Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women's Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics

3. Performance: Negotiating Multiple Black Womanhoods

3 / Performance Negotiating Multiple Black Womanhoods P erhaps one of the most notable features of the sisters in shape women’s collective identity production is its foundation in an ongoing articulation of multiple black womanhoods. At times embracing traditional black gender roles while at other times rejecting or revising them, the sisters in shape women continually move between and among different understandings of what it means to be a black woman. in so doing, they imagine and perform a uniquely sisters in shape version of black womanhood, a testament to the postmodern conceptualization of identity as discursive performance, the importance of race as an enduring and multivalent category crucial to their own identity productions, and their insistence on black women’s visibility . seemingly contradictory in their theoretical orientations, the sisters in shape identity performances highlight the fact that postmodern deconstructions of identity cannot account for why black woman is such a critical marker for the sisters in shape women even as they call that marker into question through their enactments of multiple identity positions with and against their essentialized, externally produced “other” representations. These multiple instantiations of the sisters in shape women’s identities—together with the dominant histories and ideologies that 78 \ Chapter 3 they index—foreground the political import of performative theories of subjectivity for feminist identity politics. Within feminist theories of identity, Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity has been the most influential: more than any other sources (and despite the fact that she further developed these theories in later works), her books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993) have jointly established the theoretical ground on which many others have further theorized and contested performative conceptualizations of gender, sex, and, to some degree, race. Among the most pressing questions in the debates that have arisen around these two works is that of the role of agency in discursive theories of subjectivity (a question inspired by Derrida’s and Foucault’s theories as well). The intentionally challenging nature of Butler’s formulations leaves the question open to a range of interpretations .1 in Gender Trouble, for instance, she writes that “construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency” (147), and “there is no possibility for agency or reality outside of the discursive practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have” (148). Claims such as these, which seem to locate agency in discourse rather than in individual actors, have been generative for much feminist theory even as they have inspired extensive critique; their openness to contested meanings continues to influence the already charged nature of feminist identity politics within a context of postmodernism. in her desire to pin down individual agency in Butler’s early theories of gender performativity, sonia Kruks recuperates the significance of bodily practice by reading Gender Trouble through simone de Beauvoir’s embodied subjectivity, a subjectivity elaborated through the process of “becoming” a woman, a process that we might now see as similarly concerned with the emergence of subjectivity in fields of discourse and disciplinary power (2001: 70–75). reconciling Beauvoir’s theory of gender becoming with Butler’s theory of performative gender, Kruks draws out Butler’s implicit presumption of a subject in her argument that gender is performed under duress. if subjectivity existed only in discourse, Kruks reasons, “duress” would be irrelevant, since discourses are not vulnerable to such emotions and tensions (73). in addition, Butler’s emphasis on the possibility of subversion, resistance, and slippage within discursive repetitions of gender implies “a subject that enjoys a margin of Performance / 79 freedom within the constraints of gender production” (Kruks 2001: 74). read together, then, Beauvoir’s embodied subjectivity and Butler’s performative gender offer a feminist theory of “the complex interplay of constraint and freedom through which gendered body-subjects both are constituted and constitute themselves” (Kruks 2001: 75), a theory with particular salience for the sisters in shape women and their distinctly embodied performances of multiple black womanhoods, performances that exploit the possibilities for freedom by resisting dominant interpellations in both discourse and bodily practice. Before delving into those performances, however, i turn to Butler’s slightly later work, particularly “melancholy Gender/refused identification ” ([1995] 1997), in which she continues to develop her theories of gender performance. in “melancholy Gender/refused identification,” Butler draws on Freud’s ideas about mourning and melancholia to suggest that normative gender is achieved through...