More-than-human gender performativity

ABSTRACT

This article engages with Judith Butler’s concepts of gender performativity and materiality as they develop from Bodies That Matter (1993) to The Force of Nonviolence (2020). The article shows how Butler has moved toward a materialism that is less dependent on language and thus open for animals and other nonhuman creatures to become intelligible as liveable lives. At the same time, however, Butler has not expanded the concept of gender performativity into a correspondingly more-than-human direction, which raises the issue of how to understand gender performativity when nonhumans act as living matters alongside humans. To develop such a full-fledged concept of gender performativity, the article turns to new materialism, in particular the work of Jane Bennett. Combining Butler’s concept of gender performativity with Bennett’s work on vibrant matter, the article proposes a new concept of ‘more-than-human gender performativity,’ defined as an assembled enactment of multiple forces that in the very entanglement of human and nonhuman modes of life articulates a multiplicity of gender identities. The article concludes by illustrating the relevance of such a concept by using the recent work of the Danish artist Rasmus Myrup as its point of reference.

KEYWORDS:

• Judith Butler
• gender performativity
• materiality
• Jane Bennett
• new materialism
• entanglements
• nonhumans
• ecology

Acknowledgements

I thank Rasmus Myrup and Rosita Kær for inspiring me to think with the exhibition, Salon des Refusés. I also thank Lars Tønder, Cecilia Åsberg, Mads Ejsing, the editor, and the three reviewers at Distinktion for careful readings and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some scholars have even called Butler a ‘failed materialist’ (Gamble, Hanan, and Nail 2019; Kirby 2006; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 48).

2 I return to Karen Barad below (section 1).

3 Among scholars who are interested in similar questions is Stacy Alaimo (2010) who shows how natural environments affect human bodies differently according to their class, gender, and race. Moreover, Sara Ahmed (2019) argues that restroom doors have the capacity to either pluralize or sediment human gender identities, and literature on queer ecofeminism (Gaard 1997; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010) turns to how, sexuality, and nonhumans intertwine. Yet, none of these thinkers proposes a conceptualization of more-than-human gender performativity to better grasp the potentials of human-nonhuman entanglements.

4 Women, people of color, and nature have historically been associated with the body rather than with the mind, which have made them become inferior in Western Cartesian thinking (and before that) (Plumwood 2003; Grosz 1994; De Beauvoir 1981).

5 (Self-preservation with the meaning of expanding connections rather than staying the same).

6 On Butler and Spinoza see also (Sharp 2011, Chapter 4).

7 What Butler calls a chiastic relationship might be referred to as entanglements in new materialist literature. Later in Senses of the Subject, Butler suggests that the relation between language and body is ‘partially chiastic’ (2015, 15).

8 Again in Senses of the Subject, Butler writes about the relationality of humans and nonhumans by turning to the support of infrastructure. They write, ‘Those supports are not simply passive structures. A support must support, and so must both be and act. A support cannot support without supporting something, so it is defined as both relational and agentic (2015, 14). This quote stresses the ambiguity Butler embodies on the role and power of nonhuman bodies. They write that nonhumans are agentic without elaborating or showing how that is the case.

9 Vibrant Matter can be read as Bennett’s ‘nonhuman turn’, in which she extends her former focus on human affect (2016) to the vitality of bodies more generally.

10 (Coccia 2018; Simard 2021; Kohn 2013)

11 (Butler 2006, 193).

12 (Bennett 2010, 31).

13 Another way to say this is that the concept seeks to bridge the two theoretical traditions within contemporary feminist theory: gender theory and sexual difference theory (see i.e. Butler and Braidotti, ‘Feminism by Any Other Name.’). It is beyond the scope of the article to account for these traditions.

14 On the differences between posthumanism and more-than-humanism, see also the debate on strong versus weak ontology as one way to think about it (Bennett 2000; Bennett 2016, Chapter 8).

15 See also (Haraway 2016; Neimanis 2017; Skiveren 2020; A. Tsing 2016; Smith 2020).

16 For sexualized relations between humans and natural places see (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010, Introduction).

17 For example, think about how eating meat is associated with masculinity.

18 Rasmus Myrup, Salon des Refusés, 2020, installation with natural materials and clothing. Courtesy: Rasmus Myrup and Jack Barrett Gallery, New York. ‘Heksejagt’, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2020. Photo: David Stjernholm

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Notes on contributors

Anne-Sofie Dichman

Anne-Sofie Dichman is PhD-fellow at the department of political science at University of Copenhagen. Her research interests lie at the intersections between feminist theory, new materialism, and climate politics.