Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion

Judith Butler raises some interesting thoughts on the notion of identity formation and the subversive politics therein. She begins with an assessment of the creation of non-self-initiated identity, an action that, much like we have discussed in class, foists meaning onto people that cannot really exist. She uses the example of police action to illustrate the interpolative nature of addressing via the notion of "the reprimand", or the law made verbally manifest. The reprimand, while inherently serving an admonitory function (whether deserved or not), "forms a crucial part of the juridical and social formation of the subject...it initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject" (Butler 166-77). In essence, we are witnessing the linguistic creation of identity. The subject did not exist before the address; it was the act of addressing that created their new status. To put it simply, they are a subject because they are a subject.

This title, while easy to insert, seems to be insidiously difficult to erase. Butler suggests reworking the foisted identity from the inside out: "Where the uniformity of the subject is expected, where the behavioral conformity of the subject is commanded, there might be produced the refusal of the law in the form of the parodic inhabiting of conformity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command..." (Butler 167). She indicates that subversion and thus freedom can occur by resignifying meaning through hyperbole, indeed that the extreme repetition of this superfluous identity can turn the law "against the one who delivered it" (Butler 167). But can parody ever evolve into true hyperbole? If you obey the identity thrust upon you TO THE LETTER, does that make the identity hyperbolic?

It seems that this expression of identity politics is nothing new. Luce Irigaray posited pretty much the same idea years earlier:

Rather than listening only to what men or patriarchal discourse tells women about their sexuality or fantasy lives, that is, rather than continuing to be a "masculine feminine" woman, Irigaray suggests that women need to create themselves instead as "feminine feminine." This latter sort of woman is not a male-identified woman but instead has learned to "mime the mime," mimic and thereby explode the gendered construction that the patriarchy has invented and codified in order to enslave and dehumanize her. (Hoeveler 11)

This identity is thus entirely performative, indeed self-aware, and in order to achieve subversion it must be almost mockingly so. But here we are confronted with a problem: how can the one who delivers identity know if their titles are being resignified if the course of attack is to simply mime that title? Butler states that this can be achieved through the disloyal repetition of the thing, yet in practice can the act really be that obvious? What manner of attack can this reiteration be? Are results echoed across a culture, or can they only take place on a personal level? At least in once instance, Butler can give us successful subversion through representations of drag presented in the movie Paris Is Burning:

If a white homophobic hegemony considers the black drag ball queen to be a woman, that woman, constituted already by that hegemony, will become the occasion for the rearticulation of its terms; embodying the excess of that production; the queen will out-woman women, and in the process confuse and seduce an audience whose gaze must to some degree be structured through those hegemonies...(Butler 174)

The question, however, remains: how successful can this tactic be in cases that appear to conform to the "everyday"? How can a woman "out-woman women", how can a man "out-man men"?


Butler, Judith."Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion". Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. pp 166-181.

Hoeveler,Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.