely to be equally intelligible and respected as,
even to rival, dominant gender norm A (sex A + gender A + sexuality A) and
gender norm B (sex B +gender B +sexuality B).
Take gay marriage for instance. Following this line of logic, gay marriage would
be the resignification, proliferation of the heterosexual marriage norm, which
reveals the unnaturalness of this gender norm. Here, Butler's advocacy for drag as
subversion that "In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure
of gender itself-as well as its contingency" neatly applies to gay marriage as well
(GT 175). Butler even turns Agacinski's homophobia claim that "lesbians and gays
should not be given the right to marry because homosexuality is, by definition,
'outside institutions and fixed models' around to assert that they are 'inherently'
subversive precisely because they represent the contingent boundary circumscribing
heterosexual gender norms (UG 129)". However, by simply practicing gay ma.rriage
(gender performing) the idea of marriage norm will be displaced or subverted. The
reality shows that to be able to simply practice gay marriage, to own the freedom to
resignify, to perform marriage differently, is still a dream for many, let alone to
establish it as a rival of marriage norm. In most regions in the world and for a long
time in history, gay marriage has still been legally, religiously and morally
prohibited. There remains a long way to go before the day to come when the copy
(gay marriage) will possess an equal status as "the original" (heterosexual marriage).
36
And until social, legal, religious and cultural conditions that reinforce current
marriage norm undergo significant concrete changes, that day is not likely to arrive.
ill. Further Critique

Therefore, Butler's reading of performative acts as significatory practices that
can transform the object world reflects a queer integration, or invasion, of the
poststructuralist semiotic logic into the speech-act pragmatic approach, or as
Magnus frankly puts it, "the idea of resignifying words in order to resist given
structures hardly makes sense" (90). While speech act theory studies the realization
of discursive performances as always dependent on "felicity conditions" -social
conventions and circumstances that condition discursive practice, Butler somehow
reverses their relationship and proposes that "felicity conditions" (gender
norm/authority/law) consists in performances, and without gender performances
there will be no gender laws. Here, small wonder that Geoff Boucher would
systematically criticize Butler's misreading of Austin's speech act theory and her
"uncritical acceptance of Derrida 's deconstruction of speech act theory" ( 126).
Butler also stresses the doubleness of gender performances in which occasions
there are both gender doing and gender undoing. Her articulation of gender
performativity indicates a binary frame of conception: dominant and nondominant,
consolidation and resistance, doing and undoing. Saba Mahmood interrogates
Butler's dualistic understanding of gender norm as either being consolidated/done
or subverted/undone by gender performances; rather, she suggests in her case study
of Muslim culture that norms are "performed, inhabited, and experienced in a
variety of ways" and agency can be conceived not merely in terms of resistance
(22). Yet, the relationship that gender performances have with gender norms is
more complicated than the either resistance or consolidation: because non-dominant
gender performances do not confirm to gender conventions; they resignified gender
and through these resignifications they displaced conventional genders. Actually, as
she later admits, drag performances exemplifies both, "At best, it seems, drag is a
site of a certain ambivalence" (BTM 125). More importantly, the seemingly
resistance might even work as a consolidation of gender norms for "[t]he drag balls
themselves at times produce high femininity as a function of whiteness and deflect
homosexuality through a transgendering that reidealizes certain bourgeois forms of
heterosexual exchange" (240).
37
To some extent, gender realities that Butler has witnessed after GT, especially
through the tragic death of Venus Xtravanganza ("a Lataian/preopreative
transsexual, cross-dresser, prostitute") documented by Paris Is Burning, let her
critically reflect on her earlier view of gender parody as forms of inner subversion
(125). She doubts "whether parodying the dominant norms is enough to displace
them; indeed, whether the denaturalization of gender cannot be the very vehicle for
a reconsolidation of hegemonic norm" (125). Her theoretical methodology that
equalizes gender failures and gender norms, gender doing and undoing, and gender
parody and gender "originals" proves sadly impotent in praxis. Her queer response
to the gender trouble runs the risk of being disconnected from real struggles that
gender minorities confronts on a day-to-day base and concrete social, economical,
political dimensions of gender doing. Ultimately, as Butler confesses that her queer
strategy of subversion from within-"[t]o posit possibilities beyond the norm or,
indeed, a different future for the norm itself "-might just be a "fantasy", which is
"part of the articulation of the possible; moves us beyond what is merely actual and
present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualisable"
(UG28).
References :
Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford U.P., 1985. Reprint, 1968.
Benhabib, Seyla, "Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance", Seyla Benhabib, Judith
Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, eds., Feminism Contentions: A Philosophical
Exchange. New York: Routledge, 1995, 17-34.
Boucher, Geoff, ''The Politics of Performativity: A Critique of Judith Butler," Parrhesia
1(2006):112-141.
Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
- , Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, Chapman
& Hall, Inc., 1990. Reprint. 1999.
- , Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, trans., Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books,
1990.
Kirby, Vicki, "When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of
Matter", Margaret Sonser Breen and Warren J. Blumenfeld Burlington, eds., Butler Matters:
Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. VT: Ashgate, 2005, 41-57.
Lloyd, Moya, Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics. London; Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage, 2005.
McNay, Lois, "Subject, Psyche, and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler", Theory, Culture &
Society 2 (1999): 175-93.
38
Magnus, Kathy Dow, "The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of
Intersubjective Agency," Hypatia 2 (2006):81-103.
Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton U.P., 2005.
Mills, Catherine, "Efficacy and Vulnerability: Judith Butler on Reiteration and Resistance",
Australian Feminist Studies 165.32 (2000):265-79.
Prosser, Jay, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia U.P.,
1998.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer Performativity: Henry James's the Art of the Novel." GLQ,
1(1993):1-16.
Stone, Alison: "Towards a Genealogical Feminism: A Reading of Judith Butler's Political
Thought." Contemporary Political Theory. 4.1(2005):4-24.
Webster, Fiona. "Do Bodies Matter? Sex, Gender and Politics." Australian Feminist Studies.
17.38(2002): 191-205.
Williams, Hood and Harrison, Cealy. "Trouble with Gender." Sociological Review.
46.1(1998):73-95.
Wenjuan XIE, Ph. D. candidate in Comparative Literature at University

of Alberta. She is working on her thesis "Trans-formation, Trans-ambiguity
and Trans-performance: Reading Transgender Stories from Ming-Qing
China, 14th-19th century". She is especially interested in comparative
literature, (trans)gender studies, Chinese zhiguai tales, classical Chinese
fictions, folklore studies, and translation studies. Her publications have
appeared in World on a Maple Leaf A Treasury of Canadian Multicultural
Folktales (2011), CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.4
(2011), Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature 2.1 (2012), and
Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag (edited by Pauline
Greenhill and Diane Tye, Utah State University ).
39
Judith Butler, On Gender and Sex
JUDITH BUTLER questions the belief that certain gendered behaviors

are natural, illustrating the ways that one's learned performance of
gendered behavior (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" ("Performative"
270). 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 (see the next module on performativity). Identity itself, for Butler,
is an illusion retroactively created by our performances: "In opposition to
theatrical or phenomenological models which take the gendered self to be
prior to its acts, I will understand constituting acts not only as constituting
the identity of the actor, but as constituting that identity as a compelling
illusion, an object of belief" ("Performative" 271). That belief (in stable
identities and gender differences) is, in fact, compelled "by social sanction
and taboo" ("Performative" 271), so that our belief in "natural" behavior is
really the result of both subtle and blatant coercions. One effect of such
coercions is also the creation of that which cannot be articulated, "a
domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies" (Bodies xi) that, through
abjection by the "normal" subject helps that subject to constitute itself:
"This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the
subject's domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification
against, which—and by virtue of which—the domain of the subject will
circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life" (Bodies 3). This
repudiation is necessary for the subject to establish "an identification with
the normative phantasm of 'sex'" (Bodies 3), but, because the act is not
"natural" or "biological" in any way, Butler uses that abjected domain to
question and "rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and
intelligibility" (Bodies 3). By underlining the artificial, proscribed, and
performative nature of gender identity, Butler seeks to trouble the
definition of gender, challenging the status quo in order to fight for the
rights of marginalized identities (especially gay and lesbian identity).
Indeed, 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"
("Performative" 278). 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" ("Performative" 273). That genesis is not
corporeal but performative (see next module), so that the body becomes
its gender only "through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and
consolidated through time" ("Performative" 274). 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.
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 behaviors 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" (Bodies 2-3; my italics). 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" (Bodies 2). 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" (Bodies 10).
(See the Introduction to Gender and Sex for Thomas Laqueur's exploration
of the different ways that science has determined our understanding of
bodily sexuality since the ancient Greeks.) 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" (Bodies 5). 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" (Bodies 7). 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" (Bodies 15).
Site: https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/genderandsex/modules/
butlerperformativity.html
JUDITH BUTLER, On Performativity
JUDITH BUTLER is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis,
phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, George Herbert
Mead, etc.), structural anthropologists (Claude Levì-Strauss, Victor Turner,
Clifford Geertz, etc.) and speech-act theory (particularly the work of John
Searle) in her understanding of the "performativity" of our identities. All of
these 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" ("Performative" 270). 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"
(Bodies 13). 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 (at one step removed from what Lacan distinguishes from
reality by the term, "the Real"). 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" ("Performative" 272). 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" ("Performative" 279).
Butler therefore understands gender to be "a corporeal style, an 'act,'

as it were" ("Performative" 272). 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." ("Performative" 272)
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" ("Performative" 278). For this reason, "the transvestite's gender
is as fully real as anyone whose performance complies with social
expectations" ("Performative" 278).
Judith Butler and Performativity for Beginners
(mostly in her own words)
1. A central concept of the theory is that your gender is constructed through your own
repetitive performance of gender. This is related to the idea that discourse creates subject
positions for your self to occupy—linguistic structures construct the self. The structure or discourse of
gender for Butler, however, is bodily and nonverbal. Butler’s theory does not accept stable and
coherent gender identity. Gender is “a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous
. . .[so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative
accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe
and to perform in the mode of belief” (Gender Trouble). To say that gender is performative is to argue
that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed” (Gender Trouble).
2. There is no self-preceding or outside a gendered self. Butler writes, “ . . . if gender is

constructed, it is not necessarily constructed by an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who stands before that construction in
any spatial or temporal sense of ‘before.’ Indeed, it is unclear that there can be an ‘I’ or a “we” who
had not been submitted, subjected to gender, where gendering is, among other things, the
differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being . . . the ‘I’ neither precedes nor
follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within the matrix of gender relations
themselves” (Bodies that Matter).
3. Performativity of gender is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of

