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the gay utopia julia serano performance piece skip to main skip to sidebar map inhabitants adult content thursday december 20 2007 julia serano performance piece if one more person tells me that all gender is performance i think i am going to strangle them what s most annoying about that sound bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty i took a gender studies class and you didn t sort of way which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender it is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals all gender is chromosomes or all gender is socialization in reality gender is all of these things and more in fact if there s one thing that every person in this room should be able to agree on it s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess it s like a junior high school mixer where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another and with the external expectations that other people place on us sure i can perform gender if i want i can curtsy or throw like a girl or bat my eyelashes but performance doesn t explain why some behaviors and ways of being come more naturally to me than others it offers no insight into the countless restless nights i spent as a pre teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that i should be female it doesn t capture the very real physical and emotional changes i experienced when i hormonally shifted from testosterone to estrogen performance doesn t begin to address the fact that during my transition i acted the same wore the same t shirts jeans and sneakers that i always had yet once people started reading me as female they began treating me very differently when we talk about my gender as though it were a performance it seems to me that we let the audience with all of their interpretations prejudices and assumptions completely off the hook i know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like all gender is performance all gender is drag and gender is just a construct they seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction a facade a figment of our imaginations and of course this is a convenient strategy provided that you are not a trans woman who lacks the means to have her legal sex changed to female and who thus runs the real risk of being locked up in an all male jail cell provided that you re not a trans man who has to navigate the discrepancy between his male identity and female history during job interviews and first dates whenever i hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance it always reminds me of that stephen colbert gag where he insists that he doesn t see race it s easy to fictionalize an issue when you are not fully in touch with all of the ways in which you are privileged by it almost every day of my life i deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake people who make a point of calling me effeminate rather than feminine people who slip up my pronouns only after they find out that i m trans but never beforehand people who insist on third sexing me with labels like mtf boy girl he she she male ze hir anything but simply female because i m transsexual i am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when i am simply being myself so it seems to me that this strategy of fictionalizing gender will only ever serve to marginalize me further so i ask you can t we find new ways of speaking shouldn t we be championing new slogans that empower all of us whether trans or non trans queer or straight female and or male and or none of the above instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that let s recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it it s an amalgamation of bodies identities and life experiences subconscious urges sensations and behaviors some of which develop organically and others of which are shaped by language and culture instead of arguing that gender is any one single thing let s start describing it as a holistic experience instead of dismissing all gender as performance let s admit that sometimes gender is an act and other times it isn t and since we can t get inside one another s minds we have no way of knowing whether any given person s gender is sincere or contrived let s fess up to the fact that when we make judgments about other people s genders we re typically basing it on our own assumptions and we all know what happens when you assume right let s stop claiming that certain genders and sexualities reinforce the gender binary in the past that tactic has been used to dismiss butches and femmes bisexuals trans people and our partners and feminine people of every persuasion gender is not simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer than thou hipsters how about this let s stop pretending that we have all the answers because when it comes to gender none of us is fucking omniscient instead of trying to fictionalize gender let s talk about all of the moments in life when gender feels all too real because gender doesn t feel like drag when you re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress and gender doesn t feel like a performance when for the first time in your life you finally feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others and gender doesn t feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body personality identity and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours let s stop trying to deconstruct gender into non existence and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable varied profound and intricate so don t dare dismiss my gender as a construct drag or a performance because my gender is a work of non fiction 2007 julia serano used by permission onward paul mullins art backward vom marlowe girl yoji related pleasures eric berlatsky lone woolf and cubs jennifer baumgardner fruitopia ma rainey prove it on me blues julia serano s website 1 comment russell said the whole gender performance thing is ridiculous especially in light of what butler meant re performativity of gender performative doesn t equal performance the latter word is taken from speech theory a performative speech act is one that enacts what is being said like how saying i pronounce you man and wife actually makes someone married what gender performativity means then is that by saying you re a man you re a man or by saying you re a woman or a genderqueer or anything else you are whatever you re asserting that s what it s about gender being in the eye of the asserter not the beholder or the doctor gender is performance is just a misunderstanding of the language october 6 2008 at 4 17 pm post a comment newer post older post home subscribe to post 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