ABSTRACT
Social theorists have long noted that people aren’t simply male or female but rather they “do” gender. Thus, gender is neither a fixed nor an essential property of the self but an outcome of ongoing performances in various interactional and institutional contexts. Gender, along with other axes of social difference, helps constitute the culture of everyday life and is central to the implicit codes that guide “normative” identities and practices (Kessler and McKenna 1978; West and Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990; West and Fenstermaker 1995). Sociologists have further noted that gender is a system, a social structure with concretized categories and hierarchies-most notably a patriarchal hierarchy in which men dominate and from which men benefit. Consequently, people don’t import gendered selves into neutral institutions; rather, institutions themselves are gendered in their policies, practices, and ideologies (Connell 1987; Acker 1990; Martin 1990; Lorber 1994; Messner 2002). Martin (2003) has usefully distinguished between “practicing gender”—the micro level talk and action that signifies gender, but often fleetingly and/or unintentionally-and “gendering practices”—the institutionalized ideas, structures, and repertoires of conduct that help to organize gender in more or less systematic ways. The interplay between the doing of gender and the gendering of institutions is complex: each informs and shapes the other, the former reminding us of the possibilities of agency, creativity, and resistance, the latter reminding us of the macro structures that shape-and often constrain-individual conduct. This essay works within and against these sociological traditions to explore the concept
of “gender performance.” On one level, the doing of gender is always performative, in a Goffmanesque sense: individuals repeatedly express and renew their taken-for-granted commitment to gendered scripts and ideologies as they go about their daily lives. Goffman’s (1959) theatrical metaphor of social life-as a stage peopled by actors, in roles, enacting scripts, etc.—suggests that individuals manage their own conduct in light of normative expectations on the part of real or imagined audiences of what it means to be male or female. In this formulation, gender is always already a performance, and never entirely voluntary, even though it may feel “natural” and may be largely unconscious. But what of those situations in which gender is not simply accomplished in everyday
interaction but actively displayed before deliberately constructed audiences? What of those
situations in which gender scripts are not implicit but explicit-in other words, when the theatrical metaphor is no longer metaphorical? With some exceptions (see Alexander 2004), sociologists have had less to say about this more literal version of gender performance, largely because of the need to establish the point that gender performances are not the occasional endeavor of particular actors but something we all do all the time. In fact, it is useful to conceptualize two quite different, if overlapping, sorts of gender
performance. On one end of the spectrum is performing gender, in which the doing of gender is an implicit dimension of everyday action oriented toward some other purpose (as when a woman smiles more often than her male counterparts in a business meeting); at the other end is gender performance, in which the main purpose of interaction is the explicit dramatization of gender (as in a strip show). In the latter scenario, although participants are also performing gender in the interactive sense, the expression of gender is heightened, exaggerated, codified, scripted, ritualized, and/or institutionalized in particular ways. Often there is a designated space for the performance, a collective organization of people to make it happen, a stage, costumes, props, and a clear distinction between performers and audience. These elements help construct a specific culture around and through which the gender performance works. Alexander’s (2004) recent work on social action as performance is helpful here; while not focusing on gender per se, he posits a broad theory of social action that underscores both the wide-ranging and multi-dimensional nature of performance and the analytic force of privileging a theatrical frame. In this essay we focus primarily on explicit gender performance, using the concept to
highlight the ongoing negotiations, tensions, and conflicts involved in the doing of gender in the broader sense. Because gender performances are exaggerated and ritualized, they render the codes by which gendered norms and practices are constructed particularly visible, both to audiences and to participants themselves. Depending on the context, gender performances may either reinscribe traditional ways of doing gender or model new modes of gender enactment. Occasions for reflecting on-and critiquing-gender arise in either case, because exaggeration can foreground the power relations that tacit performances tend to obscure. Thus, far from merely calling attention to the gendered scripts at play in everyday life, gender performances do important cultural work of their own. Of course, such gender performances do not all do the same kind of cultural work; the
