Pure Performativity

At first I couldn’t think of any examples from other films we’ve viewed for class this semester that seem to apply to Butler’s essay, and in particular the bits on drag, in order to answer Matt’s last discussion question. But considering Butler’s insistence that gender is performative, and specifically her articulation that, in drag, “we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance”, her arguments seem applicable to most of the films we’ve watched (137). Butler begins the essay with a quote from Esther Newton’s Mother Camp on Gretta Garbo, an icon of cinema. The quote, from Parker Tyler, posits that “[acting] is all impersonation, whether the sex underneath is true or not” (Butler 128). Speaking specifically of Garbo, the context of the quote is within cinema, even if acting, of course can apply to theater as well. But the statement seems especially pertinent to film because of the inherent absence of any “original” physical presence—any “body” at all—in the performance seen on screen; what is presented to the filmic spectator is pure performance, of gender, race, class, et. al. And even though the conventional Hollywood film is meant to promote realism and believability of the characters on screen—hence making less explicit the pure performance—the repetition of character archetypes in film’s generic categories serves also as the repetition of these performances of normative identities, which themselves stand in greater relief and become reified as the repetition deemphasizes the immaterial narrative content. In this manner, the pure performativity of the filmic image and the subjects depicted therein act to reinforce the binary oppositions of heteronormative identities. Any deviation from these oppositional male/female gender performances on screen are relegated to the “safe” boundaries of normative sexual identity as comic relief with no individual agency or power, or as deviant that must be destroyed in the course of the narrative progression.