ACTING!!!
William Shakespeare is thought to be the originator of modern language. Shakespeare birthed ideas about language using style, syntax and iambic pentameter that perhaps society only now comprehends. His contributions to the English lexicon could regard him as the Elizabethan Jerry Seinfeld, coining terms, words and phrases we use in our every day.
One of his most revolutionary modes of character insight involved breaking the fourth wall and giving disclosure into one’s mind and thoughts with the soliloquy. In As You Like It, Shakespeare begins Jacque’s monologue with the now famous line: “All the world’s stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Judith Butler’s essay entitled, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution brought Shakespeare’s play and Jacque’s famous line to mind.
In Act II Scene VII, Jacque’s line asks the viewing audience to ponder the possibility that they too, like Jacque and those he witnesses, are all actors preforming on the world’s stage. In her essay, Judith Butler theorizes that gender as assigned to men and women is possibly an act generated from socially learned behaviors and conditioning saying, “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time — an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” Furthermore, Butler likens the safe distinction society holds between an actor and a real-life encounters stating, “the various conventions which announce that this is only a play allows strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life.” Simply put, when confronted by someone who challenges the gender norms on stage, the security is in knowing they are performing. This performance gives the viewer a sheltered distance between what is acting and what is real. A safety created by Joyce Hyser’s 1985 performance as Terry Griffith in, Just One of the Guys, or Amanda Bynes’ 2006 performance as Viola in, She’s the Man.
Just as the character Rosalind in Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, both actresses’ in the modern day version take on the role that requires them by their circumstance, to dress up and assume the role of a confident boy to infiltrate a group of guys. Where love is a central theme in the play and the two movies, the reveal of Rosalind, Terry and Viola gives way to the feelings they harbored towards a boy. The stage is perhaps what makes these girls ruse forgivable, both to the audience and to their love-interest. We accept this act, thus we accept their love and don’t hold their disguises against them.
On the other hand, the same might not be said upon meeting someone who is otherwise outside the social norm. Suddenly, the notion of security gives way to vulnerability, this is not an act and that is not a costume. Butler says about this, “The transvestite, however, can do more than simply express the distinction between appearance and reality that structures a good deal of popular thinking about gender identity.” This is in the flesh and blood and reality challenging a person’s comfort level, when unable to suspend their disbelief. Butler seeks to question society’s predisposed notions about gender. Theorizing that it is within these assigned gender roles that we feel safe and secure, not only personally but socially as well. To state it simply, I am a man, because my father was a man, and thus, society is safe in perceiving and accepting me as a man.
However, there is a larger question proposed in Judith Butler’s essay. This larger question seeks to determine which came first; biological sexual assignment through physiology and evolution, or mandated gender tasks through social structures. This is a deep theory in understanding a more existential question of ones self. In aping who have reared us, are we truly authentic to ourselves, or are we merely acting in a form we feel befits us. Butler asks us to suppose a world where gender is not an issue, “The prescription is invariably more difficult, if only because we need to think a world in which acts, gestures, the visual body, the clothed body, the various physical attributes usually associated with gender, express nothing.” Where gender does not dictated or imped oneself from achieving the goals of life without such limitations, “In a sense, the prescription is not utopian, but consists in an imperative to acknowledge the existing complexity of gender which our vocabulary invariably disguises to bring that complexity into a dramatic cultural interplay without punitive consequences.”
This is perhaps why, As You Like It, Just One of the Guys and She’s the Man as comedies are successful in its idea; gender is merely a gimmick used to secure a trust and subsequent love. But imagine if Rosalind, Terry and Viola’s gender wasn’t an issue, or didn’t exist in the context of what we socially deem normal and acceptable. Maybe they would never have had to don a costume and assume the male form in an effort to gain acceptance. This is the theory Butler entertains stating, “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.” Likewise, this is the theory that we are merely performing in our assigned gender roles, whether comfortable or not in that assumed role, that William Shakespeare offered to us in his play, four hundred years before Judith Butler’s thought provoking essay and Hollywood’s comical remakes.