the dominant conventions of gender. Butler argues that “the act that one does, the act that one
performs is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Gender
Trouble). “Gender is an impersonation . . . becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that
nobody actually inhabits” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
4. Biological sex is also a social construction—gender subsumes sex. “According to this

view, then, the social construction of the natural presupposes the cancellation of the natural by the
social. Insofar as it relies on this construal, the sex/gender distinction founders . . . if gender is the
social significance that sex assumes within a given culture . . . then what, if anything, is left of ‘sex’
once it has assumed its social character as gender? . . . If gender consists of the social meanings that
sex assumes, then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties, but rather is replaced
by the social meanings it takes on; sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender
emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs
and displaces “sex” (Bodies that Matter). Butler also writes “I think for a woman to identify as a
woman is a culturally enforced effect. I don’t think that it’s a given that on the basis of a given
anatomy, an identification will follow. I think that ‘coherent identification’ has to be cultivated, policed,
and enforced; and that the violation of that has to be punished, usually through shame” (interview with
Liz Kotz in Artforum).
5. What is at stake in gender roles is the ideology of heterosexuality. “To claim that all
gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that ‘imitation’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project
and its gender binarism, 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. That it must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing
sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that
heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome….that its effort to
become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is constantly haunted
by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce
itself” (Bodies that Matter).
6. Performativity of Gender (drag) can be subversive. “Drag is subversive to the extent that
it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes
heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (Bodies that Matter).
7. But subversion through performance isn’t automatic or easy. Indeed, Butler complains
that people have misread her book Gender Trouble. “The bad reading goes something like this: I can
get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a
piece of clothing and change my gender, stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be
something radically other, so that what you get is something like the comodification of gender, and the
understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism. . . . [treating] gender deliberately, as
if it’s an object out there, when my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very
formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that
‘performativity’ is not radical choice and its not voluntarism . . . Performativity has to do with
repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms . . . This is not freedom,
but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
Butler also writes that “it seems to me that there is no easy way to know whether something is
subversive. Subversiveness is not something that can be gauged or calculated . . . I do think that for a
copy to be subversive of heterosexual hegemony it has to both mime and displace its conventions”
(interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).
MICHEL FOUCAULT, ON SEX AND GENDER
ACCORDING TO FOUCAULT it may well be that many of the sexual
issues of Christian culture can be found in various pagan texts, including a
fear of masturbation and of excessive sexual activity, a demand for self-
restraint, a valuation of heterosexual monogamy, and a negative
representation of homosexuality; however, what is lacking in ancient
culture is the pervasive, rigid, and enforced "codification" of sexual
behavior that is common from approximately the eighteenth century on, a
codification and enforcement that is made possible because of various
new strategies of social control: science and its principles of rational
organization, the contemporary penal system, the medicalization of the
subject's private and public acts, the interiorization of disciplinary rules.
According to Foucault, "moral conceptions in Greek and Greco-Roman
antiquity," by contrast, "were much more oriented toward practices of the
self and the question of askesis than toward codifications of conducts and
the strict definition of what is permitted and what is forbidden" (2.30).
Instead of emphasizing the moral rules enforced
by hegemonic institutions, "The accent was placed on the relationship
with the self that enabled a person to keep from being carried away by
the appetites and pleasures, to maintain a mastery and superiority over
them, to keep his senses in a state of tranquillity, to remain free from
interior bondage to the passions, and to achieve a mode of being that
could be defined by the full enjoyment of oneself, or the perfect
supremacy of oneself over oneself" (2.31). The goal in ancient Greece was
"a strategy of moderation and timing, of quantity and opportunity; and
this strategy aimed at an exact self-mastery—as its culmination and
consummation—whereby the subject would be 'stronger than himself'
even in the power that he exercised over others" (2.250). This self-
discipline "was not presented in the form of a universal law, which each
and every individual would have to obey, but rather as a principle of
stylization of conduct for those who wished to give their existence the
most graceful and accomplished form possible" (2.250-51).
For this reason, according Foucault, our very idea of sexuality does
not exist in ancient Greece, at least not as a single, monolithic entity
applicable to all. He instead refers to the rather loosely defined Greek
term, aphrodisia, and to multiple forms and aesthetic uses of pleasure.
The ancient Greeks were not concerned with a "hermeneutics of desire,"
with our tendency to want to interpret and discuss sexuality; to codify
proper sexual behavior; and to define certain acts as perverse. Instead the
key was moderation and self-control, with less concern on the specific
sexual acts one engaged in. In contrast to our contemporary
"hermeneutics of desire," Foucault terms this approach to sexuality the
"aesthetics of existence," by which he means "a way of life whose moral
value did not depend either on one's being in conformity with a code of
behavior, or on an effort of purification, but on certain formal principles in
the use of pleasures, in the way one distributed them, in the limits one
observed, in the hierarchy one respected" (2.89).
In general, and as a result of such differences, Foucault accepts that
the Greeks treated the subject of sexuality differently than people in post-
Christian eras: "One can grant the familiar proposition that the Greeks of
that epoch accepted certain sexual behaviors much more readily than the
Christians of the Middle Ages or the Europeans of the modern period; one
can also grant that laxity and misconduct in this regard provoked less
scandal back then and made one liable to less recrimination, especially as
there was no institution—whether pastoral or medical—that claimed the
right to determine what was permitted or forbidden, normal or abnormal,
in this area; one can also grant that the Greeks attributed much less
importance to all these questions than we do" (2.36).
MICHEL FOUCAULT, ON REPRESSIVE
HYPOTHESIS
ACCORDING TO COMMON WISDOM, we witness an increasing
discourse of repression that develops hand in hand with the rise of
capitalism, culminating finally in the pervasive stereotype of the Victorian
as "imperial prude" (Foucault, History of Sexuality 1.3). Foucault raises
three doubts about this repressive hypothesis: 1) "Is sexual repression
truly an established historical fact?" (1.10); 2) "Are prohibition, censorship,
and denial truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general
way, if not in every society, most certainly in our own?" (1.10); 3) "Was
there really a historical rupture between the age of repression and the
critical analysis of repression?" (1.10).
Foucault points out that the rise of repression that is generally
believed to begin in the seventeenth century leads not to silence but to "a
veritable discursive explosion" (1.17). Yes, the discussion of sexuality was
restricted in certain areas (the family, the school, etc.) but that restriction
was accompanied by "a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with
sex—specific discourses, different from one another both by their form
and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from
the eighteenth century onward" (1.18). Far from silence, we witness "an
institutional incitement to speak about [sex], and to do so more and more;
a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken
about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly
accumulated detail" (1.18). The effect of all this rational discourse about
sex was the increasing encroachment of state law into the realm of
private desire: "one had to speak of [sex] as of a thing to be not simply
condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility,
regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an
optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one
administered" (1.24).
Our continual call to speak of sexuality in the present age (on
television, in popular music, etc.) is, therefore, not significantly different
from the ways state power imposed its regulations in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries: through the continual demand for discourse.
Foucault also argues that censorship is not the primary form through
which power is exercised; rather it is the incitement to speak about one's
sexuality (to experts of various sorts) in order better to regulate it. Indeed,
silence itself can be read as caught up in a larger discourse about
sexuality:
Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the
discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the
absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a
strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said,
with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.... There is not
one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that
underlie and permeate discourses. (1.27).
Foucault gives the example of eighteenth-century secondary schools. Sex
was not supposed to be spoken of in such institutions; however, for this
very reason, one can read the preoccupation with sexuality in all aspects
of such schools: "The space for classes, the shape of the tables, the
planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories...,
the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods—all this referred, in
the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children" (1.28). And a whole
industry of experts (doctors, educators, schoolmasters, etc.) were, indeed,
consulted regularly on the matter of sex in order to regulate all the times,
spaces, and activities of the school.
Foucault does not question the fact of repression; he questions, rather
why sexuality "has been so widely discussed, and what has been said
about it" (1.11). His goal is to "define the regime of power-knowledge-
pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the
world" (1.11), what he terms the "polymorphous techniques of power"
(1.11).
International Journal of Inlerculruml Relations, Vol. 13, pp.527-55 I, 1989 0147-1767189 53.00 + .OO
Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright 8 1989 Pcr~amon Press plc
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE

FILIPINO WOMAN
DELIA D. AGUILAR
Center for Educational Innovation, University of Connecticut
ABSTRACT This critical review of the representations of Filipino women in

social science research aims to throw light on the ideological and theoretical
assumptions that hinder an accurate depiction of women’s subordinate status. It
begins with an exposition of how native lore touting women’s superiority, recast
with the appropriate rationale by colonial discourse, is etched in popular con-
sciousness and has proven resistant to alteration. Conventional wisdom, for ex-
ample, views the housewife’s pursekeeper function along with household man-
agement as evidence of matriarchy. In examining the more significant empirical
studies, in particulac those within the women-in-development category, the essay
notes a slight departure from this perspective. Confronted with the reality of
extensive poverty and women’s location at the bottom of the occupational struc-
ture, social scientists have had to acknowledge women’s inequality in the public
sphere. Turning their focus on the private sphere, researchers document the exist-
ence of a rigid gender division of labor at the heart of the family. This finding
results in the displacement of the notion of a matriarchy. But unaided by feminist
frameworks, investigators fall short of interrogating the power relations
embedded in gender assignments in the household. They fail to unmask the
sanctified role of motherhood and the attendant valorization of women as moral-
ly superior. Instead, studies concentrating on decision-making have simply substi-
tuted egalitarianism for women’s dominance and upheld the idea of gender com-
plementarity based on the philosophy of “‘separatespheres.”
In this essay, I will critically review the representations of Filipino

women in the pertinent literature and analyze the historical conditions of
their emergence. By contextualizing Filipino women and defining their
construction as a mediated social process, I hope to elucidate the terrain
on which practices of speech and action operate. Finally, I will examine
the intervention of contemporary social science in the shaping of wom-
en’s subjectivity and attempt to uncover the theoretical assumptions in-
forming current paradigms.
THE MYTHICAL VERSUS THE EMPIRICAL

