All these notes are direct quotes.
Gender is not stable … it is .. a stylised repetition of acts. .. Gender is instituted through the stylisation of the body … understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and enactments … constitute … an abiding gendered self. … The appearance of substance, … a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience… come to believe and to perform. Gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts … a different sort of repeating in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.
Constituting acts … create the identity of the actor .. as … a compelling illusion, an object of belief. Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as perforative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status.
Physiological and biological causalities structure meanings that embodied existence assumes in the context of lived experience. The existence … of the material … dimensions of the body are not denied by distinct from the cultural meanings. .. The body is … a continual and incessant materialisation of possibilities.
Gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. Gender is not a fact - the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender and without those acts, there would no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fiction is obscured by the credibility of its own production.
Phenomenology shares with feminist analysis a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience. Feminist theory has sought to understand… systematic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices, [using} analysis of ostensibly personal situations to clarify through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context. ... [This analysis] delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me.
Latent in the personal is political formulations of feminist theory, a supposition that the life-world of gender relations is constituted, through … the historically mediated acts of individuals. … The body becomes its gender through a series of acts … consolidated through time … : a legacy of sedimented acts rather than.. predetermined. … This is a sedimentation that … has produced a set of corporeal steles which, … appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another.
Feminist cultural anthropology and kinship studies have shown how cultures … regulate and guarantee the production, exchange and consumption of material goods, but also reproduce bonds of kinship itself, which require taboos and a punitive regulation of reproduction to effect that end. Compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced…. through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with 'natural' appearances and 'natural' heterosexual dispositions.
There are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender, in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions. … Gender is an act which has been rehearsed. Complex components that go into an act must be distinguished in order to understand the kind of [repeated performance] … which acting one's gender invariably is. Repetition … is the mundane and ritualised form of their legitimation. Performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. … The gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.
Genders then can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. Gender is stabilised, polarised, rendered discrete and intractable. … Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. … There is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.
Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.
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