these different theoretical and methodological approaches explore how subjectivities are produced within and through relationships to power.
As you think about the usefulness of these theories, how do you begin to understand the body and its relationship to power? How do the performances of artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, Nikki S. Lee and Cindy Sherman invite us to think reflexively about subjectivity and gendered processes of identification? How does the conscious choice to "play" performatives of race and gender allow artists to manipulate their bodies in order to interrogate the fluidity of race and gender boundaries? These questions are presented as prompts that may help you as you develop your written responses to the module this week.
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Lynn Deboeck
ReplyDeletePerforming Raced and Gendered Bodies
Is there any way to use the device of race responsibly with one’s body in performance? Though the three artists we encountered in this model did not resort to the violence Tshembe refers to, did they still “suffer the utter reality of the device?” (Elam, 5) One could argue that Anna Deavere Smith tries not to in Fires in the Mirror. However, we discussed in class how Smith’s representations, while authentic, still included choices that could potentially distort her subjects. Cindy Sherman mentioned that some viewers of her work thought she was making fun of certain types of people. She claims she was not. Regardless of her intentions, I struggle to believe that she could create her characters without some opinion (perhaps judgement) shining through. Nikki S. Lee had to suppress her own feelings or opinions and mirror those of the culture within which she was immersed. But how must the group feel when she leaves them just as she begins to matter to them? The concept of “bodies that matter” seems to be as fluid a concept as we have found race and gender. Chameleons like the artists of this module show us that by reiterating a set of norms one has the potential to shine a light on a figment, or what Butler calls the “appearance of substance.” Foucault’s hypothesis from Technologies of Self values performative speech acts, yet I find myself asking the same question Butler does-- what about the material body? Certainly the bodily repetition of norms would fall into Foucault’s Technologies of Sign Systems. Yet, for him, the performative utterance is most powerful. Though I agree that there is value in thinking about race through performance, how do we account for the body behind the mask? And what does that acknowledgment do to the mask?
Module 2
ReplyDeleteYears ago I played the character Ben, a male lovelorn cowboy, in the play Anton in Show Business. During class discussions about the play I observed a surprising occurrence as peers referred to Ben as “a nice guy” and that “he was so sweet.” Watching Cindy Sherman discuss her photography I noticed a similar separation between self and character as she referred to her creations often as “she” and not “I.” Performers and artists, such as Anna Deavere Smith and Nikki S. Lee, play with notions of identity and self by utilizing various ‘signs.’ As I questioned whether my classmates had stopped seeing my female body I never considered the gender binary as a construction that could easily be problematized.
We crave the categorization of self into essentialist labels such as ‘woman.’ Foucault suggests the self is never a creation of the individual on its own but rather a byproduct of the merging of various technologies, all founded on the notion of power. Foucault provocatively asks, “How have certain interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself?” (2). Butler seemingly replies with an astounding set of examples. She writes, “Sex is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. This productive reiteration can be read as a kind of performativity” (70). Butler details examples of how our foundations of discourse, which initially appear neutral as in the case of naming, narrowly shape perceptions of others and ourselves in terms of gender, sexuality, and race. When faced with the fact that “performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability,” (Butler 60) I return to the arts. There we have a permission and encouragement to question societal norms about gender and race and see how they can be “reconstructed and redefined within the theater” (Elam 15).
Jeanne
In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler argues that “materiality is constituted in and through iterability,” and that “bodies only become whole…by the idealizing and totalizing specular image which is sustained through time by the sexually marked name,” (70,72). Though her work offers valuable methodological insight for reading racialized and genderized identities, this insight is problematized by self-conscious embodiments of the Other seen in Anna Deveare Smith and Cindy Sherman’s work. “What is to restrict any given individual to a single identification? Identifications are multiple and contestory,” Butler writes (99). “To identify with a sex is to stand in some relation to an imaginary threat, imaginary and forceful, forceful because it is imaginary,” (100). Butler allows for a plurality of identity through performativity. “Identity,” Butler argues, “is [not] to be denied, over come, erased. None of us can fully answer to the demand to ‘get over yourself”, calling such an attempt “its own form of violence” (117-118).
ReplyDeleteIt would be redundant to say that performance, in Smith and Sherman’s case, is not the same as performatitivty, and that neither Smith nor Sherman accepts or transforms into another identity; however Nikki S. Lee’s photographic projects complicate this uneasy landscape even further. How is embodiment complicated in a digitally mediated age, and through digitally mediated performance locations?