If women have been the major casualties of modernization in the
Philippines, particularly in the years following martial law, very little of
Requests for reprints should be sent to: Dr. Delia D. Aguilar, Center for Educational
Innovation, University of Connecticut, U-l 12, Hall Dorm, Rm 208, 362 Fairfield Road,
Storrs, CT 06268.
527
528 D. D. Aguilar
that can be detected from the images of Filipino women projected by

social science research, the media, or popular mythology. At best, a
“balanced” assessment deriving from empirically based studies yields
conceptualization somewhat out of kilter with the actual conditions of
women’s lives. The belief in women’s high status is deeply inscribed in
popular consciousness and draws support from many sources, among
them the native legend of creation. Unlike the biblical account, the tale
asserts the simultaneous emergence of woman and man from a bamboo
cylinder split open by the pecking of a large bird. Despite the dire straits
of the majority of women, mainstream social science has been unable to
explode such myths. It has merely substituted the “ambiguous Filipina”
for the “domineering Filipina” of conventional wisdom.
This ambiguity is rendered with a panegyrical tone by journalist Guer-
rero-Napkil(l975) in the following selection:
There have been three men in her life: her Asiatic ancestor, the Spanish friar, the
American, and like Chekov’s Darling, she echoes all the men she has known in her
person. Perhaps in a few generations, the Filipina will crystallize into a clear,
pure, internally calm, symmetrical personality with definite facets in the predicr-
able planes. Perhaps in time, the different strains which now war within her in
mongrel contradictions will have been assimilated into a thoroughbred homoge-
neity. But when that happens, the Filipino woman will have lost the infinite
unexpectedness, the abrupt contrariness, the plural predictability which now
makes her both so womanly and so Filipino. (pp. 19,25)
This declaration of worth, while understandable as an attempt to assert

an individuality or uniqueness denied to colonials, subsists on a meta-
physical plane. It avoids placing the Filipina in a concrete context where
some estimation of her actual status can be made.
In contrast, sociologist Castillo (1976) employs a more down-to-earth
appraisal of women’s position through a survey of existing literature. She
begins with a summary of the varied representations of women from
which appears
a woman of contradictory assets and facets-a woman who represents at least a
double vision. She is said to be exalted by history and tradition to a pedestal and
yet she is low in the pecking order. There are arguments as to whether she still
fashions herself as . . . “coy, retiring, and subservient. . . . ” On the other hand,
she is supposed to have power and influence unofficially and in private. (p. 12)
Then turning to the empirical level where she demarcates ten aspects of
women’s lives, Castillo arrives at a “comprehensive data profile” that
proves e ually perplexing:
The Filipino woman seems to have her heart set at being “feminine.” What are the
components of feminismo? The studies and images which have been reviewed
lead us to a few guesses as to what some of these components might be. The
Filipino woman wants to get married; to have children (childlessness or even a
one-child marriage is not preferred); to be subordinate yet equal; to be seductive
The Social Construction of the Filipino Woman S29
without being seduced; to be beautiful; to be educated, to be a companion to her

husband; and a mother to her children. (p. 2.50,underscoring hers)
Why this bewildering welter of images, this fanciful quality suffusing

these descriptions when the social reality leaves slight room for
misinterpretation?
It could be that the high regard for women, in most instances no more
than an elaborate conceit, is an ideological vestige of their relatively
privileged position prior to Spanish colonial penetration. Among wom-
en’s rights and privileges effectively destroyed by Spanish Civil Law were
the right to divorce, to have children regardless of marital status, property
rights, freedom to contract business arrangements independently of the
husband, retention of maiden name, and a central role in religious prac-
tices.’ Yet so great is the predilection for seeing only superior ways in the
conqueror races (and, conversely, inferiority in the conquered) that the
mutilation of historical evidence proceeds with unusual facility. Witness
the following passage written in 1905 by James LeRoy, one of the first
observers of the Philippine scene after the conquest by the United States:
It is perfectly safe to say that in no other part of the Orient have women relatively
so much freedom or do they play so large a part in the control of the family or in
social or even industrial affairs. It is a common remark that Filipino women, both
the privileged and of the lower classes, are possessed of more character and often,
too, of more enterprise, than the men. There seems every reason for ascribing this
relative improvement in the position of women in the Philippines as compared
with surrounding countries in the Orient to the influence of the Christian religion
and the position which they have assumed under the teaching of the Church and
the directorship of the friars. (pp. 27-28)
Curiously enough, any reference to Filipino women’s privileges preceding

the intrusion of Christianity has been elided. On the contrary, by stating
that their position has improved, any suspicion that women may have
been better off in the past has been deftly cleared away. This view (Le-
Roy’s work to date retains standing as an authoritative source) blazed the
trail for many an imperial apologia in the decades to come. It functions
effectively in inculcating in Filipinos the instinct for self-denigration in-
dispensable to the status quoe2
‘The single most important source of information about beliefs and practices surrounding
women during this period is Infante (1975). Other useful readings are Alzona (1934) and
Mendoza-Guazon (1951).
Vulnerable to the charge of class reductionism, a more recent essay (Mananzan, i983)
offers substantial support for the detrimental effects of colonization. This support comes in
the form of historical documents written in Spanish.
2For an elucidation of how “Occidental” intellectuals create and maintain representations or
images of the periphery vital to Western hegemony, see Edward W. Said (1978). For an
illumination of the ways in which power in general is manifested through culture and
ideology, see Rabinow (1984).
530 D. D. Aguilar
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE COLONIAL MIND
Ensnared within the master’s field of vision, the native (usually male,
the preferred object of colonizing efforts) exposes his self-concept to
inevitable damage. Having accepted the former’s rendition of history, he
develops an awkward propensity for self-contradiction. Within these
boundaries it is not unusual to find good colonials affirming the fact that
in pre-Spanish times women had civil and political rights parallel to men.
In the same breath they concede priority to the colonizer’s exclusivist
perspective. If such distortions exemplified by LeRoy can occur vis-a-vis
Spain, a universally hated colonial power, imagine how the contrast be-
tween Spanish and U.S. colonial policy which advocated women’s suf-
frage, established a system of public education, and granted equal formal
access to women and men, could easily turn the carefully nurtured myth
of its benevolence into fact!
In a widely prescribed social science reader written by Filipinos (Maca-
raig, Espiritu, & Bernardino, 1954; the main writer, Serafin Macaraig,
wrote the first Philippine sociology textbook in 1938), the authors at-
tribute “matriarchal tendencies” in the family to the power held by wom-
en before the Spanish conquest. Only a page earlier, they had declared the
following: “The Filipino family has been influenced by both Oriental and
Occidental traits. The predominating influence of the man over the wom-
an is characteristically Oriental, while the growing acceptance today of
the equality of man and woman is Occidental” (p. 152). Unfortunately,
assertions as glaringly fallacious as these constitute a prototype of the
schizoid colonial mind whose subaltern conditioning is finally capped
with the illusion of freedom under U.S. tutelage.
That the more privileged Filipinos would be the most susceptible to this
propaganda should not be surprising. When, under U.S. rule, women’s
limited career roles of teacher, nun, or spinster (the last two the most
prized because of the premium Catholicism conferred on virginity) were
expanded to include new professional opportunities, lavish praises, root-
ed in ignorance, were heaped upon the conquerors. In The Development
and Progress of the Filipino Woman written in 195 1, Maria Paz Mendo-
za-Guazon, the first Filipina medical doctor, exalted this turn of events:
“There has never been in the history of the world such a noble and
magnanimous program of government as that proclaimed by President
McKinley on January 30, 1898” (p. 49). Accepting without question the
latter’s declaration that the Philippine Commission bestowed only “the
richest blessings of a liberating rather than a conquering nation” (p. 49),
Mendoza-Guazon and others of her class only served to confound an
already inaccurate depiction of how women’s status had evolved.
Writing in 1917 another woman of the elite, Pura Villanueva de Kalaw,
admitted the possibility that “the accounts of history do not do full
justice to . . . the Filipino,” especially “the Filipino woman who, in the
The Social Construction of the Filipino Woman 531
family and the home, has succeeded in preserving her own personality”
(p. 32). Not without a touch of absurdity, Villanueva de Kalaw appraises
as salutary the outcome of Spanish women’s racist shunning of “inter-
course with the native woman.” This, coupled with the Catholic edict
decreeing marriage indissoluble, were measures that for her highlighted,
preserved, and secured women’s status within the family. Her paean to
the United States is astonishing: “The great land of feminism has brought
us, with her flag, her principles of democracy and equality which places
woman on a level with men, not only as regards her rights, but also as
regards her duties towards the nation” (pp. 35-36). This opinion is tem-
pered only with her fear that the encroachment of Western individualism
into Philippine life with “the introduction of the Saxon educational influ-
ence will result in serious peril to the beautiful cohesion of the Filipino
family.”
TWO CONTRASTING VIEWS

Interestingly enough, the only piece in the early colonial period of U.S.
colonialism that has taken a critical look at imperialism and class differ-
ences in women’s position within a subject nation is that by U.S. journal-
ist Agnes Smedley published in a progressive journal in India in 193 1. In
it she calls attention precisely to the world view that, like the foregoing,
blindly duplicated representations of women and of Filipinos in general
that had been fabricated to rationalize and justify territorial imperatives.
If U.S. domination indicated progress over Spanish feudalism, she saw its
evidence in “a type of middle- and upper-class woman that aspires above
all else to be small copies of American middle- and upper-class women”
(Smedley, 1931, p. 456). She refers to the intellectual bondage of this
group as “so complete that it is unconscious.” While recognizing the
advantages of a universal education for such women (she observes that 30
have law degrees, but none practice), she is keenly sensitive to the disas-
trous result of the use of English as the official medium of instruction:
“spiritlessness, an utter lack of originality or of any creative or critical
thinking ability” (p. 458). Her obvious affinity with worker and peasant
women emerges in her sympathetic description of their situation. She
underlines the impact of bad working conditions upon workers in for-
eign-owned factories geared for export production and the miserly pay of
domestic piecework. On the farm, peasant women-a few of whom were
union organizers-share work equally with men (“or perhaps more than
equally”), the strenuousness of field labor leavened by “lovely peasant
songs of labor” (p. 460).
To appreciate the perspicacity of Agnes Smedley’s barely four-page
essay, compare and contrast its substance with scattered comments on
women by U.S. anthropologist Felix Keesing (1937) in a book published
within the same decade. On several key points, the two agree: as manag-
532 D. D. Aguilar
ers of the home, a relic of an earlier division of labor, women take charge
of the household income. From this responsibility arises a penchant for
business that, according to Keesing, deploys women as small traders
offering competition to about 10,000 Chinese establishments in Manila
and the provinces. Observing that “to their lot fell most of the routine of
economic activity other than the heaviest labor (p. 27), he notes that
within a family system marked by cooperation, loyalty, and dutifulness to
elders, women maintain a highly respected position. The power of this
familial ideology in which the image of Filipino women is etched will
register its impact upon the minds of Filipinos for the next half-century.
Where Smedley and Keesing part ways is in their perception of the
influence of the Western metropolis. While the former indicts the Catho-
lic church of the Spanish regime as the “chief pillar of subjection” (Smed-
ley, p. 458), the latter merely skims the surface when he writes: “The
romantic attitude of the Latin towards those of the female sex has affect-
ed the status of women and customs of courtship and marriage” (Keesing,
p. 37). Applying the same mind-set to the U.S. era, Keesing takes the
movement for women’s right to vote at face value, regarding it as “a
significant feature of that period” (p. 98). In contrast, Smedley dispar-
ages the Federation of Women’s Clubs which acted as a vanguard for the
suffrage movement. For her the Federation was a pale imitation of its
U.S. counterpart that did “nothing whatever that would arouse the least
opposition or criticism from the most orthodox and respectable women
of their class in America or in the Philippines” (p. 458).3
To make yet another comparison and to see the manner in which the
Filipino elite not merely yielded to but surpassed the imperialist discourse
of conventional observers, recall Keesing’s matter-of-fact assertion of the
significance of suffrage and set that against Villaneuva de Kalaw’s ver-
sion: “Filipino women, finally, are each day taking their places in the
Government offices, the commercial establishments, the schools, and in
all the fields of activity where an altar is erected to progress and work” (p.
36). One might justifiably label such utterances as symptoms of obsequi-
ousness, of thorough indoctrination, or of plain blindness to everything
but the interest of class.
AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
Without rejecting any or all of the above, perhaps another way of

