Blogpost #4
Built from fictional, poetic, and theoretical texts, recorded performances, and scholarly analysis, the corpus of work (no pun intended) we were assigned to read for the fourth, and final, leg of our course, “Performance and the Gendered Body,” was generically heterogeneous. In my view, for the task of unpacking discourse on gender and queerness, with one foot the individual and the other in the collective, should we accept binaristic thinking, this kind of formal variety is essential. It becomes even more so in the context of performance: a genre- and form-defying category that encompasses the deliberate and the subliminal, the visceral and the reasoned.
My belief in the particular gravity of diversity in this discourse was only reaffirmed by the in-class discussions that emerged less from the texts themselves, but rather from their juxtaposition, or perhaps more specifically the negative space dividing them. Though I admit that they are relatively proximal to each other as compared to other assigned texts, in my view no two works signal how conducive negative space can be to this mode of analysis better than Butler’s seminal text Gender Trouble and the relationship outlined therein between their now-ubiquitous performance theory of gender, and Wind of Fury.
Both Gender Trouble and Wind of Fury teem with corporeal imagery such that the feminine body, or at least the descriptors Butler and Vasyakina attach to it, acts a vector for thinking about “woman” as both a gendered, sexed body and a political class. This is admittedly a vast oversimplification, but gestures to the tension between gendering and sexing and the way these processes generate, or are generated by, politicisation stand out in both texts.
To shed light on this juxtaposition, I will provide an example. Near the beginning of Wind of Fury, for example, Vasyakina writes:
“My mother has become an Amazon
she sat upon a boulder
and in one stroke cut off her left breast
To make it easier to hold the bow
To leave nothing for the feeding of babies
Her right breast became heavy wood long ago.”
As I feel generally holds true for the text, this particular excerpt makes clear that motherhood is a burden; that children, even if loved and bound to their mothers by shared experience, are categorically “the fruit of domestic violence.” Important to acknowledge here is that, of course, Vasyakina’s point is not about the mother qua individual, but rather as a social and political class, an idea to which Butler also gestures.
However, while Vasyakina presents womanhood ostensibly as blood inheritance, defined by physical Butler examines more closely the way in which womanhood is assigned. In “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” they consider womanhood, and feminism with it, not as an inherited, innate sisterhood into which women are born, but—though this is again an oversimplification—one that shared performance and mimicry generate. Butler poses to that end the question: “Is ‘the body’ itself shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex?”
The framing of this question is interesting, especially because I feel it does bear a striking similarity Vasyakina’s characterisation of womanhood. However, the notion that the body itself—and specifically the organs we might deem female—is not an emblem of subjugation but is rather shaped and indeed created by it marks an important point of departure, and one which questions the centrality of biology to the bondage of women.
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