Butler argues in her conclusion that gender is performative, or a kind of ”act” or “parody.” This has profound consequences for how we understand subjectivity and the kinds of political activity or agency that are possible for individuals. Far from representing irreducible categories of existence, gender is in fact a parodic representation of those categories—it exposes the “illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance” that “reveal[s] its fundamentally phantasmatic status.” This means that “feminine” and “masculine” are essentially false as epistemological categories, and, as Butler points out, therefore ironically undermine and limit the kinds of political agency feminism is aiming to enable. As she says, “the critical task is ... to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those [gender] constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them.”
In other words, the feminine is not, according to Butler, a fundamental category of existence, but a kind of performance established through repetition. Parodic representations of gender, such as drag, can serve to “contest” the illusion of gender as a “natural” way of being. In a similar vein, eliminating gendered pronouns from language serves to undermine the “naturalness” of the male/female split. For Butler, any representation of gender exists within an ontological framework that justifies the gendered representation feminism would seek to subvert. The only answer, in her view, is to “game” the system, and by a “radical proliferation of gender, displace the very gender norms” that enforce the male/female split.
Butler concludes by questioning the basic assumptions of feminist identity politics. Her position, essentially, is that the only way to do away with gender descrimination is to get rid of “female” and “male” as coherent categories of existence. Once this happens, a new politics, independent of male/female binarism, might evolve.
Friday, January 20, 2017
Please could you write a 400 word analysis (not summary) of Gender Trouble's conclusion - From Parody to Politics.
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