looking at the matter might be more helpful, that offered by Pierre
JOthers in more recent times have reevaluated the women’s suffrage movement that culmi-
nated in the right to vote in 1973 as a diversionary tactic employed by U.S. authorities in the
Philippines to weaken the more threatening movement for independence (Santos-Maranan,
1984).
Macherey as he expounds on the Althusserian concept of the ideological

state apparatus (Mercer & Radford, 1977). Bourgeois ideology, according
to him, must be seen as a well-constructed, coherent totality from which
there is no escape once entered into because of its veneer of consolida-
tion. This apparently coherent system of beliefs is actually ridden with
contradictions. But these contradictions are plastered over by all kinds of
mechanisms for the precise purpose of creating a semblance of consisten-
cy. Such a view at once enables us to interpret and evaluate the phenome-
non of the “colonial mentality,” the manifestations of which we have seen
in a sampling of Filipino intellectuals. Our aim is to examine and unmask
the ideological apparatuses (for example, Philippine experience as
transcribed by LeRoy and Keesing) through which the compliance of
Filipinos is maintained. Furthermore, it is when outsiders to the particu-
lar ideology-Agnes Smedley, in this case- peel off the imaginary to
reveal the actual that we begin to decipher the myth. Smedley states
outright that her perception of Filipino women is colored by the striking
contrast provided by revolutionary women in China, her point of depar-
ture on her Philippine visit. Extending the tools of class analysis, she
draws out the potential power of worker and peasant women in their very
exclusion from the main ideological citadels and in their unity as exploit-
ed groups.
The impossibility of neatly disentangling conceptualizations of Filipi-
no womanhood from the ideologies of colonial domination should now
become readily apparent. From this it follows that to challenge assump-
tions about Filipino women and reconstruct their history necessitates
nothing less than the simultaneous defiance and destruction of imperial
authority. Unless and until this happens and unless we become alert to
half-truths and gaps glossed over by ideology, cultural constructs will
continue to obfuscate the experience of Filipino women. These imposed
constructs will continue to perpetuate a curious patchwork of impres-
sions that meld the illusion of female preeminence with the reality of
submission.
DECONSTRUCTING POPULAR MYTHS
Easily the most widely accepted motif is that of woman as “queen of

the home.” Synonymous with the status denoted by the “power behind
the throne,” it has its antecedents in pre-Spanish times,4 but the belief
today is linked with the pursekeeper service performed by the wife. Seen
as a logical extension of this function is the business acumen that women
are expected to automatically possess. In an essay which attempts to
“Spanish chronicler Father Pedro Chirino, writing about the Philippines at the beginning of
the 17th century, noted that the role for the Filipino wife in Manila, Marinduque, and
Panay was to be “queen of the home” (Mendoza-Guazon, 1951, pp. 12, 32).
534 D. D. Aguilar
reclaim women’s past by reconstructing the works of early chroniclers,

the authors conclude that the Filipina’s entrepreneurial ability was even
then her most salient feature (Rausa-Gomez & Thbangui, 1978). A study
investigating the role of women managers in family-owned businesses
begins this way: “Proverbially, the person who holds the purse strings
rules the house. In the Philippines, it is the woman who does so and who
therefore runs the home as in matriarchal societies” (Alvarez & Alvarez,
1973, p. 547). Prefaced by such a statement, the conclusion cannot be
altogether surprising: “The Filipina does not need to be liberated because
in fact, she already dominates the home and family businesses as well” (p.
560). Moreover, the public visibility of a few individual women of influ-
ence has helped preserve the idea of dominance, exaggerating its dimen-
sions to guarantee the Filipino woman’s superiority over other Asian
women and even over “her Western counterparts.”
With his wife exercising “disproportionate power,” what is a husband
to do to buttress his endangered manliness but to find succor in the arms
of a mistress, a querida (Shahani, 1975)? Although this facile rationale
enunciated by a woman ambassador has gathered few adherents, the
evocations of an innate female morality is a common response to the
sexual double standard. Standing as her husband’s moral guardian lest he
savor more than occasional peccadillos, the wife-her devoutness tested
by unflagging church attendance-now additionally becomes anointed as
the voice of social conscience. The essentialist argument investing women
with a maternal instinct and its derivative moral authority can hardly be
modulated: “The Filipino woman will always play her part either at home
or in the legislature as a true MOTHER [author’s capitalization] because
she has at heart the progress and advancement of her country, and the
protection of our womanhood and childhood” (Mendoza-Guazon, 193 1,
p, 16). Holding the “psychological key to the economic development
problems that beset our country,” women not only have a “sobering
influence in family life” but are also exhorted to curb the male inclination
for overindulgence in politics and to direct children toward developing a
taste for local products (Reyes, 1965).
That these ideas persist in spite of the undeniably distressed situation
of ordinary women, most of its symptoms visible to the human eye, must
attest to some need to sustain these collective sentiments. Whatever the
case, even social scientists seeking “objectivity” seem so eager to corrobo-
rate women’s presumed high status that even glaring disparities in the law
fall short of bringing to light women’s actual condition. A recognized
authority on women and legal rights, Flerida Ruth P. Romero (1979,
1981), states that the field of domestic relations is the one area in law
where major revisions are required to offset gender inequality.5 One
sA revised family code that took effect in July 1988 has removed some of the more blatant
gender biases in family law.
might assume that information like this would quickly banish mispercep-
tions about the power and influence of women. Yet U.S. anthropologist
Robert Fox (1963), studying Filipino women and men, the family and
kinship relations, can discuss the law and its applications to the family
(for instance, that legal separation is granted differentially, requiring
adultery of the wife and concubinage of the husband) and still fail to
interrogate women’s so-called high social position.
The findings of Fox and that of Filipino social investigators in the
sixties and early seventies are encapsulated in the paragraph below. Its
main arguments are not far removed from common lore as sketched
earlier:
The continuous support given to a wife by her family and kin is one of the reasons
for the strong position of women in Filipino society. She is the central figure in
the family, wife, mother, treasurer and disburser of funds. In accordance with the
traditional Filipino custom, now a part of the Civil Code, the property which a
woman brings to marriage is her own and she may do as she likes over its
disposition. Enjoying an equal status with her husband, she nevertheless gives
him the illusion that he is lord and master of his household. Although she accepts
a form of double morality, the males being allowed freedom denied the female
members of her famiiy, her informal influence in society often affects the eco-
nomic and political affairs of the country. (Nelson, 1968, p. 100)
Here we note that pronouncements of women’s superiority have been

pared down to the more prudent designation of the wife as the “central
figure in the family.” Conceptions of “dominance” have been replaced
with the comparatively concessionary associations of “strong position,”
“equal status,” and “informal influence.”
TOWARD A REVALLJATION OF THE CONSENSUS
Although it was not until the UN declaration of International Women’s

Year in 1975 that studies specifically centering on women were undertak-
en, the findings of the six?ies and seventies took off from the perspective
just mentioned. These received notions were subjected to close scrutiny
through empirical investigation. In due course, particularly with the fo-
cus on women and development, attention was drawn to the reality of
mass poverty, and the image of the dominant Filipino woman scoffing at
the implication that she might need liberation began to blur. In short,
flights of fancy which the subject of women customarily evokes had
necessarily to be curtailed in the confrontation with unmitigated econom-
ic hardship.
First to be cast out was the notion that women are influential in the
public sphere, a belief found to be falsely predicated on the few women
leaders whose presence in government and education receive wide publici-
536 D. D. Aguilar
ty. Complacency resting on the supposed preponderance of women in the

professions quickly dissipated with new data. Chief of these is the infor-
mation that the largest concentrations are in teaching and nursing, both
low-paying occupations, and that those who combine motherhood and
career comprise less than 3% of all married women. By the same token,
social scientists disclosed that even upper-class women who achieve entry
into the public sphere do so through the women’s auxiliaries of their
husbands’ organizations. Consequently, their ability to make decisions is
in large measure circumscribed (Montiel & Hollnsteiner, 1978). In fact,
there is no space within the public sphere-not national or local govern-
ment, nor business or the professions, not even in the field of education
where woman predominate-where women exert decision-making power
(Gonzalez & Hollnsteiner, 1976). It was made distinctly clear that women
have higher unemployment and underemployment rates, are placed in
manual and menial jobs, and receive consistently 10~~. cash earnings
relative to men in the same industry and occupational group (Castillo,
1976). In effect, “to adequately assess and measure women’s participation
in the development process” (Eviota, 1978, p. l), an objective formulated
under the aegis of USAID, researchers were compelled to surrender prior
inventions to make way for a redefinition of the Filipina more in line with
the new data collected.
Given these empirical studies and their scientific thrust, why the con-
tinuing mystification of women? Why the image of “the ambiguous Fili-
pina”? A theory of sexual asymmetry, embryonic though it may be, has
begun to inform inquiries into women’s status in the public domain. But
elsewhere -in the home to be exact, where the ideological fog permeating
family relations is particularly dense-the hallowed theme of woman as
mother and wife has so far eluded interrogation.
MAPPING THE DOMESTIC TERRITORY
Cognizant of the instances of public inequality and the juridical subor-

