From: "Hannah Miyamoto" <hsmiyamoto@msn.com>
To: Intersex-Androgynous@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 14:39:23 -0500
Subject: Re: [Intersex-Androgynous] Re: Newcome

<<how many genders are there?  Three?>>
 
    "Gender" is a social construction--a set of social roles that are
assigned to individuals and said individuals are expected to fill those
roles.  In the U.S., Canada, the British Isles, Europe, Australia and New
Zealand, there are definitely only two, man/boy, woman/girl.

    In contrast, "Sex" is considered a biological fact:  Male, Female and
everyone else.  As you already know, "Intersex" is not a sex in itself,
since intersexed people vary widely in biology.  But it is definitely a
category in which to put everyone with some degree of anomaly in sex
differentiation.
 
    Gender can be broken down into at least three categories:  Gender 
role, Gender identity, Gender performance.

    Gender role is what I just talked about.  two sexes, two gender roles
for the two sexes, everybody of male sex is supposed to "act like a man,"
everyone of female sex must "be a lady."  Everyone not in one sex or the
other -- is either surgically and pharmaceutically manipulated to fit one 
of the sex or . . . thrown in the discard.

    Gender identity is what the individual believes their gender role 
should be.  A transgender person believes her or his role should be other 
than that assigned to them.  But technically speaking, any feminist woman 
or man is transgender because she or he is dissatisfied with their 
assigned gender role to some degree.  There are also people who are not 
comfortable with the role of either gender -- sometimes called 
"androgynous," although that is not what I held the word to mean when I 
started this group.

    Gender performance is the actual "performance" of an individual of 
their gender.  Like any role, there are actors, and they perform that 
role as best they can.  "All the world is a stage, and we are merely 
players."  Some people don't perform their role very well -- either 
because they don't want to, or they are physically hindered from a "good 
performance."  The former are transgendered persons, while the second 
group I consider part of the intersexed.
 
I commend this to your consideration.
 
In Sisterhood, Hannah

From: scfeldman@juno.com
To: androgynes@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 13:14:01 -0500
Subject: Components of Gender, by Stephe Feldman

[. . .]

     About a year and a half after having written that article
[i.e., Components of Gender], I read Queer Theory, Gender Theory: 
An Instant Primer, by Riki Wilchins, and was seemingly vindicated 
for my views about gender performance.

     Here are two relevant quotes from Queer Theory, Gender 
Theory: An Instant Primer:

|Link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/androgynes/message/10686
|To: androgynes@yahoogroups.com
|Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:02:25 -0500
|From: scfeldman@juno.com
|Subject: Gender is Performative, Not a Performance
|
|>Re Re: [androgynes] Useful links,
|>on Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:32:32 +0000
|>Nosferatu das Vampir <nosferatudasvampir@...> writes:
|>
|>[Judith Butler] proposes the quite Foucauldian notion that 
|>gender is performance.
|
|      According to Riki Wilchins, in Queer Theory, Gender 
|Theory: An Instant Primer (Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 1 
|August 2004.  ISBN 1555837980), this is a misconception.  In 
|Wilchin's view, Butler says that gender is performative, not a 
|performance per se.  There is a difference.
|
|      From page 142 of Queer Theory, Gender Theory:
|
||      Butler believes that what we see as gender is
|| performatively produced.  This has been widely misinterpreted
|| as "all gender is just a performance," something she not only
|| didn't say but with which she very much disagrees.  At a time
|| when youth are increasingly aware of gender's elasticity and
|| symbolic displays, when Hilary Swank wins an Oscar for playing
|| Brandon Teena and Harvey Fierstein wins a Tony for playing
|| Hairspray's Edna Turnblad on Broadway, when college teens
|| stage drag king parties, the notion of "gender as performance"
|| is probably with us for good.
||
||      Performatives are the name for special kinds of speech
|| that also qualify as official social acts.  It sounds a little
|| obscure, but consider that the words "I now pronounce you
|| husband and wife" -- when uttered by the right person at the
|| right time before the right audience -- create a marriage
|| between a couple.
|
|Stephe Feldman, androgyne two-spirit <scfeldman@juno.com>
|Androgyne Online <http://androgyne.0catch.com/> webmaster
|Chang Cheh movies <http://changcheh.0catch.com> webmaster

