Performing for Judy B
This artist is liberated by Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity
If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a ‘ground’ will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time.
-Judith Butler in Gender Trouble
I discovered Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble during my first semester in grad school. I admit that I couldn’t dissect every sentence, but something inside of me — breaking out of me — understood the heart of it.
I had been introduced to critical theory a year or so before in undergrad, and I’d read everything by Foucault that I could get my hands upon. Still, I knew nothing of queer theory.
And so, when I met Judy B, I was confronted by my own gender trouble.
I’d fallen for someone, I started to read them as butch, and then I stared in the mirror for a very long time. I couldn’t just pretend it didn’t happen.
Judy B first reveals what happens through the male gaze. Gender trouble feels like a “scandal” because you almost feel tricked when first confronted by the reality that you’ve always gotten it wrong.
You’re so used to desiring or being desired by prince charming, and then you meet them/her/him:
…the sudden intrusion, the unanticipated agency, of a female ‘object’ who inexplicably returns the glance, reverses the gaze, and contests the place and authority of the masculine position.
And boy, they’re hot. And you know you’re crushing on them because you feel the sweats through your body.
Honestly, I may have become too overly conscious of my gender performance at first. I stumbled a lot trying to find queer lovers, let alone make friends.
My outward appearance often betrayed my sheltered past: no tattoos, no body piercings. My hair was still it’s natural color.
I started to talk about the tattoos that I imagined getting to feel like I could fit in and carry a conversation about anything other than theory.
One of the first colleagues I knew to be openly gay told me I was overthinking things. He said I shouldn’t analyze queerness.
Every day after, I was trying to prove that I wasn’t just questioning.
Now, I wish I’d just gone to the LGBTQ+ center, but I was too shy about these things.
Here I was, a “baby queer,” being asked theoretical questions about disentangling sex from gender and the importance of “performance.”
I started to draw because I didn’t really know how to put into words what was going through my head. I started to dress up, take selfies and draw self-portraits.
I was performing for Judy B, and I wanted everyone to know.
Gender is fluid and it’s relational. It’s not a fixed thing. It morphs as it’s constructed by the things surrounding us, permeating our worlds everyday, whether conscious or not.
We get these messages every day, in word and picture — through music, film, ads, friends, family, instant messages — but we don’t notice them. We just respond to them and then repeat those responses over and over, until they feel almost innate.
These patterns become inscribed in our brains like rote memory.
Then something triggers a shift in thinking, routine breaks down, and the predicted pattern fails.
When this happened to me, I didn’t ever have much of a chance to process it. The shame, the guilt, the faith, shoved under the table. I didn’t even really want to talk about it much.
I cut my hair short, and my professor approved.
I came out almost immediately using academic terminology. I found speech through theory.
Theory saved me. Theory was my crutch when religious doctrine failed me.
Writers like Judy B, Jack Halberstam and Alison Bechdel were the only voices I could connect with. They gave me a truer sense of me.
The biggest critique of my early academic writing was that I used too many quotes. But perhaps I needed to; there were gaps I was still trying to fill in. I was clinging to the citations and the connecting words, even though I may have used them all wrong sometimes.
I was hiding in the jargon. I didn’t really know how to use my words.
I still hardly know the right word sometimes. Occasionally, I wonder why I still only list “she/her/hers” as my pronouns when “they/them/theirs” would fit many of the characters that embody the fantasies I create in art.
Because gender is performative, how can I make art without talking to myself and to others, or to a camera?
I recently found out that my first queer crush was also a performer of drag.
Judy B, of course, also wrote profusely about drag:
In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself — as well as its contingency.
Today time drags, and yet every chance at love around me is fleeting. I exist alone in a space where it’s easy to fall back into my body, devoid of meaning.
I feel more alive when I dress up. I need to dress up to undress.
I blare music. I write and now I perform to the beats. The music exploding in my ears, not just echoing around the room, helps me move.
I hear things out loud, listening better when it’s not straight. I read deeply, even into my bodily experience of textual bodies.
I snap pictures of myself and my world constantly as I present scenes, objects and ideas through my own onlooking.
I’m queer; I date on the spectrum. And yet still, to this day, I often don’t feel queer enough.
Am I now stuck in auto-theory?
Everything still feels a bit like an encounter with myself, like I am yet to exit my coming of age.
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