dination of women in the world of work as well as in the private one of
the home, social researchers shifted the ground to the domestic realm.
Their intention was to determine the patterns of behavior obtaining with-
in the convention of family life. These attempts focused on gender roles
and expectations, with all studies substantiating the idealized image of
the family along with the accepted notions of femininity and masculinity.
One case deserves prior citation. Querying their informants about the
ideal wife and husband in a study on attitudes toward family planning,
Lynch and Makil(1968) received responses that could not have been more
stereotypical. The ideal husband is perceived as a good provider and
morally good (i.e., faithful to his wife), while the ideal wife is a good
household manager, industrious, and free of vice. This model of a rigidly
defined sexual division of labor is borne out by other researchers who

proceeded to investigate the whole repertoire of gender-differentiated be-
havior in the household. (1110, 1977; Gonzalez, 1977, Porio, Lynch, &
Hollnsteiner, 1981; Mendez & Jocano, 1974). Backed by legal mandate
declaring the husband “responsible for the support of his wife and the
rest of the family” and the wife as charged with “the affairs of the
household” (Romero, 1979, p. 4), there is practically no deviation from
this pattern; that is, the spheres of activity within the home are sharply
demarcated. This expectation overruns class division, for even women of
the upper class risk social censure by not fulfilling, no doubt in different
ways, the “desirable minimum home production time” (1110,1978, p. 15).
Finding housekeeping the monopoly of women in her study of the “life
concerns” of women, men, and unmarried daughters, Jeanne F. 1110
(1977) imputes the base of support of this practice to the “implicit logic
. . . heavily founded on a stronger-weaker sex distinction” (p. 59). Fe-
males performed the tasks of dishwashing, home yard cleaning, washing
and ironing clothes, child care, and marketing; males took charge of
home repair, fetching water, and gathering firewood.
Anna Miren B. Gonzalez (Gonzales & Hollnsteiner, 1976), interviewing
poor women from urban, semi-urban, and rural communities, noted how
securely welded women were to duties linked with home management and
family life, and men with family life and occupation. Where there was a
crossover of tasks, perceptions refused alteration: men saw themselves
mainly in an economic role despite their participation in housework, and
women with remunerative work did not see themselves as family provid-
ers. For Gonzalez there is no denying the tenacity of the woman-for-the-
home dictum. This is a conclusion totally in accord with that of 1110
(1977), who further discovered that women concur with men regarding
household obligations typically envisaged for women to carry out almost
exclusively.
The biological logic underpinning the household division of labor as
inferred by 1110is given clear, unmistakable expression by Mendez and
Jocano (1974) in their study of urban and rural families. The following
excerpt from their book describes gender assignment in the latter group:
The physical aspects, such as choice of where to live, the building of the house as
well as the planning of improvement, are more the husband’s task. These imply
constructing; building; hauling wood, bamboo, and other heavy materials. Obvi-
ously, the heavier tasks are reserved for men. Child rearing and household man-
agement (including use of appliances) are the wife’s domain. These are related to
biology. Since child bearing has been assigned to her by nature, child rearing
necessarily follows, for this involves nurturance. The mother has to stay with the
child most of the time. The running of a household consequently became allied to
child rearing. For this reason, the Baras [the town under study] husband considers
going to market a woman’s task since it is related to running the household. No
Baras husband does the marketing according to our survey.
538 D. D. Aguilar
Here it is difficult to extricate the authors’ point of view from that of

their subjects. Since nowhere in the book can be discerned the slightest
questioning of this essentialist gender ideology, it is tempting to equate
the representation of sexually differentiated tasks as biologically based
-and therefore natural and fixed-as both the respondents’ and
the authors’. At the very least, one can safely assume a congruence of
opinion.
This presumption is relatively easy to make in view of the stance taken
by other researchers on the subject. 1110(1977), for example, repeatedly
cautions against development projects involving women that are not con-
tingent on the preservation of marital harmony. Certainly one might
quite simply attribute this recommendation to an overriding concern for
efficacious programs, which is precisely how she puts it. Nevertheless, it
is impossible to imagine this degree of assurance if there were any serious
doubts about the normality or naturalness of gender arrangements upon
which domestic peace is built. In a review of studies exploring women’s
response to expanded assignments with the assumption of extradomestic
paid work, Castillo and Guerrero (1969) endorse multiple roles for wom-
en without hesitation. They authenticate through studies of working
women the adroit juggling of paid and unpaid work that women are able
to accomplish (“she even manages to arrange his clothes, sew missing
buttons and darn socks,” p. 22). Like 1110’sacquiescence to the ideal of
familial tranquility to which wives in her study felt pledged, this prescrip-
tion is conceivable only because the family unit and the roles of mother
and wife with their concomitant obligations are received, if not as divine
decree, as naturally given. This being the case, the authors can launch
into a whimsical projection of the possibilities awaiting the Filipino wom-
an once she takes a job:
In so far as she makes a choice and is able to perform the dual or triple role she
has chosen for herself, she will remain a creatively versatile person maximizing
her self-fulfillment, her contribution to the family, the community, and society in
general.
They warn of the dangers of ambivalence, or of refusing the broadened

definition of femininity:
But when she gives up one role at the expense of another, but at the same time
“pines and whines” for what might have been or could be, then she becomes a
powder keg of trouble-always rejecting what she is and never satisfied with what
she has. (p. 24)
Although perhaps not intending to disparage their own gender, the re-
searchers’ enervating assessment of female capabilities comes through
clearly. Their view posits, at minimum, the acceptance of a female es-
sence-in this specific instance, a capriciousness requiring the ballast

afforded by masculine rationality-that carries the ratification of society
as a whole. Observe the deprecation of female enterprise implicit in
conventional jokes about “old maids,” an epithet that includes any wom-
an who remains single at the ripe age of 25 (Castillo, 1976, p. 45).
Here is Castillo once again, this time summing up her study examining
attitudes of high school students toward the wife who engages in paid
employment :
Very few respondents considered the working wife completely unacceptable al-
though there were sex differences observed. . . . The boys tended to be more
restrictive than the girls. On the other hand, the girls reported a high degree of
willingness to defer to husband’s wishes. (Castillo, 1976, p. 193)
Concerning Guerrero’s investigation of husband-wife roles in a college

community, she states: “Although husbands’ definition of the wife’s
‘proper’ role is mostly that of a wife and mother, the majority of them
nevertheless approve of their wives’ working” (p. 194).
Susceptible to configurational reading, these same two studies produce
an interpretation somewhat at variance with Castillo’s in the hands of
Porio, Lynch, and Hollnsteiner (1981). The three draw the straight-
forward conclusion that the wife’s outside occupation constitutes a threat
to the husband’s capacity as a wage earner and emphasizes as actual, not
potential, the resultant tension between wives and husbands. Manifestly
more lucid, perhaps in part owing to the pragmatic mandate of their
institutional affiliation,6 these researchers urge the juxtaposition of tradi-
tional attitudes with the exigencies of economic survival to punctuate the
need for change. Their vision for the future is optimistic. They predicted
that after International Women’s Year growing numbers of women would
voice a preference to join the labor force and would do so (note the
wistfulness) “ideally but not necessarily with the husband’s approval” (p.
52).
THE WOMAN AS HOUSEHOLD WORKER
Without a doubt, the social definition of the Filipino woman as house-

hold worker-imaginative allusions to her “queenly” station notwith-
standing-is difficult for the public and for social scientists alike to relin-
quish. This conception is not entirely incorrect. It is based on the fact
6The Institute of Philippine Studies, according to its blurb, “combines a theoretical orienta-
tion, drawn usually from the social sciences, and a commitment to results that aim at an
improvement in the life quality of the masses.” Porio, Lynch & Hollnsteiner each had, at
one time or another, held positions of responsibility at the Institute.
540 D. D. Aguilur
that 70% of Filipino wives 15 years and older perceive themselves as

housekeepers whose primary occupation transpires in the home, with
only one-fourth regarding their paid work as their main activity. The
average wife spends eight or more hours a day over 29 days each month
performing housekeeping duties (Castillo, 1976, p. 244). Castillo (1976,
p. 210) cites the 1973 National Demographic Survey which places at 2%
the number of households with hired help. The fiction enunciating the
graceful ease with which Filipino women combine paid work and mother-
hood, one that relies on the availability of domestics, is easily exposed by
questioning employed mothers of young children about how familial
responsibilities conflict with career opportunities.
Both 1110’sstudy of households in the Bicol region and Gonzalez’
interviews with poor families yield estimates verifying the figures above.
1110 (1977, p. 15) found that more than one-third of mothers’ home
production time, averaging 46 hours a week, is expended in child care and
over one-fourth in food preparation. Gonzalez’ investigation arrived at a
daily average of 8.7 hours of household labor, with the following regional
variations: rural, 11.1 hours, semi-urban, 6.3 hours, and urban, 8.8
hours (Gonzalez & Hollnsteiner, 1976, p. 99). Refining this point further,
Miralao (1980) applied time-use methodology for a more accurate assess-
ment of gender-based participation in the domestic and public spheres.
She uncovered conspicuously inequitable work shares within households,
with husbands contributing a mere third of their wives’ time, equivalent
time occurring only in traditionally structured marriages where husbands’
market work matched wives’ domestic labor. Moreover, it is not simply
the expenditure of invisible labor that domestic service entails. It also
exacts, besides this unremitting labor of love, a degree of self-abnegation
that only those prepared by training for this role can deliver. Ancheta
(1982) cites a survey of three farming barangays (villages) in Batangas in
which the researchers grouped women’s daily activities under three head-
ings: home production, market production, and personal consumption.
A glance at the table representing day-to-day chores quickly suggests that
in a 4 a.m.-8 p.m. routine, the only moments for “personal consump-
tion” occur between 1 and 2 p.m. and after eight at night, with the
activity involved a purely recuperative one - rest and sleep.
WHY THE PERSISTENCE OF MYTHS?
If current social science literature retains few illusions about women’s

status in the public domain and, beyond this, has quantified their per-
formance of the daily housechores, by what sleight of hand is the notion
of their “high position in the family” sustained? To be sure, the concept
of “status” and its loose usage has retarded the comprehension of wom-
en’s actual standing vis-&is men within the Philippine socioeconomic