     Then, three weeks later, came the ultimate corroboration, 
when I discovered an interview where Judith Butler discussed the 
fallout from her influential 1989 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism 
and the Subversion of Identity -- which is pretty much the source 
of what has come to be the theory of "gender performance" -- in
the context of her then-new (1993) book, Bodies That Matter: On 
the Discursive Limits of Sex.

|Link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/androgynes/message/10765
|To: androgynes@yahoogroups.com
|Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 22:30:25 -0500
|From: scfeldman@juno.com
|Subject: Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with 
|Judith Butler
|
|     Here is another example of gender being performative as
|opposed to a performance:
|
|[From Google's cache of http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm ,
|since this article is not currently online otherwise:]
|
|Extracts from Gender as Performance:
|An Interview with Judith Butler
|
|Interview by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, London, 1993.
|
|Full version originally published in Radical Philosophy 67
|(summer 1994).  (c) Radical Philosophy Ltd, 1994.  These 
|extracts are reprinted here with the kind permission of Radical 
|Philosophy Ltd.
|
|RP: A lot of people like Gender Trouble because they liked the
|idea of gender as a kind of improvisational theatre, a space
|where different identities can be more or less freely adopted 
|and explored at will.  They wanted to get on with the work of
|enacting gender, in order to undermine its dominant forms.
|However, at the beginning of Bodies That Matter you say that, of
|course, one doesn't just voluntaristically construct or
|deconstruct identities.  It's unclear to us to what extent you
|want to hold onto the possibilities opened up in Gender Trouble
|of being able to use transgressive performances such as drag to
|help decentre or destabilise gender categories, and to what
|extent you have become sceptical about this.
|
|Butler: The problem with drag is that I offered it as an example
|of performativity, but it has been taken up as the paradigm for
|performativity.  One ought always to be wary of one's examples.
|What's interesting is that this voluntarist interpretation, this
|desire for a kind of radical theatrical remaking of the body, is
|obviously out there in the public sphere.  There's a desire for 
|a fully phantasmatic transfiguration of the body.  But no, I 
|don't think that drag is a paradigm for the subversion of 
|gender.  I don't think that if we were all more dragged out 
|gender life would become more expansive and less restrictive.  
|There are restrictions in drag.  In fact, I argued toward the 
|end of the book that drag has its own melancholia.
|
|It is important to understand performativity -- which is 
|distinct from performance -- through the more limited notion of
|resignification.  I'm still thinking about subversive 
|repetition, which is a category in Gender Trouble, but in the 
|place of something like parody I would now emphasise the complex 
|ways in which resignification works in political discourse.  I 
|suspect there's going to be a less celebratory, and less 
|popular, response to my new book.  But I wanted to write against 
|my popular image.  I set out to make myself less popular, 
|because I felt that the popularisation of Gender Trouble -- even 
|though it was interesting culturally to see what it tapped into, 
|to see what was out there, longing to be tapped into -- ended up 
|being a terrible misrepresentation of what I wanted to say!
|
|[. . . ] It is important to distinguish performance from
|performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter
|contests the very notion of the subject.  The place where I try
|to clarify this is toward the beginning of my essay "Critically
|Queer", in Bodies that Matter, I begin with the Foucauldian
|premise that power works in part through discourse and it works
|in part to produce and destabilise subjects.  But then, when one
|starts to think carefully about how discourse might be said to
|produce a subject, it's clear that one's already talking about a
|certain figure or trope of production.  It is at this point that
|it's useful to turn to the notion of performativity, and
|performative speech acts in particular -- understood as those
|speech acts that bring into being that which they name.  This is
|the moment in which discourse becomes productive in a fairly
|specific way.  So what I'm trying to do is think about the
|performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the capacity
|to produce what it names.  Then I take a further step, through
|the Derridean rewriting of Austin, and suggest that this
|production actually always happens through a certain kind of
|repetition and recitation.  So if you want the ontology of this,
|I guess performativity is the vehicle through which ontological
|effects are established.  Performativity is the discursive mode
|by which ontological effects are installed.  Something like 
|that.
|
|[. . .]

[. . .]

Stephe Feldman, androgyne two-spirit <scfeldman@juno.com>
Androgyne Online <http://androgyne.0catch.com/> webmaster
Chang Cheh movies <http://changcheh.0catch.com> webmaster
MySpace page for Stephe <http://www.myspace.com/66747276>