Performing Identity in The Hard Nut : Stereotype, Modeling and the Inventive Body

What does one do with one’s body? The problem of how performance shapes social identity to craft effects of gender, age, race and status necessarily implicates the movement of the body itself. What to do with the lumbering mass of flesh and bones, trunk and limbs, head, hands and feet? How does one organize these disparate parts to project an integrated image of oneself to the world? That we construct our physical movements as thoroughly as we fashion our clothing and our textual discourses about the body is by now a commonplace assumption. Much less studied, however, is the content of the artifice itself: through what feats of gravitational cooperation and defiance does the body give itself shape? Perhaps more importantly, how do such shapes become models for repetition, standards of practice, to the point that they map the nuances of social identity?

In her by now near-classic book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, Judith Butler emphasized the agency of the body in the construction of gender and, by extension, of other facets of social identity. Gender, Butler claimed, is inherently performative, an “incessant and repeated action” which exists only as it is played out in continuous reenactments.² Far from providing a factual ground upon which we might project images of our own devising, the substance of the body is itself a product of shifting and conflicting notions of sex and sexuality. The very act of positing a material body “before” identification is, in Butler’s terms, a performative contradiction—an argument that she extended in her Bodies That Matter of 1993.³ What one does with one’s body is of pressing political interest to feminists such as Butler, for if incessantly repeated performance constitutes social identity it also holds at least the potential for its disruption. “What kind of subversive repetition,” Butler asked us to consider, “might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?”⁴

Butler left open this question in 1990, and numerous publications have taken it up by probing the tangles of compliance and resistance in bodily constructions of social identity.⁵ But the particularities of how physical movement contributes to the socializing process have remained to a great extent unexplored in interdisciplinary critical studies. Striking in its absence in this regard is dance, whose corporeal expressions seem to demand just the kind of nuanced reexamination that Butler and others have devoted to textual writings about the body.⁶ Butler herself separated performativity from voluntary performance, arguing that the “incessant actions” of performativity, and the political hierarchies they produce and maintain, differ from performances that adopt and relinquish roles at will.⁷ Dance, however, necessarily comprises its own kind of performativity: a technique that governs the performance so completely that it becomes an implicit function of physicality. This is, in effect, “staged performativity,” and nowhere in the West does it operate more forcefully than in the three-hundred-year-old tradition of ballet. With a physical language as intricate and as artful as any verbal language, ballet offers a theatrical parallel for the social construction of the body through learned and reiterated patterns. Butler’s notion of a body whose physicality is inseparable from the discourses that present it is in fact archly promoted by ballet, in which “nature” exists only as the product of pervasive and layered styling.

Butler’s own avoidance of dance is surprising, considering how closely she invokes its process as she brings a critique of pure physicality to her consideration of performed identity.⁸ “Gender,” she asserts, “is always a doing”; while appearing “natural,” it is in fact a “repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts. . . .” Extending Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, Butler envisions the potentially subversive performance of gender as “. . . a kind of cultural/corporeal action that requires a new vocabulary that institutes and proliferates present participles of various kinds. . . .”⁹ Dance is an art of space and time which exists precisely as “present participles,” and it offers a test case for...