Greetings class!  Below is my critical response to Judith Butler's, Gender Trouble. Seeing that the text is over two decades old now (and yet still very relevant to our lives), I tried to relate some of Butler's concepts to contemporary phenomenons.  I chose to use the concept of performativity to ask questions about pinterest.com and its relationship to our concepts of gender and sex, as well as how they both relate to consumption.  Enjoy!

Judith Butler begins a genealogy of gender ontology with Simone De Beauvoir’s famous assertion, “One is not born a woman, but rather one becomes a woman.”  Just how one becomes, is, or exists as a woman is the general pursuit of Butler’s inquiry, with an explicit focus on the discursive production of binary relations and the suggestion that cultural constructions of gender are produced as “real” through “self-naturalization.”  This “self-naturalization” process denotes what it is to be a woman or a man, and that gender is constructed through the naturalization of notions of biological sex.  To counter the process of naturalizing a biological sex, Butler suggests that sex is constructed in the same way as gender, and that the two are intrinsically linked.  Therefore, biological constructions of “gender identity” behind the performance of gender are linked to the outcomes of gendered performances.  Therefore, the performance of gender denotes both gendered expression and notions of biological sex.  In this brief paper, I’d like to build on this notion of performativity as process for constructing notions of biologically innate characteristics.  Specifically, I’d like to explore the ways in which our consumption practices are linked to ideologies of gender expression and biological sex.

            Building on Nietzsche’s concept of “the doer” and “the deed,” Butler builds the theoretical construct of gender performativity.  According to Butler, “There is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results;” thereby, outcome of gender expression builds notions of gender identity that are innate, rather than constructed (33).  In this sense, gender identity and gender expression cannot be separated, as the expression constructions the identity.  It is from this concept that Butler connects sex and gender, two concepts previously separated by feminist scholars as a political tool.  However, as Butler would contend, sex and gender and intrinsically linked and simultaneously constructed through the performance of gender.  It is this performance, in essence, that constructs notions of biology and expression.

            As Butler would contend, the simultaneous construction of both sex and gender is not a mere coincidence, but rather, in service of institutions of power.  In fact, Butler argues that the construction of “intelligible genders” services and maintains institutions that rely on “relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire” (23).  Both Irigaray and Butler would contend that this represents a “phallogocentric signifying economy,” or rather, political economies reliant on social, legal, and political organizations of sex and gender.  Building on this concept of “phallogocentric signifying economy,” I would like to contend here that our consumption practices both service institutions, as well as organize sex and gender.  Furthermore, an intersectional analysis of this concept would reveal that phallogocentrism organizes not only sex and gender, but also race, class, and citizenship.  And that participation in a phallogocentric economy is performative and naturalized through discursive formations of innate biological identities.

              Gendered performances are easily spotted in contemporary cultures.  While the performance of gender is both historically and socially contextual, culturally rooted analysis could unveil a variety of the ways in which normative gender practices are encouraged and performative.  For instance, I can find no better example of contemporary “feminine” gender performativity than that of the social media website, pinterest.com.  Cultural critiques of pinterest point to the ways in which it predominately encourages feminine and traditional behaviors, such as dream weddings, baking game day treats “for him,” and DIY ombre hair color.  Now, the context of this paper is not to argue whether this is a “good” or “bad” trend, but rather, I hope to point to the extent in which this supports both the performativity of gender (in the same way that Butler points to drag and hyper-performativity), as well as the way these performances are related to our consumption practices.  Further, if we follow Butler’s argument that gender and sex cannot be separated, then it must follow that performances of gender on websites such as pinterest.com also point to our understandings of an “innate gender” or sex. 

            Gender performativity, following Butler’s argument, is in service of certain institutions of power.  Further building on Foucault’s concept of bio-power, gender performativity can be understood as organized to service Capitalist projects.  Therefore, the extent to which pinterest is gendered (which I am going to make the claim that it is), then we can make the connection to pinterest’s “feminine” appeal to its Capitalist ventures.  In fact, according to recent critiques of pinterest, the website “drives more traffic to marthastewart.com and marthastewartweddings.com than Facebook and Twitter combined,” making it a powerful force for marketing to certain types of consumers (Odell).  Certainly, this is not great leap or connection to make, but what I intended to illicit here is that this Capitalist venture is not possible without a neat organization of gendered expression.  And following Butler’s claims that the expression and identity are linked, I question the message that overtly “feminine” or “masculine” marketing codes send about our “innate being” or identity.  The question then becomes, are cultural understandings of gendered biology constructed throughout purchases?  Does marketing and consumption drive our understanding of “the real,” biological, and innate? 

References:

Butler, Judith (1990, 1999).  Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.

Odell, Amy. (2012)  “How Pinterest is Killing Feminism.”  Buzzfeed.com.  Retrieved from:  http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/how-pinterest-is-killing-feminism