Gender performativity

Miriam Meyerhoff
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

The notion of performativity in gender studies

was introduced primarily through the work of
philosopher Judith Butler (1956), but the underlying presuppositions performativity makes about
the nature of gender as a social category have been
very influential in language and gender research
as well as in philosophy. The publication of Butlers
book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (1990) came at a critical period in the
history of sociolinguistics. It coincided with a
reburgeoning of the creative connections between
sociolinguistics and anthropology; this fostered a
climate in which researchers and theorists were
engaged in exploring social categories as emergent
and multifacetedidentities were analyzed as
being socially and historically contingent. As we
will see, Butlers arguments from feminist philosophy that gender is performative meshed well with
this ongoing shift in how linguists had begun to
examine the relationship between language and
social categories such as gender.
In order to understand the attraction of gender
performativity for the field of language and gender more broadly, it is helpful to understand the
state of the art in sociolinguistics in the 1970s and
1980s. This period was largely characterized by
what the sociolinguist Penelope Eckert (1942)
dubbed first and second wave approaches to the

study of language variation. So-called first-wave

approaches to language variation were concerned
with describing correlations between language
and macro-social categories such as gender, ethnicity, and age. In this context, deterministic generalizations along the lines of women say this
and men say that were the norm. Such discourses persist today in much popular work on
language and gender, for example, the highly
deterministic model of males and females coming
from different culturesor even planets and
speciesin mass market self-help literature and
popular science writing.
The second wave of analyzing gender and language adopted a somewhat more anthropological method, in which the kinds of social
categories researchers investigated were more
likely to be ones that had local significance in a
given community. For example, instead of
grouping all women (or even all younger
women) in a community together a priori and
assuming fundamental homogeneity in their
linguistic behavior, a researcher would be more
inclined to examine whether younger women
participate in the same kinds of social networks
as older women, or whether there are different
social networks among younger women that
serve to differentiate them from each other as

The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, First Edition. Edited by Patricia Whelehan and Anne Bolin.
2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118896877.wbiehs178

g e n d e r p e r f o r m at i v i t y

much as they can be differentiated from young

men or older women.
Both first- and second-wave approaches were
open to criticism on the grounds of the deterministic nature of the research. In both cases, where
analysts found differences in how groups of
speakers use language, such differences were
accounted for by saying that language serves as a
marker of a speakers membership or identification with some larger social group. However, the
fundamental nature of those social groups
where they come from, how they are understood
in society, and what an individuals relationship is
to those groupsremained outside the bounds
of enquiry. Butlers significant contribution in
reframing social categories, such as gender identity, as performative was to problematize such
categories and to argue that they must be understood as emerging from the lived experience of an
individual, and as interpretable within the cultural norms in which that individual was socialized. Thus, performativity afforded a possible
framework for theorizing gender in new ways,
and this included new ways of representing the
relationship between language and gender. The
emergent quality of identities and the necessity of
analyzing gender behavior in light of the cultural
norms that an individual has been socialized into
are cornerstones of what has come to be referred
to as third-wave studies of gender and language.
In arguing that gender is performative, Butler
drew from a tradition in the philosophy of language. The publication in 1962 of J. L. Austins
(191160) How to Do Things With Words argued
that language does not merely reflect speakers
perception of reality, rather that speakers may use
language to instantiate reality: in other words,
that we do things with words. For example, the
words I promise constitute what follows as a
promise or an obligation to perform certain
actions for others; the very words I order in
Iorder you to follow me, spoken by the right person, in the right social role, at the right time,
makes what follows an order (and not a request or
suggestion). Butler picked up on this idea and
argued that the creation and maintenance of gender identities have a similar basis in performative
actions. Starting from birth, she suggests, with
the formulaic proclamation Its a boy or Its a girl,
society and individuals are busy creating and recreating differences along culturally normative

lines. The ways we talk and the ways we talk about

each other are an important part of how gender
identities are created and understood as normative or as challenging norms. There is no such
thing as gender identity outside the ways it is
constituted as a social temporality (Butler
1990:141). While Butler does not specifically
address sexuality in this work, her discussion of
the link between the performative quality of everyday gender identities and drag queens performance of linguistic routines that challenge gender
norms suggests that she sees gender and sexuality
as intimately entwined.
The performative quality of gender and sexuality is distinct from gendered and sexualized
performance. If a performance is something controlled and possibly characterized by a degree of
artifice, performativity is talking about something
completely different. To say that gender is performative is simply to say that how we understand
gender, and how we position ourselves as gendered or sexual beings in relation to others is
achieved through the repetition and enactment of
these activities. The fact that our community sees
these acts as gendered is what makes them so, not
the fact that lesbian women or heterosexual men
(as some given) enact them. However, the distinction between performance and performative is
often blurred in analyses of language and gender,
and language and sexuality. Some analysts will
move freely between the two epistemologically
and discursively. Butler herself sometimes uses
perform in a way that suggests a mannered and
controlled performance, not just a performative
act; this reflects the complexity of performativity.
She argues that when normative performances
conform to our expectations they are likely to
obscure the performed nature of identity.
What does it mean that a performative view of
gender and sexuality claims that gender and sexuality are interactionally emergent and socially contingent? First of all, it means that masculine or
feminine identities do not exist outside their
expressions. We constitute gendered identities
through talk (and other forms of social action). It
also means that the rituals (Butler uses this term,
echoing Erving Goffmans (192282) discussion of
interaction rituals (1967)) that we use performatively are situated in a social and historical context.
Other gender and identity theorists have made this
point toowhat it is to enact womanliness is

