Friday, July 26, 2013
Week 3- Performing Raced and Gendered Bodies: Trans/national Subjectivity
As you explore the think through the links in the final module of our intensive course on theories of race and performance, think about the tools that Judith Butler, Judith Butler, and Robin Kelley give us to discuss the dynamic quality of racial identifications and in/voluntary acts associated with notions of race and performance. Speak to the intersections between their theories of how subjects constitute themselves. How does race complicate the theories of Foucault and Butler? Please use this prompt to incite ideas, however, you do not have to directly respond to it. Write freely with these considerations in mind and use your own performance examples.
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Judith Butler’s argument about the performative nature of gender can be transferred directly to race. Just as Butler distinguishes between a person’s gender, which is socially constructed, and a person’s biological sex, so is race a social construct and not an inherent biological quality. One’s racial identity, just as one’s gender identity, are constituted through performative acts on and through the body, shaped in the course of history. Butler argues that by changing performative acts one can challenge socially scripted gender identities (and thus racial identities, too), and thereby challenge systems of power and oppression.
ReplyDeleteThrough his concept of Technologies of the Self, Foucault goes in a similar direction as Butler, arguing that the self that is projected outwards is not something natural or essential, but something shaped by social norms, power struggles and self-regulation. However, while Butler’s performative acts seem to occur unconsciously as a result of reiterated behavior shaped by history, Foucault’s technologies seem to be actively undertaken practices that subjects employ to constitute themselves within and through systems of power. Both scholars agree that bodies which do not adhere to accepted social norms are punished or regulated. Deviation from social norms is often a violation of a strict hierarchical binary: the male-female (heteronormative) binary and/or the black-white binary. Challenging these binaries can function as a way to break up hierarchical system of oppression. Robin Kelley does that through his personal story of his racially mixed family, whose bodies do not conform to social expectations about race and are thus illegible. Robin’s concept of polyculturalism, too, challenges the hierarchy of the black-white-binary by opposing to it the notion of bodies in which different racial and cultural identities overlap and intersect, thus offering a more dynamic concept of culture. President Obama is both the embodiment of polyculturalism and propagator of it, as he is arguing for the recognition of a common cause and foundation of American of different races: the unity of the nation.
As a personal, addition: I really liked the poem Enuf by Ntozake Shange (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/enuf/), which to me seems to reflect Butler’s notion of gendered performative acts of the body and poses a challenge to it. Feel free to respond!
“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. […] I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue” (Obama, “A More Perfect Union”)
ReplyDeleteKelly points out in his essay “People in Me”, that nowadays not everybody still belongs to only one race and culture. We are polycultural now, having mixed heritages and cultural diversity, just as Obama makes clear in his speech, too. Not only our heritage, but also our history defines our identity. Obama is very aware of this fact and does not forget to mention the history of his wife’s family in order to have people to understand the history of his own family. Foucault states in the writing “Technologies of the Self”, that a person or subject can only exist in a historical context.
He goes on explaining, that people living in a specific structure can still work on their own happiness and have to take care of the self. In the movie “The Bucket List” a white, rich business man, called Edward, and a poor mechanic African-American man, called Carter, meet at a hospital, both diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. They are aware of dying soon and start doing all the things they want to experience before they die. They become “the doctor of [them]self” (Foucault,2 ) and are willing to find joy in their life. The movie applies to the systematic race theory, too, because both men are living in a time where white people are still the superior ones.
Even so Foucault does not consider race as being part of defining ourselves, we have to consider it in order to understand some situations and especially the history of people like Michelle or Barack Obama better. As Judith Butler says, we don’t have to be a boy or a girl; we can be something in between or even change completely our gender.
It is the same with race: we have to expand our definition of blackness, of our culture and of race. Nobody is what we first think he or she is on first sight and no matter what heritage or gender a person has should not affect our opinion about him or her.
Continuing the discussion from previous weeks, and more pointedly from Prof. Hodges Persely’s lecture on Nikki S. Lee and the “Hip Hop Project,” I would like to discuss how performativity, race and gender are all concepts that are intertwined in another. Even from the week two’s Tropic Thunder, we see in the film that performativity is displayed in language, as it is a cultural depository of race relations. The dominant vernacular codes that people associate with Americans are white (tone, vocabulary, pitch etc.), but in order to perform across racial lines, one must be fluent or aware of the vernacular discourse happening between races. Tropic Thunder samples recognized codes of blackness as does Nikki S. Lee, and by adapting these codes onto her body, she is able to ‘pass or perform’ as another.
ReplyDeleteJudith Butler also discusses the legibility of bodies, naturalized concepts of gender, and the instability of gender identity. Since publishing “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Butler has engaged academia in questioning how race has the same binary qualities as of the males/female relationship. “Consider that there is a sedimentation of gender norms that produces the peculiar phenomenon of a natural sex, or a real woman, or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and that this is a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another.” (Butler, 5) In this very telling statement, one can them see why I would make the leaping conclusion that not only does performativity apply to the male/female binary, but to the black/white one as well.
In “Racial Draft” and “State of the Union”, we see much of the same type of ‘sampling’ like in “The Hip Hop Project.” Self-adornment is the performative tool used along with vernacular in the case of Tracy Ulman and Dave Chapelle. They both challenge notions of self-representation and question what appears to be obvious: who can be black, white, British, Asian etc. in a very Foucauldian manner. These sketches negotiate identities in the matrix of power that Foucault explicates. In Technologies of the Self, we come to understand that power between races, genders, class and communities exists, but the subject is a historical construction that ‘acts’ within the limits of a socio-historical moment. Before concluding, I want to touch on Robin D.G. Kelley and his notion of polyculturalism. In contrast to multiculturalism and its fixed and concrete boundaries surrounding self-identification, Kelley leans towards a more flexible racial grammar that question and expands the discourse of blackness and the multiplicity of black identity. He asserts that race can be performative and it was poly from the beginning! What is fascinating to me, is trying to figure out how these multiple identifications can exist simultaneously, and how we as a society recognize race once it moves outside of normative codes of recognition.