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f o u r Recon¤guring Gender Habit, Bodies, and Cultural Change Because transaction is a dynamic, ongoing process, the issue of transformation is central to the notion of transactional bodies. Transaction does not necessarily entail signi¤cant alteration of personal habits or cultural customs . It may result in monotonous change, in which the circle of transaction reinforces and strengthens, rather than undercuts, habit and custom. While transaction thus offers no guarantees regarding change, it includes the possibility of signi¤cant transformation and helps explain how such transformation might occur. To explore how the structures of individual habit and cultural meaning, particularly those involving gender, might be changed, I want to draw together Dewey’s understanding of habit with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, as presented in Gender Trouble.1 Habit is an organism’s constitutive predisposition to transact with the world in particular ways, and performativity is the process of repetitive activity that constitutively stylizes one’s being. Together, these ideas provide powerful tools with which to understand the composition and transformation of gender. The combination of habit and performativity is felicitous because there are hints in Butler’s later work that she wants to push her notion of performativity beyond the linguistic toward the social, a development that the notion of habit can greatly assist.2 I say “hints” only because most of Butler’s work after Gender Trouble addresses performativity in the relatively narrow terms of language and speech acts. Language did not occupy a place of privilege when Butler introduced the concept of performativity in her earlier work. Her writings subsequent to Gender Trouble, however, increasingly connect performativity to and examine it in particular within the exclusive context of linguistic performances. Most recently, Butler’s emphasis on the linguistic has taken the form of arguing that performativity is an activity in which the distinction between the linguistic and the social cannot be made.3 For this reason, my claim that Butler pushes the concept of performativity beyond the linguistic to the social in her later work may appear to posit a dualism between the linguistic and social that Butler rejects . I agree with Butler that linguistic performances are signi¤cant; indeed the concept of habit is not antithetical to the linguistic. I also agree that no essential or absolute distinction should be posited between the linguistic and the social. Something important is lost, however, if one limits the notion of performativity to the linguistic or abolishes all distinction between linguistic and social performatives such that the social cannot be addressed apart from the linguistic. This is not to establish a dualism between the social and the linguistic as if the two were ingredients in a tossed salad. Rather it is to refuse to melt the two together completely such that they are indistinguishable. In particular situations and for speci¤c purposes, making a distinction between the social and the linguistic can be very helpful for understanding and improving the world; being able to distinguish the nonlinguistic from the linguistic often is important for attending to the “had,” lived aspects of experience that are ambiguous and thus “over®ow” the words one uses to describe them.4 By conceiving of performativity along the lines of habit, the richness of Butler’s concept of performativity can be retained and reworked such that it continues to shed light on the nonlinguistic aspects of corporeal existence. As feminists have argued, the need to rethink contemporary conceptions of gender, and the notions of sex and sexuality that transact with them, is urgent.5 One reason for this urgency is that current categories of sex and gender are extremely rigid: each member of the binary pair is de¤ned in sharp opposition to the other. As a biological designation, one’s sex is either male or female. Ambiguity of sex is disallowed, even to the point of surgically “correcting” bodies whose physical attributes are indeterminate . Corresponding to and allegedly following from one’s sex are one’s gender and sexuality: biological males are to be men, who are to sexually desire biological females only. In turn, biological females are to be women who sexually desire only men. Thus, in many contemporary cultures , the binary structures of sex and gender are interdependent with that of (hetero)sexuality: to be a male/man or a female/woman is to sexually desire only a person who is located on the other side of the sex/gender binary. To challenge the rigid con¤nes of...

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