g e n d e r p e r f o r m at i v i t y

interpretable to the actor and the people s/he is

interacting with only in terms of their cultural
expectations. Elinor Ochs (1944) talks about language as being precontextualized by previous iterations of a linguistic routine or by previous speakers
use of a form and as recontextualizing future uses
of that routine or form (1990). For example, by
adopting submissive routines such as deferring
to others, using a low amplitude, high-pitched
voice, and holding their body in ways that suggest
smallness or withdrawal, a speaker performatively
may evoke existing cultural tropes of the submissive woman. But the use of these routines also projects forward in time, either maintaining or altering
and contesting what has been normative. In Ochs
terms, the routines index womanliness. Thus,
normatively gendered language routines may
become resources that both genders can draw on
creatively, for example, in order to project a new
model of feminine leadership, or to project a
masculinity that problematizes a normative complementarity between males and females. This
raises the possibility that any performative act may
succeed or not succeed given the social context in
which it unfolds.
Deborah Cameron (1958) and Don Kulick
(1960) provide one of the most sustained discussions of the theoretical and methodological
implications of performativity in Language and
Sexuality (2003). They distinguish between
identity and identification, the former being
something active and conscious, the latter being
subconscious and possibly conflicted psychological processes. The importance of this distinction can be understood partly in light of
Butlers rejection of any sense that there are any
immanent gender identities. It has become a significant point of difference for sociolinguists
working in the fields of language and gender and
language and sexuality. Cameron and Kulick
argue that just as gender is always implicated in
any performance of sexuality gender [is]
always and necessarily sexualized (2003:143).
Hence, Cameron and Kulick argue that it is
important to theorize gender and sexuality in
terms of gendered and sexual desire(s), as well as
gendered and sexual identities (cf. Livia and
Hall 1997). For them, desire is a crucial component in the study of language and sexuality
because it situates power centrally in the study
of language and sexuality.

Cameron and Kulick see identity as being

something that a person more actively and consciously affiliates to (cf. Acts of Identity, LePage
and Tabouret-Keller 1985an influential work in
sociolinguistics), whereas identifications may
occur below a persons conscious awareness, possibly even disrupting and contradicting conscious
acts of identity. Thus, some identifications may
not even be able to be expressed, but may still be
crucial in the constitution of particular subject
positions (139).
It may be helpful to read Cameron and Kulicks
insistence on identification and desire (as well as
identity) in light of broader issues in linguistics,
because these distinctions may seem abstruse to
readers outside the field. Research traditions in
linguistics often differentiate themselves methodologically and ideologically on the basis of how
closely they focus on material and overt orientations to identities. For instance, within classic
conversation analysis, analysts eschew any
attempt to go beyond the text (and by implication, to get inside speakers heads). They will not
analyze talk as being structured around gendered
or sexual identities unless there is some overt and
explicit mention of these identities. Conversely,
interactional and variationist sociolinguistics and
discourse analysis have been more ready to
invoke common-sense categories or conventionalized routines in their analyses of patterns of
linguistic behaviors and to generalize across
individuals. They have also been more ready to
contextualize a linguistic interaction in light of
the larger structure of society. As we saw earlier,
this has been done with different levels of subtlety
and sophistication and with a different willingness
to employ a critical (queer) spirit of enquiry in
the analysis. Consequently, if some identifications
are not overtly expressed (even if they are
important in constituting certain subject positions)
some linguistic methodologies will not be suitable
for exploring them.
It is also perhaps useful to remember that linguistics has long been riven by the competenceperformance split. This differentiates mentalist
analyses of language (what you can in theory produce and understand) from those that analyze
actual tokens of language in use (what people
in practice do produce and hear). For some
sociolinguists, the idea that they are primarily concerned with the analysis of performances is deeply

g e n d e r p e r f o r m at i v i t y

embedded in their understanding of their work. But

this does not necessarily imply consciously controlled performances. Indeed, much sociolinguistic
research is concerned with demonstrating how
much social and linguistic structures constrain the
way we use language. This is despite that fact that
speakers are unable to articulate or explain such
structures.
Given this, it is not hard to see why performativity might influence different linguists in different
ways. Researchers reacting against what Eckert
called the first- and second-wave approaches
might find Butlers theory attractive because it
rejects the idea that identities have any objective or
immutable quality. Conversation analysts might
adopt aspects of the theory because of its emphasis
on the emergent quality of gender and sexual
identityfocusing on the emergence of and
orientation to such categories in the turn-by-turn
unfolding of talk. Other linguists might be more
inclined to look beyond what is overtly oriented to
and to probe the performative quality of talk in the
light of social precontextualizations and in light of
perceived incongruities (e.g., Barrett 1998).
It seems clear that debates over the relative
importance of conscious and controlled versus
unconscious and even ascribed sociolinguistic
identifications will continue to play a major part in
the field of sociolinguistics for some time. To that
extent, performativity will also remain a significant
factor in theory and practice in the study of language and sexuality and language and gender.

SEE ALSO: Discursive Construction of

Sexuality; Language and the Politics of Gender;
Sexuality and Talk-in-Interaction

References
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The
William James Lectures delivered at Harvard
University in 1955, edited by J. O. Urmson. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Barrett, Rusty. 1998. Markedness and Style-witching
in Performances by African-American Drag
Queens. In Codes and Consequences: Choosing
Linguistic Varieties, edited by Carol Myers-Scotton,
139161. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.
Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. Language
and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on
Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Le Page, R. B., and Andr Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of
Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and
Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Livia, Anna, and Kira Hall. 1997. Queerly Phrased:
Language, Gender and Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ochs, Elinor. 1990. Indexicality and Socialization. In
Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human
Development, edited by James W. Stigler, Richard A.
Shweder, and Gilbert Herdt, 287308. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Further reading
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2003.
Gender and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.