The Power of Subversive Gender and Sexual Practices in Butler’s Gender Trouble

by Lynn Huang

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble elaborates Foucault’s theory of reverse discourse in terms of subversive gender and sexual practices. In order to have a reverse discourse, there is a need for common terms so that intelligible communication is possible. Butler explains that these terms are not limited to words in language; they include all modes of behavior such as acts, gestures, and desires. Such acts that parody heterosexual constructs work to make their constructed quality visible. Butler writes, “The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy” (41). By establishing a heterosexual construct in a situation that is distinctly non-heterosexual (or vice versa), it becomes possible to perceive the constructedness of gender and the fact that it is a repeated imitation of other such imitations.

Butch-femme stylization is an example of a potentially subversive repetition because it is an enactment of a distinctively heterosexist gender relation. The structure of a butch-femme relationship is culturally intelligible even though the actors in the relationship may not be as individuals. The relationship, not the people in it, is recognizable to hegemonic normative¹ society in a way that other lesbian pairings are not. It has the potential to disturb precisely because it is so uncanny; so familiar, yet foreign at the same time. The heterosexual categories of “masculine” and “feminine” through which normative society understands sexuality are demonstrated in a homosexual relationship that has heterosexual trappings. In a sense, a butch-femme couple “speaks” a gender-stylized behavioral language that heterosexists can understand because it is a language that they also “do,” and in so doing, proliferate.

This concept of “doing” brings us to Butler’s account of the performativity of gender. Outward acts and gender stylization may appear to imply some essence from which they proceed, as if they were manifestations of a stable internal identity. However, the opposite is a far more accurate assessment. Acts are performative in that they work to fabricate this sense of interiority, an interiority that is a fiction because it is necessarily constructed through acts, which in turn are compelled via normative constructions. “What we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures” (xv). Bodily acts are not a result of an internal essence; the idea of the existence of an internal essence is itself an illusion constructed through bodily acts. It follows that gender is a purely performative effect, not a thing or substance, consisting of the stylized repetition of various acts of gender that work together over time to constitute one’s “gender identity.” The illusion of a centralized, internal gender is used to regulate sexuality within a heterosexist culture.

What makes butch-femme stylization effective is that it makes clear the distinction between one’s supposedly “internal” features (anatomical sex and gender identity) and the enactment of a heterosexual construct. A masculine-feminine relationship does not necessarily proceed from a “man-woman” or “male-female” relationship. By that same token, a heterosexual relationship is not necessarily masculine-feminine. Hence, there is no “original” relationship that is masculine-feminine (or masculine-masculine or feminine-feminine, for that matter); all relationships are copies, or imitations, of other copies. The masculine-feminine relationship is the one that gets proliferated because it is endorsed by compulsory heterosexuality. Butch-femme stylization forces people to see the imitative aspect of a heterosexual construct.

Drag is another example of a potentially subversive gender practice. Subversive acts challenge the concept of a stable, fixed internal essence. Butler explains that parodic repetition of gender, such as drag, “fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (174). Drag exposes the illusion that gender identity is internal by demonstrating a disjunction between the supposedly internal gender identity and the external performance of gender. When we see a person who is anatomically male, whose gender identity is “man,” and whose gender performance is masculine, it is easy to make false associations between the three and come to the erroneous conclusion that they naturally represent a single unified identity, or that anatomically male sex leads to gender identity as a man, which then leads to masculine gender performance.

Drag subverts this notion by exploding the ostensible unity of heterosexual coherence into discernible components, parsing the dimensions of gender corporeality in a way that defies interdependency between them. If these dimensions are independent from each other, then they can exist in any combination in any person. Even as drag seeks to present a “woman” as a unified being, it reveals “woman” as an illusion of heterosexual coherence and a performative imitation. Since “woman” is an illusion, drag can imitate this illusion the way an anatomical female can. Drag queens dramatize and parody womanhood as a cultural mechanism in such a way that one cannot help but notice the inconsistency between these three experiences of gender, and then notice the way in which anatomical females copy the same behavior without the existence of an original.

As parodies, butch-femme stylization and drag are subversive because they enable us to see heterosexual constructs as the copies they are rather than as originals. While it is true that these parodies often imitate gender categories that stem from misogynistic phallogocentrism, they can still be subversive because they recontextualize these categories in a manner that denaturalizes heterosexist assumptions surrounding what is “natural.” However, there is always a risk of losing the parodic edge in an imitation that becomes, over time, too common to have that uncanny familiar yet unfamiliar quality—it could end up being simply familiar, with no ability to draw a critical eye. Yet, subversion is only intelligible if it can find loopholes in the normative rules that govern sexuality and gender and apply these rules to non-heterosexual frames.

The necessary adherence to normative rules, even when bent to apply to non-normative subversive contexts, leads me to question the efficacy of the practices Butler describes. While it is true that subversive acts can only be intelligible if they use normative terms, there is a danger of proliferating normative hegemonic ideals of the “natural” without proliferating the critical position necessary to understand subversive acts as subversive. Heterosexual practices may be seen as so “natural” that those engaging in non-heterosexual practices have a desire to imitate heterosexual acts, and these imitations may be viewed as failed copies. Subversive acts do their work by exposing heterosexual constructs as fiction and inviting us to think critically about heterosexist concepts that we may take for granted; they cannot be successful unless we accept that invitation to take a critical stance. The problem of inaccessibility in Butler’s own work is the same problem subversive acts face: for all their normative intelligibility, they are not easily understood by society at large.

On the other hand, a critical stance may not be necessary for subversive acts to work on us. Since compulsory heterosexuality does not operate on a conscious level, that could mean subversion must also work on an unconscious level, following the same terms as the hegemonic order. Those who participate in butch-femme stylization or drag are not likely to be plotting ways to subvert heterosexist culture; if they happen to do so, it is probably unconscious. As much as heterosexism is pervasive yet invisible, it becomes visible when heterosexual constructs are repeatedly enacted in non-heterosexual frames. Butler writes, “The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself” (189). The only sure sign that subversive gender and sexual practices have been successful is when such repetition becomes unnecessary, even impossible, because heterosexual constructs are no longer being imitated by anyone, heterosexual or not.

¹ I will use the term “normative” in the same way Butler does, in meaning “pertaining to the norms that govern gender” (xx).