Performative Acts and Gender Constitution : An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

TLDR

The chapter critiques naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality, arguing that feminist theory must view the body as an active process of embodying cultural and historical possibilities. It contends that gender identity is a performative accomplishment shaped by social sanction and taboo, drawing on theatrical, anthropological, and phenomenological insights. The authors expand the conventional notion of act to include both the constitutive and performative aspects of meaning, applying this enriched phenomenological framework to the gendered body.

Abstract

This chapter draws from theatrical, anthropological, and philosophical discourses, but mainly phenomenology, to show that what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality that assume that the meaning of women’s social existence can be derived from some fact of their physiology. For both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities, a complicated process of appropriation, which any phenomenological theory of constitution needs to describe. In order to describe the gendered body, a phenomenological theory of constitution requires an expansion of the conventional view of acts to mean both that which constitutes meaning and through which meaning is performed or enacted. The feminist appropriation of the phenomenological theory of constitution might employ the notion of an act in a richly ambiguous sense.