range of sites and practices that facilitate them is wide, and cultural work is more selfconscious in some gender performances than others. Certain cultural settings ritualize performance in ways that solidify the normal “rules” of gender, making these rules more apprehensible and encouraging their acceptance or embrace by both participants and audiences. We think of these as inside-gender performances because they tend to clarify rather than complicate traditional constructions of gender difference. In Alexander’s (2004) terms, inside-gender performances appear more natural because they “fuse” their cultural scripts with the background assumptions of audiences. Consider beauty pageants, for example: typically, they embody normative ideologies about gender (in concert with race and nation) within carefully scripted institutional contexts. As Banet-Weiser (1999: 26) notes, the Miss America Pageant has for most of its history actively constructed a national feminine identity based upon notions of “respectable” femininity, “typical” (i.e. white, Western) beauty, and a neoliberal “tolerance” for diversity that accommodates rather than highlights cultural, ethnic, and racial difference. A similar womanas-nation trope, in which an “idealized” femininity and an “idealized” national ethnic
identity mutually constitute one another, is observable in pageants for women of specific ethnic subgroups within the US-including Chinese-Americans (Wu 1997), JapaneseAmericans (King-O’Riain 2006), and African-Americans (Craig 2002)—as well as for pageants outside the West in countries such as Guatemala (McAllister 1996), Thailand (Van Esterik 1995), Tibet (McGranahan 1996), the British Virgin Islands (Cohen 1996), and Jamaica (Barnes 1994). Although definitions of womanhood and nationhood vary by time and place, beauty contests generally represent, in distilled form, what it means to perform gender “properly” on a given national or international stage. Other insidegender sites such as proms (Best 2000), weddings (Nishimura 1996; Otnes and Pleck 2003; Ingraham 2008), bridal showers (Montemurro 2006), debutante balls (Lynch 1999), and the “institutional core” of men’s professional sport (Messner 2002) likewise articulate traditional gender scripts. By contrast, some gender performances aim solely or primarily to display, play with,
challenge, critique, and/or expose the very construction of gender itself. Here, the social rules of gender are not necessarily fused with background expectations but are displayed to an audience for the purpose of subverting, transforming, or highlighting their constructed nature. We think of these as outside-gender performances. Drag shows are a prime example. As Taylor et al. (2004: 107) have noted, many drag shows are arranged precisely to “call attention to the role of cultural markers and practices such as dress, bodily style, gesture, and voice, in constructing gender and sexual difference,” thus “destabilizing institutionalized gender and sexological classifications by making visible the social basis of gender and sexuality and by presenting hybrid and minority genders and sexualities” (see also Newton 1979; Schacht 2002). Similarly, various musical performance traditionsglam rock, for example (Auslander 2006), and some elements of “conscious rap” and “feminist hip-hop” (Collins 2006; Rose 2008), disco (Gamson 2005), and alternative rock (Schippers 2002)—intentionally undercut or critique gender assumptions. It is worth noting that the same performance can simultaneously be “inside gender” in
one sense and “outside gender” in another. For instance, Katherine Frank and others have pointed out that gender performances by sex-industry professionals-in strip shows, porn sets, and the like-often display gender in exaggerated ways that flatter a paying audience, thus reiterating and reinforcing gender norms and conventions, despite participants’ conscious agnosticism about-or even resistance to-such norms and conventions (Frank 2002, 2007; Liepe-Levinson 2002). Similarly, one could argue that for all the ways beauty pageants normalize traditional gender difference, due to their public nature most of them also invite critique of that difference. Non-Western pageants in particular call attention to widely varying notions of “ideal” womanhood/nationhood (see Banet-Weiser 1999; Cohen et al. 1996). Moreover, in both the US and abroad, pageants undoubtedly have different meanings for different contestants, and still other meanings for audiences. Indeed, it is likely typical for gender performances to be both “inside” and “outside”
at once. The institutional context may generate an “inside” (i.e. gender-conformist) performance, while the performers’ own conscious agency may add “outside” (i.e. gender-transgressive) elements; a performance intended as “outside” may be read by some audiences as “inside;” a performance may be “inside” in some of its ideological elements and “outside” in others. Understanding these inside-outside dynamics-the relative strengths of the traditional and transgressive aspects of the performance, and why the balance between them looks as it does-is our central analytic task. Through a detailed look at cheerleading (a predominantly inside-gender genre) and drag shows
(a predominantly outside-gender genre), we hope to illustrate more fully the utility of analyzing gender performances as sites of tension between conformity and nonconformity-ultimately, sites of tension between accepting or challenging prevailing power arrangements.
