Gender’, ‘Performance’ and the potential of ‘Bisexuality’.
When bodies do matter
I concur with Judith Butler that gender is a performance, a drag depiction of what we understand male and female should ‘be’. I will use some of Butler’s arguments and ideas of the body and gender as drag as performance as parody to explore gender in the context of this question but also to explore how bisexuality can also be read in these terms, and how this potentially upsets and dismantles sexuality and sexual identities, including it’s ‘own’.
If gender is a man or a woman and sexuality is a man & woman or woman & woman or man & man, then sexuality is as much performance, as much ‘drag’ as gender. If gender is constructed and parodic then it makes the categories of sexuality redundant outside of their socially constructed and performed ‘realities’. Therefore if ‘lesbian’ doesn’t exist then ‘bisexual’ doesn’t either and if there can be no ‘bisexual’ there can be no exclusion.
The bisexual kiss is a concept with no real performed meaning but it also throws into question a lesbian kiss or straight kiss because if gender is performance they are all actions performed within a constructed meaning understood only when placed.
Can we forget whose mouth we are kissing if we are performing a bisexual kiss?
Butler asks, ‘is “the body” or “the sexed body” the firm foundation on which gender and systems of compulsory sexuality operate? Or is “the body” itself shaped by political forces with strategic interests in keeping that body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex?’ (p164 GT) I will take that stance here, then, that the body is gendered in a social sense, interpellated as male or female from birth and socially constructed as such from then on. Within feminist political discourse the body is bounded and constituted as female/girl/woman in relation to patriarchal oppression and heterosexualism to keep woman in place as ‘other’ and subordinate. What then is ‘woman’ in a context outside of that ideology, that is, what is ‘woman’ in a feminist and/or lesbian context? If ‘woman’ is constructed in society and doesn’t ‘exist’ outside of that, where is she and what is she in a feminist and lesbian description? If political forces and strategic interests keep a body bounded, then surely this is the same when it is spoken of as lesbian, as feminist: undermining and challenging patriarchal/heterosexist discourses and material oppressions does not stop a woman being a woman, but in a way reinforces her ‘womanness’ by virtue of the labels ‘feminist’ and ‘lesbian’. If a lesbian is a woman who fucks and loves women or even a woman who is politically identified with women the very fact of her being a woman is as fundamental as a woman not being a man is to patriarchy.
So within feminism, within the sexual identities of lesbian and gay, where these are usually read as women exclusively and men exclusively, surely there is importance invested in these bodies being recognisably gendered as male and female? Following from this, the fact that the bisexual person fucks both men and women is significant here also because it is only when these gendered bodies are acknowledged as such that bisexuality is read as bisexuality that is a person who fucks both men and women. For those who hold bisexuality as either suspicious intrusion or queer saviour, it matters.
The fantasy of stability
Butler writes, ‘if the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true not false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.’
Stable identity is as important for the lesbian or gay man as it is for the heterosexual. That gender is neither true or false is something I concur with and although we can deconstruct the idea of gender and present it as fabrication & fantasy, for the lived experience it has material effect and for the agency of the gendered person and the sexual person it has very real significance, effecting them as personal/political beings. For a ‘sense of self’ this often presents the need to name oneself and to stick to that name, to defend one’s right to call oneself that name and to use that name as an example of how we exist in the wider society, where the oppressions exist, how they work, and what we can do to overcome them. For those of sexualities outside of ‘heterosexual’ this is a day-to-day lived experience of validity and great import. It informs the repeated discourse of their life and places them in a particular political stance.
If this is eroded by the possibility that their identity may not be as stable as they assert or believe, that is, if their stability is questioned or challenged, it becomes a threat not only to their sense of agency, but to their political standing. Therefore, it is somewhat understandable that bisexuality, instead of being universally embraced by the lesbian and gay movements and community is seen widely as a threat not unlike heterosexualism. Because bisexuality does not only question the ‘monosexuality’ of the binary sexualities, but it upsets by the very fact of its un-definability.
Drag and the bisexual kiss
Butler argues with drag, ‘we are in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance.’ (p175 GT)
If gender is drag is gender – that is a performance of a performance – it raises more questions than it answers. Does this explain the impossibility of the bisexual kiss, or is it more the un-definability of bisexuality and therefore the impossibility of the kiss? Butler goes on to say, ‘as much as drag creates a unified picture of “woman” […] it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.’ (ibid) Is a bisexual kiss upholding or undermining heterosexual coherence? Is bisexuality highlighting or ‘blurring’ gender? Or does this depend of the context of the kiss, the gender of the participants? Or can it not be discussed in these terms either?
In what way is a lesbian relationship performative (as good, pure, non-oppressive, or simply just as it is)? Surely lesbian itself is a performance or gendered explanation as much as man and woman is?
Bisexuality and the imitative practice.
Butler states that drag performances ‘as imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, […] imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction.’ (p176)
This can be attributed to male and female and heterosexuality – but what about other sexualities? If nothing is ‘outside’, if all is constructed then these have to perform in the same way. So what is bisexuality imitating? Heterosexuality and lesbianism/gay or is it not imitating these, not outside but re-translating gender in its own way, acknowledging difference and drag of gender while accepting it? Is the bisexual kiss impossible because while including and avowing gender, bi doesn’t utopianise or normalise gender or sexuality? Because it is placed outside by het/gay does it have no choice? If bisexuality is then, not a parody or a pastiche, what is it?
Butler warns, ‘parody by itself is not subversive’ and so the question of ‘drag’ in terms of everyday performance of all gender (and so, I argue, sexuality) is not enough to make trouble. She says, ‘there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony.’ (pp176-177) I would argue it is a performance which can’t be named or defined that has this very potential: bisexuality. It is with bisexuality not denying gender or gender performance, by not being ‘blind’ to it but upsetting ideas of sexuality and gender’s place within it, which subverts the parody. Bisexuality is as complicit as heterosexuality and homosexuality/lesbianism in performing gender, in parodying the idea of it, but because it remains unexplained, not-pinned-down –it is truly troubling - it subverts these very ideas at the same time as it does not deny them.
Butler goes on, ‘what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire [?]’ (p177) Because lesbian/gay also relies on the male and female binary in the explanation of desire, because it is within these sexualities that a (different but still) naturalized identity and desire is held to be, and that is what bisexuality threatens to disrupt, it is bisexuality or queer that offers the answers to Butler’s question. It is not in disavowing the existence of gender but avowing its performance that bisexuality or queer highlights and questions stability and the ‘natural’.
Bisexuality, I would argue, has a greater potential than lesbian/gay to upset, deconstruct and question the binaries of constructed gender and sexuality. It does this because it isn’t definable, but also because of its position of suspicion, it continually erodes the stability and possibility of gender and sexuality. Seen by one camp as dangerous and destructive, and by another as utopian-queerness, I feel it is right to see it not as the saviour from the binary, and definitely not separate from or beyond the binaries, as it still performs within them, uses them and drags them, but rather it has the potential for the continuous discussion which needs to be talked out regarding the instability of agency, identity, relationships and the fact that it is all actually ok. It is its very instability and un-definability that makes it different and non-conforming to either heterosexual or homosexual ideologies. It’s the very potential of bisexuality and therefore all sexuality that is situated within these discourses but it also explains exactly what bisexuality *does* - and it is doing it right now, already!
Refs:
Queer ethics; or, the challenge of bisexuality to lesbian ethics - Elisabeth Daumer
Gender trouble – Judith Butler
“A pretty good bisexual kiss there…” - Susanna Trnka