The rise of the internet phenomenon known as Anonymous – as much a group embodiment/identifier as it is simultaneously a disembodiment – allows for performance without any concern for performative identifiers. Anonymous is a genderless, raceless, nameless cyber construct, never assuming an “official” iterable or readable embodiment, always in flux; in this perpetual state of non-being, Anonymous finds it’s strength: necessarily a plurality of identities, when the component parts operate in one direction, Anonymous functions as a site of powerful civil protest in the new millenium.
-Danny
In my opinion, the resounding theme in all of the pieces is identity. Butler challenged the entire formation of identities. What, or rather who forms our identity? She explored whether this is something we do ourselves or is done to us. She often concluded that it is something forced upon us and we seldom have a way of subverting it without punishment. Butler challenged me with a different but similar version of a concept I struggled with in the last module. I tend to, at least at first, identify individuals by their gender and then race. This idea has been so ingrained in me it is hard for me to conceive of another way.
ReplyDeleteThe remaining pieces each could spin off of Butler’s as a possible system or at least a facet of identity creation. “Technologies of the Self” explored the different ways in which an individual “acts upon himself” (3). In other words, how does he create his own identity? Elam’s piece highlighted the concept of performance creating identity for others. The performance of race throughout history has shaped not only what the “other” thought of race, but also what those of the race being performed saw it to mean. Anna Deavere Smith’s piece highlighted the difference between individual and group identity and how individual identities can be very diverse even within each group. Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee’s artwork were different ways of presenting or performing identity. They both inserted themselves into their art, specifically photography. They changed their identities constantly. Sherman changed hers via costuming, makeup, and wigs but Lee actually immersed herself in the lifestyle she was emulating. All of these pieces attempted to answer the question, at least in part, of how identity is formed and enacted.
- Heather
I find in Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter a hint of J.L. Austin’s anti-theatrical prejudice towards performatives that are essentially performances. Butler warns, “The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake” (234). Thus, she qualifies her assertion in Gender Trouble that drag is performative by pointing out the ways in which drag might work to reinforce the heterosexual matrix. For Butler, performativity “consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer” (234). As Butler formulates in her introduction, performativity becomes based on a citationality and iterability derived from Jacques Derrida and J.L. Austin. The focus is on regimes of discourse and power that through performatives regulate various identities. Despite the fact that Butler never provides a clear distinction between performance and performativity, it seems clear which she privileges. Like Austin’s suggestion that a performative utterance would be “in a peculiar way hollow” when performed theatrically, Butler views the conflation of performativity and performance as a threat of “reduction.”
ReplyDeleteHow then can we read the performances of Anna Deavere Smith, Nikki S. Lee, and Cindy Sherman as performativity? Butler makes it clear that her view of performativity does not include individualism, voluntarism, consumerism, or a choosing subject (15). Perhaps, the voluntary way in which an artist “puts on” a gender, race, or other identity might indicate Butler’s reticence towards performance. In this way, a representation of a performative might fail at being performative to be a representation. Why a theatrical citation might be less relevant then a citation in general society—as if the distinction could be made—Is a more difficult question. Instead, I would suggest that a performance might become performative in the moment in which it strategically iterates/cites differently. To perform performativity requires more than “truthful” reproduction/repetition, it also requires revision.
-Scott
Module 2 – Performing Raced and Gendered Bodies
ReplyDeleteOne of the most problematic discussions about race is the question of visibility and visual marking: how and to what extent is race seen? While commonly associated with visible, biological signs of difference, race is determined by a wide variety of technologies of sign systems, to use Foucault’s terminology, including speech, clothing, and discourse. Both sides can be seen in Yinka Shonibare’s discussion of his headless sculptures. At first glance, this work locates racial identification visually, in the face, whose absence therefore makes racial identification impossible; however, the racial mixing of other physical and contextual signifiers implies a recognition of their ability to signal race. These techniques are further exemplified in Anna Deavere Smith’s performance of Jewish and Black identities, which highlights the performative aspects of race, in Butler’s sense of “ritualized production” and reiteration of established norms (95). Butler also emphasizes the associative nature of racial recognition: “it is only on the condition of an association that conditions a naming that [indefinite] color becomes legible” (171). Photographer Nikki S. Lee combines the performance of norms with race by association in her chameleon projects, in which her race can be interpreted as Black, Asian, Hispanic, or White depending on her context and companions. These conscious performances and assumptions of racialized identity imply a difference from the imposition of gender and sex in Butler, in that they are chosen and assumed with less fear of reprisal and punishment. This is not to say that race is not a polemic and problematic category, but the contemporary mixing of race, together with the presence of less physically-defined racial categories, such as Jewish or Hispanic, makes it harder to recognize racial identity from physical characteristics alone, creating a greater need for other signifiers and, potentially, a greater freedom to choose a personal racial identity.
