PERFORMATIVITY, PRECARITY AND

SEXUAL POLITICS

JUDITH BUTLER

Prepared by:

İbrahim ŞAHİN
Literature and Gender
 Re-examination of gender
performativity Sexual Politics
Issues in the nation-states:
Precarity
• Claiming a right when there
A referance to; is not a right to claim

- who are exposed to injury

• Being forced to follow
- Violence
certain norms in order to
- Displacement
change these norms
- in risk of not being
qualified as a subject of
recognition
 Performativity - an account of agency

 Precarity - focuses on conditions that threaten

life in ways that appear to be outside of one’s
control.

Are these two concepts completely different

from each other?
Gender is Performative
 it is a certain kind of enactment

 the “appearance” of gender is often mistaken as a sign of

its internal or inherent truth

 a strict binary frame

 obligatory norms to be one gender or the other

 the reproduction of gender – power
 no gender without this reproduction of norms
 risks undoing or redoing the norm in unexpected ways
 - Anything living can be destroyed
at will or by accident
- endurance is not guaranteed

 Social-political institutions – minimize the conditions precarity - NS

 Restriction – problem
 Precarity designates the condition

 Certain populations suffer from failing social and

economic networks of support.

 Become differantially exposed to injury, violence without protection, death

At hightened risk – disease, poverty, starvation, displacement
 PRECARITY
1- Populations that starve or near starvation
2- Sex workers – Street violence, police harrassment

Precarity gender norms

Not living their genders

in intelligible ways

Harrassment - Violence
Gender norms – distinction / public - private
 Who will fail to be protected by law, police on the street, job, at home ?
 Who will be stigmatized?
 Criminalized on the basis of public appearence?
 the object of fascination – consumer pleasure?
 Will have medical benefits before the law?
 Whose intimate relations will, in fact, be recognized before the law?

TRANSGENDER ACTIVISM, FEMINISM, QUEER POLITICS, GAY MARRIAGE

MOVEMENT
 Only one way that power operates
 reproduces itself in some way – risky not fully foreseen effects

Butler suggests;
- Derridian Notion of iterability
– Marxist conception of reproduction of domination, reproduction of personhood

 «I» - the subject - agent produced socially through power

 Power relies on mechanism of reproduction – can produce new- subversive effects

 If the power lay out «who» can be a subject = Who qualifies as a subject of
recognition in politics, before the law ????
 What do we call those who do not and cannot appear as “subjects” within hegemonic
discourse?
 Recognizability
of different sexual and
gender norms
powerful logics determine – desire,
orientation, sexual acts, pleasures

Understanding the
different forms of
sexuality – exeeding the
limits of established norms
Performativity of gender – bound up with differantial
ways in which subjects become eligible for recognition

Full recognition is not possible – ways of allocating it

To be a subject requires complying certain norms that

govern recognition

WHO COUNTS AS A SUBJECT, WHO DOES NOT

Performativity – Precarity relation

 Performativity – Precarity Link Example
2006 / Illegal immigrants / Los Angeles – sang the national anthem of
the US in English and in Spanish
but
On the web Spanish version widely circulated
Their aim? To become citizen / What kind of performative exercise?
 Exercising the right without having that right

luckilly not arrested

Political battles in California and elsw. in the US

abot English as obligatory language in all public schools and for all public
services

English-only deffenders fearful about Spanish

Singing in Spanish – an outrage or being part of the US?

Not citizens but workers in fields-urban centers
Singing the anthem in Spanish = cultural presence of Spanish language,
multi-lingual reality, rejecting privitization strategies
THE VISIBILITY OF UNVISIBLE
  Structural link;
nation-state = production
of stateless people
 How those stateless can
do exercise rights?

It has to be an action with

others and be public – can
never be an individual
performance

Hannah Arendt Has to enter in the sphere

of appearance

The efficacy and true exercise of our freedom –

doesn’t follow from our individual personhood –
social conditions place/political belonging
Right to have rights / to belong humanity should be
guaranteed by humanity
 “the right to have rights” is itself a kind of
performative exercise

the performativity of the assertion in Arendt and the

singing in the street is understood as an exercise of
freedom

Freedom is not a potential that waits for its exercise.

It comes into being through its exercise.

Arendt: Equality – pre-condition of changing the World

But equality only exists to the extent that people do -
Performative
 To be a participant in politics, to become part of
concerted and collective action, one need not only make
the claim for equality, but one needs to act and petition
within the terms of equality.

Spivak – borders of the nation-state in the service of

colonialism
Who counts as citizen?

Arendt: nation-state invariably produces stateless people

On Totalitarinism to European nation-states

Function – global conditions

Spivak: We Can’t have transcendend nation state

Only a part of us – a subject
Africa – 48 multi-ethnic states / an example of nation
state broken up
Africa is also the place for the experimentation
of NGOs, Spivak puts it, “a laboratory for
thinking and doing non nation-centered states.

Language - the existence of tribal languages

the act of cultural translation is the way of

bringing about a new understanding

Africa example shows that the borders of the

state divide populations from one another, but
also force populations together who do not share
linguistic or cultural ties. indigenous poor have to
acquire dominant language in
such states produce disenfranchised populations order to be represented by
who are regularly exploited by state-sponsored politics and law
capitalism – precarious populations
 Right to Speak
First power, than act or first act and in the
acting laying claim to the required power

Translation / Performativity=reproduction of
norms
Reproduction of gender norms – a negotiation
with forms of power

Whose lives will be more/less liveable?

GENDER PERFORMATIVITY
Norms are acting on us before we have a
chance to act

Child confusion / gender belonging

Obligation, process of repetition
«Gender and sexuality are different issues, but I do not
think they can be fully dissociated. Certains forms of
sexuality are linked with phantasies about gender, and
certain ways of living gender require certain kinds of
sexual practices.»

Gender is a way of living the body with and for others

Although sexuality is not reducible to gender; you might

decide on sexual relations

It is not the passion, it is already decided for you

Performativity is a process that implies being acted on in

ways we do not always fully understand and of acting, in
politically consequential ways

Performativity - Subject
 Precarious life characterizes such lives who do not qualify as recognizable, readable, or
grievable.

In this way, precarity is rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the
poor, and the stateless.

Queer theory – AIDS Crises

How does one live - one’s love is not considered love, and one’s loss is not considered loss?
How does one live an unrecognizable life?

African continent – no access to new drugs – no ways to pay for them

How performativity links with precarity ?

How does the unspeakable population speak and makes its claims?
What kind of disruption is this within the field of power?
How can such populations lay claim to what they require?
 Gender is not a being – it is a doing, no
sex/gender
 Sex exists as a norm – represents material