and political structure. When Montiel and Hollnsteiner (1978, pp. 4-6)
arrived at an operational definition that narrowed the meaning of status
to the degree of participation in both domestic and public activities and
the benefit derived therefrom, an important guidepost was erected which
set the terms for future inquiry.
Already referred to earlier, a practice that is still a subject of disputa-
tion is the wife’s function as family treasurer. The view that she who holds
the purse rules the roost, patently anchored in a species of vulgar materi-
alism, locates woman’s power in what is interpreted as her key economic
role within the family. Its detractors accept the basic postulate but argue
that, given the destitution suffered by most households, management of
scant resources cannot constitute a base of power (Montiel & Holln-
Steiner, 1978, p. 15; Gonzalez & Hollnsteiner, 1976, p. 100).
But the importance of plenitude or scarcity is disregarded or de-em-
phasized by those who would transmute the mundane, tedious, and bur-
densome duty of housekeeping into that of “household management”
and who celebrate as the wife’s “financial prerogative” the painful charge
in poverty-stricken families of trying to make ends meet. Rutten (1982),
writing about women workers of a sugarcane hacienda on the island of
Negros, takes her cue from Robert Fox and Filipino anthropologist F.
Landa Jocano in equating support from family and the female network
in the community with wives’ “dominant position” (p. 53). Overcast with
vaguely coherent constructions of the Filipino woman like the ones al-
ready discussed, her perception of the women she observes for eight
months is unaided by her acquaintance with feminist frameworks, includ-
ing the Marxist feminist paradigm. She enters the world of these women
adopting the assumptions of preceding studies. Enamored of the concep-
tion of wives as managers, she has thereby occluded the subsistence level
that is the object of their management. While the wife’s treasurer role is
still habitually summoned as the crux of women’s supposed family-based
power in everyday discourse and in works like Rutten’s, it is however
gradually becoming contentious territory among social researchers.
THE TERRAIN OF POWER IN THE FAMILY
The terrain on which “experts” have finally converged, despite

divergent starting points, is family decision making. The significance of
this focus cannot be overplayed. We should point out how empirical
studies are mainly responsible for validating “equality” in decision mak-
ing within the household, and how current formulations surrounding the
Filipino woman’s “ambiguous” status ultimately invoke such studies. It is
interesting to observe that in approaching this facet of family relations,
542 D. D. Aguilar
social scientists have sought to overturn adversarial notions: that the

Filipino family is patriarchal or patricentric, matriarchal or matricentric,
authoritarian, traditional, et cetera. On occasion, they employ incongru-
ent classifications simultaneously. Porio, Lynch, and Hollnsteiner (1981)
assert that their own cross-class study which disclosed an egalitarian
mode in six decision-making areas defied expectations that a peasant-
based society like the Philippines would be authoritarian. Their results
indicated that both parents make decisions regarding the discipline of
children, choice of child’s school, and family investments. The child
decides on the choice of school and friends; the final area, household
budgeting, is the wife’s exclusive territory. This pattern is replicated by
1110’s(1977) subjects for whom family planning, recreation, and chil-
dren’s participation in extra-family activities are matters for wife and
husband to decide equally. Licuanan and Gonzalez’ (1976) explorations
among the lower classes produced the same results: women exercise influ-
ence over household chores, child care, discipline of female children, and
family finances; men’s spheres of influence include his livelihood and the
discipline of male children. For these investigators, the data produced
conclusions that disputed glib assertions of women’s supremacy in the
domestic domain. Wives do not have a monopoly of power; they share it
equally with their husbands.
In Mendez and Jocano’s work (1974), husband and wife emerge as
“coequal,” their roles situationally defined as dominant or docile depend-
ing on the context which determines the “specificity or generality of role
performance” (p. 272). To illustrate, they point out that the father might
be authoritarian in relation to the discipline of children, but the mother
can just as easily be construed in the same manner where household
chores and money are entailed. They contend that the pattern of authori-
ty is neither patriarchal or matriarchal but egalitarian. But they muddy
their proposition by declaring, on the one hand, that women have a “high
position in the family” and, on the other, that the husband represents the
authority who “is not to be bothered . . . with minor problems which are
the woman’s job” (pp. 47,270). Overall, they agree with the appraisal that
the prevailing standard in family decision making is joint or shared.
Now let us take a look at precisely how egalitarianism or the shared
dispensation of authority is practiced in the Filipino family:
Joint decision-making is said to involve the initiation of the problem or issue by

either husband, e.g., family business, or wife, e.g., children’s discipline, for the
two of them to act together. Discussion of possible actions then ensue. After
evaluation of the pros and cons of the alternative course of action, some degree of
consensus is reached. However, where conflict occurs, the husband’s opinion is
invariably followed. The wife, however, can take recourse to any of the following
to reverse the decision: arguing with her husband, keeping her peace, sulking,
nagging, or disregarding her spouse. Nevertheless, except for the few times when
the couple is at loggerheads, the final decision can still be viewed as the result of
shared responsibility and authority (1110, 1977, p. 73).
The feebleness of such logic, though certainly apparent, is probably of

less consequence than the writer’s determination to press for the desired
conclusion that the last sentence betrays. Without having to evoke femi-
nist rebuttals of the research model - family studies founded on the “per-
sonal resource theory” in the United States in the fifties and sixties,
specifically that of Blood and Wolfe (1960)‘- it seems perfectly clear that
egalitarianism is merely a tag that has been foisted upon a set of relations
it really does not fit. The investigators’ own confusion is often projected
onto the object of their study. When Mendez and Jocano explain wives’
deference to their husbands as intended “always to give the illusion, if not
the reality, of male dominance,” one is tempted to ask: is male dominance
an illusion or is it a reality? After granting that “husbands can and do
impose their will at times,” the writers proffer the gift of gender parity
tendered by a masculine sense of fair play: “but they also recognize the
wife’s ability to make sound decisions in the interest of the family” (Men-
dez & Jocano, 1974, p. 210).
GENDER EQUALITY VIA “SEPARATE SPHERES”
Recalling Montiel and Hollnsteiner’s delimitation of the concept of

status, it should be evident that the work of social scientists in the past
two decades has modified earlier colonial constructions of the Filipino
woman. More specifically, it has exploded the myth of women’s superior-
ity or high status in the public domain. But the subscription to the
“separate spheres” perspective has ruled out a synoptic view, one that
would account for all the varied aspects of women’s existence. And
there’s the rub: for the Filipina becomes “ambiguous” only insofar as the
two spheres of society, the public and private, are disconnected in the
abstraction of scientists’ minds. Unlike the traditional concept of sepa-
rate spheres, however, where the wife is believed to maintain authority in
the private domain, in the case of the Filipino family that “authority”
quickly vanishes upon scrutiny. As the aforementioned studies indicate,
the husband holds the right to override the wife’s decisions at all levels,
effecting a relationship that is nowhere near equality. Still, it is when this
framework is articulated that the patterns of thought embedded in the
valorization of the woman as morally superior, the wife and mother as
‘The most vigorous challenges to the approach that this book exemplifies include the
following: Safilios-Rosthchild (1969); Gillespie (1972); Hunt (1978).
544 D. D. Aguilar
queen of the home, as household manager, etc., finally come to the fore.
In similar fashion, the allocation by gender of complementary tasks pre-
sumed to be biologically linked, the collapsing of the wife’s treasurer
function with possession of power, the precaution that development pro-
grams avoid stirring tranquil marital waters-all of these reflect align-
ment with the philosophy of the separate spheres.8
Premised on the belief that equality is possible in a hierarchical society,
the notion of separate spheres dovetails neatly with functionalism, the
bedrock of mainstream social science in the Philippines. In fact, no
critique of the prevailing perspectives on women would make any sense
without taking full account of, as it were, the state of the art. Makil and
Hunt (1981), evaluating the impact of martial law on the profession,
report with curious detachment that research and publication activity
actually increased after the advent of martial law.9 While their abstention
from penetrating the political beliefs and ideological values indissociably
bound up with a functionalist orientation is to be expected, the reasons
they give for the compatibility between social science as it has been
practiced and a dictatorial regime are quite to the point. One major
element is the reliance on quantitative methodology which coincided per-
fectly with the requirements of the regime’s technocratic think tank. Fu’r-
ther, the “values” orientation of research spearheaded by Frank Lynch,
Mary Hollnsteiner, and associates at the institute of Philippine CulturelO
was seized by military inteliigence and adapted with no trouble to their
own ends. During the period of martial law (1972-1986), many profes-
sionals from the physical, more “objective” sciences, if you will, were
arrested and taken prisoner by the Marcos regime, but none from the
social sciences. Given this friendly alliance, one can understand or even
expect the hesitation, refusal, or downright inability of mainstream social
scientists to countenance historical and social realities in the Philippines.
sA close parallel to gender arrangements in the Philippines can be found in the machismo/
marianismo cults of Latin America. See, for example, separate essays by Jaquette and
Stevens in Pescatello (1973). In the United States, Cott (1977) contends that during the 19th
century the sexual oppression of Victorian women allowed them access to the public world
as society’s moral guardians.
sHunt, a U.S. sociology professor at Western Michigan University, is called “father to
Philippine sociology”; at the time of their essay’s publication, Makil was director of the
Institute of Philippine Culture.
toProgressive social scientists have criticized the way in which this influential group, privi-
leging values or cultural practices removed from the axis of social and political structures,
have obscured the real problems in Philippine society, and function as academic servitors
for imperialism. This is not an irresponsible accusation given that, as Makil and Hunt
acknowledge, funding for research comes from the United States channelled through Phil-
ippine government agencies (David, 1982; Samson, 198G).
LIMITS OF FUNCTIONALISM
These fears aside, however, it is the inherent limitations of the func-
tionalist approach itself, with its crude empiricism, that account for its
failure to illuminate the woman question in the Philippines. The underly-
ing principle of homeostasis implanted in the concepts endorsed by em-
piricists causes them to turn their backs on the disturbing presence of
conflict implicit in the politics of gender. Thus handicapped, they are
unable to deal with the disadvantaged position of women when its obtru-
sion becomes impossible to ignore.
That studies so far have totally escaped the influence of feminism is an
understatementl* It is the absence of feminist theorizing that has blinded
researchers to the gross asymmetry of the sexual division of labor. So
blinded, they can only find there the phenomenon of role differentiation
and its cognates-egalitarianism, consensus, complementarity, shared
tasks-all establishing residence in the “separate sphere” of the house-
hold. As a result, the debate over whether or not the pursekeeper role
imbues the wife with power is made to hinge on the size of the purse, to
the neglect of the familial ideology that obliterates the woman’s interest
and conflates it with that of her family.‘2
The belief in the organic unity of the family limits the usefulness of
research quantifying home production and market production, even as
the delineation of these categories of work has done nothing to unveil the
inextricable links between the private and the public domains. In this
context, women can be exhorted to take on multiple roles by way of
enhancing their “equal partnership with men in progress and develop-
ment.” At the same time, these diverse roles abet culturally induced
desires to preserve traditional ideals of femininity and domesticity.
ItOne sociologist connected with the Institute of Philippine Culture (Eviota, 1986) has
published a piece that is decidedly Marxist in orientation. Struggling with great difficulty to
cut free from a narrow productivism and to articulate a feminist framework, she neverthe-
less ultimately succumbs to the tendency to fii the blame for women’s subordination on the
capitalist process.
The beginning of an efflorescence of feminist ideas since 1984 has, of course, generated
interesting work by progressive women that lies distinctly outside the margins of what has
been critiqued here. The most significant to date is a pamphlet series (an alternative Philip-
pine report to the 1985 Nairobi conference) produced by the Philippine Women’s Research
Collective.
%tudies of “tipping up,” a similar practice among the working class in England, make clear
that husbands receive pocket money while the remaining funds over which wives are sup-
posed to exercise control are actually earmarked for household expenses (Barrett & Mcln-
tosh, 1982). For further explication of this practice and the analysis that family members’
interests may not always be coalesced, see Oren (1973).
546 D. D. Aguiiar
WOMEN-IN-DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVE: A CRITIQUE
To pronounce the absence of a feminist paradigm does not, however,

