#EVERYTHING WILL BE ABRIDGED CONDENSED COMPRESSION JPEG FOR ANOTHER TWO WEEKS

[ghelgheli]

So I absolutely agree that gender is socially constructed, but I have always had a hard time with the idea of gender as being a set of "behaviors/expressions/desires" like you say, for the same reason why I'm uncomfortable with the Judith Butler "performance" idea. Doesn't that inherently leave the door open to say that, if someone says they are a trans woman, but they're behaviors/expressions/performance/etc don't line up with what a woman's are supposed to be, then we can just say "No, you're not a woman. You don't fulfill the criteria for womanhood." Like it feels like this inherently sets gender nonconforming people up to be blocked from the gender they identify with and forced back into one they don't. Am I missing something? This isn't a gotcha, I genuinely think I must be misunderstanding something, but no matter how I look at it, it seems like that would be the result of defining gender that way.

oh I don't think this at all! did I say I thought this? if I did I fucked up.

to start, my (second-hand, tbf) understanding of performativity in butler's sense is that it is widely misunderstood. the notion of gender as performativity is descended in part from speech-act theory a la JL Austin and so on; these are discussions of how certain utterances (like a priest declaring a marriage) can have uptake in the world and change it—ive just summoned the phrase "illocutionary force" into the minds of those readers that know. to perform such a speech act is to change the world just by speaking. this is the notion of performance at work in butler's theory (again, as far as my second-hand understanding goes. I'll read gender trouble soon)

in that theory, gender is built by people performing gender, and people performing gender constantly rebuild it. I think this can accommodate gnc expression because, like a speech act, someone can assert that they are performing a particular gender by fiat even if that performance is aberrant relative to whatever the dominant performance is. that is the kind of thing a masc woman does when she asserts that she's a woman despite "doing gender wrong". but that's enough of me defending butler by proxy. I don't actually think performance is a successful theory of gender, because it fails at identifying its material etiology

as far as I'm concerned gender is something that is done to people and that people take up themselves because they are wise to the ways it can and will be done to them. it is an organizing principle of cisheteropatriarchy which, along (and inseparably) with racialization, constitutes part of the superstructural foundation of our political economy. this precedes capitalism, but today has been fully adapted by it. it is the stabilizing grip of the family as an economic unit and is essential to the maintenance of division of labour as it exists today, designating certain groups (again, bearing in mind intersections with race) not just for reproductive labour but for any of the more invisibilized, precarious, subservient forms of labour c.f. the relationship between trans womanhood and sex work

the aesthetics of gender (behaviour expressions whatever) are just its visible surfacing and one of—along with its medicalization and racialization, e.g.—the methods of demarcating and enforcing it. deviation is punished only proximally because of this or that kind of outrage. the ultimate reason for punishment is the maintenance of capitalist homeostasis, insofar as such a thing is supposed to be possible (it is not, of course). and as the post I cannot stop talking about points out, transmisogyny is one of the most violently feverish of capitalism's autoimmune responses. but despite its violence, it is never a successful response, and on the contrary it manages just to condition defenses against it.

trans womanhood, for example, is not a historically stable object. it has as much ontological essence as any gender-inflected concept: none. it is one construction in response to the experiences of betraying maleness and its demands (linguistic, economic, behavioural, psychological... these are fuzzy concepts. there is no one narrative) and being subject to transmisogyny as a result. there are other constructions (crossdresser, transvestite, travesti, hijra...) that have been formed in response to transmisogyny, and all of them are stubborn tumours that capitalism will never be rid of; thus it tries to starve them.

but to get to your point: gender concepts, particularly "deviant" ones like trans womanhood, but even womanhood itself (which I conceive of as an umbrella) can accommodate nonconformity because no amount of, say, masculinity is going to redeem a trans lesbian as far as cisheteropatriarchy is concerned—ask me how I know. trans lesbianism, as a declared divestment from simply being a man, is unacceptable however it is instantiated. you may accuse me of being pessimistic here. I am!