Gender performance

"I identify as ..."

There is an inevitable tension between saying that you identify as something and the notion of gender performance. A performance is something that can be evaluated. Gary Oldman is said to be brilliant in his performance as Churchill in a recent movie. I haven't seen it so I cannot say. I can tell you, however, that Brian Cox was awful in his performance as Churchill earlier this year. It would seem that performance requires a standard.

I should add that Cox was hampered by a very bad script. He also looks wrong for the part. Were those factors enough to make it impossible for him to succeed?

And that is where gender performance gets trick, really tricky, in a hurry.

Just this morning I was looking at definitions of gender performance provided by the Quora site. There are three definitions up as of today.

Here is the first:

Gender is part of what you might know as Performance theory. This theory states that we are, all of us, always performing. Gender is part of this theory because the way we present, whether masculine, feminine, or non-binary, is viewed and assessed by other people. As a trans woman I understand gender as a performance because I do not wake up flawless like Beyonce. I only present feminine after putting effort into it.

There is an interesting tension at the heart of this one. Our writer, whose name is Josephine Hoskins, says she is a woman. And yet she can only "present feminine after putting some effort into it". But notice who she chooses as an example of someone who doesn't need to do that. Beyoncé! That's a little odd because if there is anyone on the face of the earth who is a hard-working a skilled gender performer, it's Beyoncé. Beyoncé's fame is a function of her ability at gender performance. She does it so well that millions of women take her as a model (Beyoncé's fans are mostly girls and women). And there is a huge factual mistake here: Beyoncé does not wake up flawless. No one does. Beyoncé wakes up and starts performing her gender just as every single one of us does.

The flawless claim here is hiding another assumption, an assumption that Hoskins, as a trans person, no doubt struggles with. But how to put it. We can't simply take Hoskin's own self description "I am a woman" claims to be ontologically equivalent to "Beyoncé is a woman". From the perspective of gender theory, we cannot say that Beyoncé is "actually", "really" or "truly" a woman. So the only way out is to claim that Beyoncé is flawless, that she doesn't have to put effort into it. And that is factually wrong and insulting. For most of the "yous" in this world, Beyoncé puts a lot more effort into being Beyoncé than you put into being you and that is why she is so successful at it.

Okay, but if we stop circling around, we might want to claim (while pretending that we are "admitting") that Beyoncé actually has "something" that she builds on. What that something is we have not defined but if we're going to stay within the confines of gender theory, and I plan to for this post, that something cannot be anything biological. So what is it?

One tempting answer is to flesh out Hoskins answer and say that through genetic fluke Beyoncé is blessed with a face and body that corresponds to existing notions of femininity. This is an attempt to say that it is not the biological facts that are determinative but that these biological facts just happen to correspond with a cultural fact, a "social construct" in the jargon of gender theory (and gender theory is laden with jargon). That has two kinds of problems. The first is that it's circular: we're effectively saying that she succeeds at something because she genetically matches that something when the task was to define what that something is in the first place. The second, and bigger problem, is that it makes light of Beyoncé's considerable achievement that she is one of a small group of strong and determined women who have created a new notion of feminine beauty that challenges dominant notion of blonde and white. That took courage and a lot more hard work than most of us are capable of. Sorry, but in the self-presentation sweepstakes, Beyoncé is queen of the world. If there was a gender performance category in the Olympics Beyoncé would have taken home the gold medal in at least 4 of the last 5 games.

And that provides another reminder of why we cannot attribute Beyoncé's success to whatever it is that she was born with. At the Olympic level you are necessarily competing with people who have also been extraordinary gifted. In the rarefied atmosphere where Beyoncé lives you either perform at a very high level or you crash to the ground. Natural gifts mean nothing there.

 Back at the beginning we had two seemingly different statements. "I identify as ..." and then Hoskins' "I am a woman". If, however, we refuse to accept any definition of woman, then both claims—either to "identify as" or "I am"—are meaningless.

But Beyoncé proves otherwise. Just by being Beyoncé and being very, very good at being Beyoncé she proves something about femininity and that is that performance matters. We are, as Hoskins puts it, "viewed and assessed by other people" and some people are assessed as being better at being a woman than other people are.