annul the women-in-development approach in the studies reviewed, for it
is this that has focalized practical, day-to-day matters for which women
are responsible by social fiat. A perfunctory survey of research titles since
the declaration of the UN Decade for Women attests to the pervasiveness
of this theme and its concomitant slogans. A major influence on women-
in-development specialists is the work of Boserup (1970). Marxist femi-
nists have criticized the liberalism of Boserup that presides over the bulk
of women-in-development literature, charging that although the main
thrust is to ameliorate women’s lives, it assumes gender inequality to be
amenable to repair through education, the provision of jobs, and changes
in attitudes.
ideologically complicit with functionalism, the contribution of wom-
en-in-development theory has been to foreground issues of concern to
women and to tap the latter as active agents (“equal partners with men”)
in the process of “modernization.“13 A noble goal, indeed, were one to
empty out knowledge of the harsh destiny “development” has laid in store
for large numbers of Filipino women. While social scientists have,
through the use of certain conceptual frameworks, been able to stand at a
remove from the vexing problems confronting ordinary women and to shy
away from questions of political struggle, this has not been so for govern-
ment workers. It is they whose job it is to finally execute the cruel hoax.
As an income-generating project (the mainstay of women in develop-
ment), the Bureau of Women and Minors taught prostitutes the craft of
stringing rosary beads for the Pope’s 1981 visit, to the accompaniment of
a lecture on morals and the financial reward of P2 for eight hours’ work
(Azarcon-de la Cruz, 1985). Needless to say, this is not a project research-
ers write about.
Deconstructing Boserup’s thesis through a Marxist feminist analysis,
Beneria and Sen (198 1) point to its hesitation to move beyond the narrow
conclusions evolving from empirical data toward a theoretical coherence.
In fundamental agreement with the separate spheres philosophy, Bo-
serup’s argument suffers from the same deficiencies. She cannot, for
example, explain class as anything more than a static category separating
people. Nor does she consider how gender might intersect with class to
devaluate women. For Beneria and Sen, Boserup’s refusal of any real
engagement with issues that might expose inequality as a structural fea-
ture of capitalism places her in league with international agencies and
IjIt is ironic that in this respect the instrumentalism of Philippine government policymakers
coincides with that of the revolutionary movement in spite of their dramatically opposed
visions of the good society.
their funding goals. The preface of any study on women in the Philip-
pines acknowledging its sponsoring organizations should testify to this.
Moreover, Boserup makes no attempt to connect production (the public
sphere) into which she would wish to see women integrated, and repro-
duction (the private sphere) whose part in the construction of gendered
subjectivity and female oppression she leaves untouched.
In view of the omission of the central role played by social relations in
the household, one is hard put to find the slightest intimation of femi-
nism in the agenda for women in development. Were liberal feminism
integral to the framing device used in dissecting the status of women in
the Philippines, the outcome would have been drastically different, for a
disruptive element would have been introduced.14 Recall, as an example,
the passage explaining how “joint” or “egalitarian” decisions are made.
One cannot fail to note that the writer’s naive adherence to the sociologi-
cal instruments of role theory and role differentiation is reflected in her
total innocence of telltale clues of male domination that a liberal feminist
would immediately espy with dismay.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, social science research has appropriated the social con-

struction of the Filipino woman formerly assumed by random commen-
tators whose observations, born from mythical lore, inevitably inscribed
colonial ideology. While the examination of gender roles and expecta-
tions has not unmasked the power structure within the family nor re-
vealed gender differences to be variable, dynamic, and subject to change,
the empirical method, however, has eliminated some of the more idiosyn-
cratic qualities of previous discourse on women. Under the aegis of wom-
en in development, social researchers have demystified women’s status in
the public domain and jettisoned the dog-eared fiction of a matriarchy.
But an understanding of the family’s position within society remains
obscured and along with it, women’s domestic subservience.
REFERENCES
ALVAREZ, B. C., & ALVAREZ, P. M. (1973). The family-owned business: A

matriarchal model. Philippine Studies, 20, 547-561.
14Bandarage (1984) specifically names liberal feminism as the fulcrum of women in develop-
ment. Beneria and Sen (1982) write that “a feminist agenda has often been rather superfi-
cially added to economic development projects” (p. 157). Apropos of my argument is the
distinction Omvedt (1978) makes between “women’s equality movements” and “women’s
liberation movements,” where the former utilize and the latter call into question the sexual
division of labor within national struggles. The first supports a women’s struggle, the other
a feminist one.
548 D. D. Aguilar
ALZONA, E. (1934). The Filipino woman: Her social, economic, and political
status, 1565-1933. Manila: Benipayo Press.
ANCHETA, R. R. (1982, March). The Filipino woman in rice farming. (Occa-
sional Paper no. 4, NFE/WID Exchange-Asia). Laguna: University of the
Philippines.
AZARCON-DE LA CRUZ, P. (1985). Filipinos for sale: An alternative Philip-
pine report on women and tourism. Manila: Aklat Pilipino.
BANDARAGE, A. (1984). Women in development: Liberalism, Marxism and
Marxist-feminism. Development and Change, 15,495-515.
BARRETT, M., & MCINTOSH, M. (1982). The anti-social famiiy. London:
Verso Editions.
BENERIA, L., & SEN, Cl. (1981). Accumulation, reproduction, and women’s
role in economic development: Boserup revisited. Signs, 1,279-298.
BENERIA, L., & SEN, G. (1982). Class and gender inequalities and women’s
role in economic development. Feminist Studies, 8, 157-176.
BLOOD, R. O., & WOLFE, D. M. (1960). Husbands and wives: The dynamics of
married living. Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe.
BOSERUP, E. (1970). Women’s role in economic development. London: George
Allen and Unwin.
CASTILLO, G. T. (1976). The Filipino woman as manpower: The image and the
empirical reality. Laguna: University of the Philippines.
CASTILLO, G. T. & GUERRERO, S. H. (1969). The Filipino woman: A study
of multiple roles. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 4, 18-29.
COTT, N. (1977). The bonds of womanhood: “Women’s sphere” in New England,
X780-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press.
DAVID, R. S. (1982). Sociology and development studies in the Philippines.
Quezon City: Third World Studies.
EVIOTA, E. (1978). Philippine women and development: An annotated bibliog-
raphy. Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture.
EVIOTA, E. (1986). The articulation of gender and class in the Philippines. In E.
Leacock & H. Safa (Eds.), Women’s work (pp. 194-206). South Hadley, MA:
Bergin and Garvey.
FOX, R. (1963). Men and women in the Philippines. In B. E. Ward (Ed.), Women
in the new Asia (pp. 342-364). Amsterdam: UNESCO.
GILLESPIE, D. L. (1972). Who has the power? The marital struggle. In H. P.
Dreitzel (Ed.), Family, marriage, and the struggle of the sexes (pp. 121-149).
New York: Macmillan.
GONZALEZ, A. M. B. (1977). Filipino women in development: The impact of
poverty. Philippine Sociological Review, 25, 97-104.
GONZALEZ, A. M. B., & HOLLNSTEINER, M. R. (1976). Filipino women as
partners of men in progress and development: A survey of empirical data and a
statement of basic goals fostering male-female relationships. Quezon City:
Institute of Philippine Culture.
GUERRERO-NAPKIL, C. (1975). The Filipino woman. The Philippines Quar-
terly, 19, 25.
HUNT, P. (1978). Cash transactions and household tasks: Domestic behavior in
relation to industrial employment. The SocioIogicaI Review, 26, 555-571.
ILLO, J. F. I. (1977). Involvement by choice: The role of women in development.
Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture.
ILLO, J. F. I. (1978, December 10-21). Constraints to rural women’s participa-

