ABSTRACT
The desire to reveal and subvert the limitations of gender codings as they are manifest bodily is a major concern of feminist performance, including the comic variety. According to Judith Butler, gender is a physical style, an “act” that we all perform, and that also performs us (276–7). Gender is a historically and socially constituted code of behavior and a “corporeal field of cultural play” (282). Butler’s emphasis on gender as both corporeal and cultural play is significant. It suggests that while gender is something that plays us, it is also something that we can play with. In other words, rather than accepting the gendered body as a fixed entity, as physical and cultural destiny, Butler proposes that a certain amount of “play,” of mutability, is possible in how we perform our gender. The separation of gender from the physically sexed body is an important feminist theoretical proposition. Butler’s theories suggest that, in both the gap and the interplay between gender and the body, the potential for change exists. Thus, although cultural gender codings are highly prescriptive, they can be expanded through subversive bodily acts. Enter Pochsy.