In Chapter 2 of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” she takes to task Jacques Lacan’s explanation of the mirrored reflection on the body ‘in pieces’ in his concept of the “Mirror Stage.” I would argue that this module reads the body instead through the observer’s lens but with, for me (and to some extent Butler), similar results. Butler rereads “The Mirror Stage” “as offering an implicit theory of ‘mirroring’ as a signifying practice[…]a kind of synecdochal extrapolation by which those pieces or parts come to stand[…]for the whole”(48).
ReplyDeleteHow we perceive identity in terms of intra- and inter-body performance is made up of a set of these parts—iterative daily performative practices that, in combination, are the bedrock for the construction of our own identities and the ways by which we identify others. Butler writes, “This repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition[…]This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint”(60).
In “Technologies of the Self” Michel Foucault writes that “the soul cannot know itself except by looking at itself in a similar element, a mirror”(8). There is more to it than this, though, when we apply Foucault’s technologies in concert with Butler. Subjects also know themselves by differentiation—they define themselves against what they are distinctly “not.”
By displaying enough of these “pieces” in concert, Yinka Shonibare forces observers to make assumptions about the identities of his headless subjects. In Anna Deavere Smith’s documentary theatre piece Fires in the Mirror, she selectively takes on pieces’ of her interviewees and, as a result, mirrors/repeats/signifies them. This gaze is both a mirror and a lens through which the observer makes determinations about others and him or herself.
I have little to no confidence in my understanding of what Foucault or Butler are talking about, but I will give it a shot. Foucault asserts that we formulate sexual identity through ‘technologies of the self’, which are the various interactions with and navigations through the complexities of the body, environment, and social apparati that the rest of us simply call ‘life’. His presentation was meant to historicize the development of his train of thought on the topic. Butler seems to go even deeper, attempting to deconstruct the body as matter in an almost Cartesian sense by basically stating: “I perform this sex, therefore I am this sex”. It is a nature vs. nurture type of analysis regarding the body and sexuality. Butler argues that biological assumptions about an individual’s ‘sex’ are influenced by social norms (technologies of self?) and that ‘sexing’, therefore, is a process through which individual identities are constantly reiterated and juxtaposed against those norms. The art work of Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee effectively illustrate these concepts. It is necessary to view their work as an exhibit, in my opinion, for each individual photograph, on its own, is relatively unimpressive. The deeper meaning behind their work becomes evident only when several pieces are juxtaposed with one another. It is the shift/metamorphosis itself that makes their artwork fascinating. And this my also be true of Ann Deavere Smith’s work as well. While her individual characters are excellent examples of transformation in their own right, when presented in conversation with one another they tell a ‘story’, a deep and rich narrative full of contradictions that invoke problematic inquiries and confusion for the viewer, which in turn engenders contemplation and forces recognition of how truly facile and superficial our performances and perceptions of identity can be.
ReplyDeleteIn "Bodies that Matter" Judith Butler describes the performative aspect of gender construction as “the forced reiteration of norms,” which is different than performance in that “performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation” (59). There is an element of constraint in performativity, which “impels and sustains performativity” (60). Performativity, then, is the continual reenactment of social norms. Butler emphasizes that power associated with performativity is not embodied in a subject; the constraint present is the “nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power” (171). Power perpetuates itself through performativity as power is rearticulated in normative behavior. So, how does one subvert the power of performativity? According to Butler, “the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation” (181). The weakness of normative categories is that the categories themselves are not stable; they do not adequately account for the diversity within the unified label. With Butler’s work in mind, consider the work of performance artist Nikki S. Lee. In Lee’s projects she embodies and performs different types of people, skaters and lesbians, elderly and schoolgirls. Not only does she adapt her appearance, she is physically challenged when acquiring new skills, such as skating or dancing. Lee then recruits a friend to take snapshots of her, in the company of the people she is performing, in everyday life situations. The snapshots feel real, genuine. Is Lee subverting normative performativity through her art? I honestly don’t know. In some projects, Lee challenges norms with the mere presence of her Asian body. In other projects, it appears that she is rearticulating normative stereotypes. Can performance subvert performativity? Yes, if it complicates rather than perpetuates performative norms.
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