tion in Philippine development: A report from the field. Paper read at the
Tenth Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, New Delhi.
INFANTE, T. R. (1975). The women in the early Philippines and among the
cultural minorities. Manila: UST Press.
KEESING, F. M. (1937). The Philippines: A nation in the making. Shanghai:
Kelly Walsh.
LEROY, J. A. (1968). Philippine life in town and country. Manila: Filipiniana
Book Guild. (First published 1905)
LICUANAN, P. B., & GONZALEZ, A. M. B. (1976). Fi!ipino women in devel-
opment (draft of final report). Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture.
LYNCH, F., & MAKIL, P. Q. (1968). The BRAC (1967) Filipino family survey.
St. Louis Quarterly, 6, 293-330.
MACARAIG, S., ESPIRITU, S. & BERNARDINO, V. (1954). The development
and the problems of the Filipino family. Philippine social life. Manila: Maca-
raig Publishing Co.
MAKIL, P. Q., & HUNT, C. L. (1981). The impact of martial law on sociologists
in the Philippines. PSSC Social Science Information, 3-12.
MANANZAN, SR. M. J. (1983). The Filipino woman before and after the Span-
ish conquest of the Philippines. Unpublished paper.
MENDEZ, P. P., & JOCANO, F. L. (1974). The Filipino family in its rural and
urban orientation: Two case studies. Manila: Centro Escolar University.
MENDOZA-GUAZON, M. P. (1951). The development and progress of the
Filipino woman. Manila: Kiko Printing Press.
MENDOZA-GUAZON, M. P. (193 1). The status of the Filipino woman. (One of
a series of papers on Philippine progress.) Manila: Institute of Public
Relations.
MERCER, C., & RADFORD, J. (Trans. and Eds.). (1977). An interview with
Pierre Macherey. Red Letters, 5, 3-9.
MIRALAO, V. A. (1980). Women and men in development. Quezon City: Insti-
tute of Philippine Culture.
MONTIEL, C., & HOLLNSTEINER, M. R. (1978). The Filipino woman: Her role
and status in Philippine society. Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture.
NELSON, R. (1968). The Philippines. New York: Walker.
OMVEDT. G. (1978). Women and rural revolt in India. Journal of Peasant Stud-
ies, 5, 370-403.
PESCATELLO, A. (Ed.). (1973). Female and male in Latin America. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
PORIO, E., LYNCH, F., & HOLLNSTEINER, M. R. (1981). The Filipino fami-
ly, community, and nation. Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture.
RABINOW, P. (Ed.). (1984). Foucalt reader. New York: Pantheon Books.
RAUSA-GOMEZ, L., & TUBANGUI, H. R. (1978). Reflections on the Filipino
woman’s past. Philippine Studies, 26, 125-141.
REYES, T. JR. (1965). The role of women in socio-economic development. The
Philippine Educational Forum, 45-49.
ROMERO, F. R. P. (1979). Women’s status in Philippine society. Quezon City:
U. P. Law Center.
ROMERO, F. R. P. (1981). Family law in the Philippines. Quezon City: U. P. Law
Center.
550 D. D. Aguilar
RUTTEN, R. (1982). Women workers of hacienda Miiagros: Wage labor and

household subsistence on a Philippine sugarcane plantation. Amsterdam: Uni-
versity of Amsterdam.
SAFILIOS-ROSTHCHILD, C. (1969). Family sociology or wives’ sociology? A
cross-cultural examination. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 31, 290-301.
SAID, E. W. (1975). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
SAMSON, L. L. (1980). The politics of understanding Philippine culture. The
Diliman Review, 29,45-48.
SANTOS-MARANAN, A. F. (1984). Do women really hold up half the sky? The
Diliman Review, 32, 42-50.
SHAHANI, L. R. (1975). Liberating the Filipino woman. The Philippines Quar-
terly, 1, 35-40.
SMEDLEY, A. (1931). The women in the Philippines. The Modern Review, 44,
456-461.
VILLANUEVA DE KALAW, P. (1917). The Filipino woman in the past and in
the present. The Philippine Review, 32-36.
ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS
Get examen critique &.a rep&ntationa cks fglanes

*ilip@nas dana le reciier&e en sciences so&ales a Four but &
mettre en luniere lea pr&na*ions idologiques et th&xiqu=
qui entravent tn portrait exact &a la ~Daiticn stirdonr+ &a la
femme. n &ute en montrant axnment la ~tion i&&e qui
poclane la slqmriorite’ de la femme, i&e formulb Z rowBzLu avec
oas raisona appeopi&s c&x5 le disams cx&onial, eat grwk
tina la mnaciena pp_rlaire et s’est montr& rkistante a tout
&an~ent. Wr ez3nple,lejugenent uxwentionel voithnsle
faitqm la fenme au fqer antraele budget etles affairescb
m&age we caractCistiqu5cklamatriarcbie. Enexami~ntles
reh2rcfiesenpiriqu3slesplus sicpificatives, en prticulier
calles chns la cxt&xie "fenmeschnsle dkelo~ent," cette
etude wnstate Me l&&e dkviationde cette perspective. Faazz
la r&lit&d'me mwret&drr'ralis&e et&la ~sition cks
iemnes en hs &1'&helie~pcfessiotile, les krcheurs en
sdences sxiales ont &e'for&s & r~titrel’ir+litG&s
r'emneschslecixnainerxlhliule.htourn-intleur attentionsur
le &maim pive'les &&he&s &ahlissent l'existena d'lple
divisionriqi& ~3.2 travail selonles sexsau sein c?2la fanille.
Cette a3nsGtaticname~ au&plaaement &la xkion c+2
netriartiie. Nais faute d'acbger me pespxtive faniniste,les
cnerciieurs ouhlientck s~inte'rroqxSW les relationsd2 pwoir
cHnsl.2divisioncutravail au sein chmenacp. Ilsne
rhssissznt ra.5a Sinaxpzr le r&e sanctifiedelamaterniti et
lavtiorisadon axrespxxknte dalafenme entantqu'&re
r,ioralanent su+ieur. Ckst ainsiquzles e'tudzsquise
wnentrent sur lamanike cbntles &isicns sent pises ont
simplanentsuktitue'l'egalitarisne 2 la cbnirk3nat ck l.af-e et
ontmaintcr.ul'i~e uz la ampl&entarid Bs ssxes b3& sur la
@.loso$ie ce.5%QGres dpr&s." (author-supplied abstract)
E.&a rese'& critica&las repesentaciones&lasmujeres

filiHn3sen la irwestigxi6n &ntro cklas cienciassociales,
aluntcalas conjeturasibal&icasyte6ricasq~ ok&aculizan
una descripcidnpzci.s3de1 estacb suixrdimcb dzlasmderes.
The Social Construction of the Filipino Woman
Chniereamnwexpsici&lsobreoanoel sabarpplar
autdctono,vouaro ck la supariorihd da las mujeres, recnnstr&%
oonlaradtiisaci6napopizk% prael hablaakltial, est6
gravacbenlaoxcienciagqulary haresultacb resistentea
alteradcnes Lavisi6A cnnvancicnal,pr ejenplo,veala
frncicPl&lamujer arnoaqtilaquerealizalafuxicnd2l
marmjo da1 dinarojlnto anlads adninistracbradalafrmilia,
pesentancb as'aridancia ds matriarcacb. Ekaminantblos
estudiosen~riaxm&i sicpificativos, prticulacmente acpllos
dantro b la mtepriTa ~32mujeres en dasarrallo,el ensayo
otserva u3a sapraci6nleve da e&a px3pactiva. Cbnfrcntadas
ax w realicfadckptxezaextensivay aznla ticad6ncklas
mujeres en el sitiomh kijo &la estructrraocupcional, 10s
cientificossocialeshantenidbque reaxrxarlacarenciab
igualdadpralamujer enlaesfera &hIica. Miranb haciala
estera pivad3, losiluestigadxes cbarnentanla existenciada
w aivisi6n1321tratnjoriqida enel ntieofmniliar entrelos
qhxos. Fste Qscutximientoresulta enladislocaci6ndala
noci6n de matriarcati. Pare, sinla qxi3 da estructuras
faninistas,losi1~estiq~3~esnoalcnreana haax pequntas
sobee al pax cklasrelacicnesequista&senlastareasdalos
qkros &ntro dalafanfiia. Fracasanal no &sannascarar el
plpl santificacbde lamaterniady enla aampiknte
valorizacidnda las mujeres an10 moralmantesupriores. h
czmbio,losestudiosqua se axxmntranenla tunada bcisionas
nan sustitukb simplsxentela tbctrinadalaigual&d prlackl
p~inio8l~mmjeresyl~soste~~lai~a,~quelos
q&ros son am@.exntarios, tcasati enla filosofiada "esferas
sqaradas." (autnor-su&ied atstract)

8readings (GTB)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

8readings (GTB)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Home News Answers Writing About

< Main Answers

Warning: This piece contains inappropriate language for children.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns

But accusations of TERFery have been suﬃcient to intimidate many people,

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identiﬁcation

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course

TERMS OF USE P R I VAC Y & C O O K I E S P O L I C Y ENQUIRIES LINKS MEDIA KIT LEGAL

© J.K. ROWLING 2016

Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts Publishing rights © J.K. Rowling

ISSN: (Print) 2572-3618 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcle19

Queer[ing] Performativity, Queer[ing]

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486

© 2014 Sichuan University. Published

Published online: 06 Aug 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 7412

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

>1 51 JfJ; a. iA.JIJHJIJ·tt

( Nt) ·tintl JL4tfoJ fOJ 4; rJ;J )J!f fOJM.; 1-::J.

I . Queer(ing) Performance: Reading Gender Performativity against Speech

Hence, she is able to dissolve Austin's distinction of the constative and

More precisely, the "founding interpellation", the "naming" is itself a citation, a

IT • Queer[ing] Subversion: A Critique of Gender Performativity

In a radical deconstructionist way, conventional gender binary is read arbitrary

3. The (un)Citing of the Law and Its Paradoxical Doubleness

If gender subversion means non-dominant gender performances could rival,

4. Resignification, Performative Failures and Performative Subversions

The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely .. .in the

Interestingly, parodic repetitions are justified as equal as the "original" not

ill. Further Critique

Wenjuan XIE, Ph. D. candidate in Comparative Literature at University

JUDITH BUTLER questions the belief that certain gendered behaviors

Indeed, Butler goes far as to argue that gender, as an objective

Butler takes her formulations even further by questioning the very

Butler takes this formulation further by exploring the ways that

Butler therefore understands gender to be "a corporeal style, an 'act,'

What is required for the hegemony of heteronormative standards to

Butler underscores gender's constructed nature in order to fight for

2. There is no self-preceding or outside a gendered self. Butler writes, “ . . . if gender is

3. Performativity of gender is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of

4. Biological sex is also a social construction—gender subsumes sex. “According to this

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE

Center for Educational Innovation, University of Connecticut

ABSTRACT This critical review of the representations of Filipino women in

In this essay, I will critically review the representations of Filipino

THE MYTHICAL VERSUS THE EMPIRICAL

that can be detected from the images of Filipino women projected by

This declaration of worth, while understandable as an attempt to assert

without being seduced; to be beautiful; to be educated, to be a companion to her

Why this bewildering welter of images, this fanciful quality suffusing

Curiously enough, any reference to Filipino women’s privileges preceding

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE COLONIAL MIND

TWO CONTRASTING VIEWS

Without rejecting any or all of the above, perhaps another way of

Macherey as he expounds on the Althusserian concept of the ideological

DECONSTRUCTING POPULAR MYTHS

Easily the most widely accepted motif is that of woman as “queen of

reclaim women’s past by reconstructing the works of early chroniclers,