Perfomativity in the Post-Human
The reappropriation of performativity in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Synecdoche New York.
In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler argues for a different understanding of gender and sexuality than was previously accepted. In this text Butler coins the term performativity in relation to gender roles and gender identity. Butler argues that none of us are born with a gender but that what we perceive as gender roles are social constructs. This idea of gender roles, or “sex” as Butler labels it, as a social construct does however come with a problem as ‘this relation between culture and nature implies a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart’. The problem that has raised the issue of performativity for Butler is the idea that ‘bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled’ (2)
Butler further argues that, once the normative ideal has been accepted, we are compelled to then act upon this ideal of gender roles and relate our own gender identity with this and perform accordingly, to act as is expected of us by both the Other and the Self. Butler continues by arguing that this act is exactly that, an act, or a performance. This performance is however a complicated idea as this performance of gender roles is different from that of actors on a stage. She thus labeled it performativity which she defines ‘not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ and produces ‘the phenomena that it regulates and constraints.’(2) Butler finally argues that the concept of performativity results in a radical ‘rethinking of the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking “I,” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex.’(3)
In this article I will look at three contemporary texts which, as I will argue, have taken the construct of performativity beyond the limits of gender roles and gender identity. I will argue that the 2006 novel Remainder by Tom McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go and the 2008 movie Synecdoche, New York have taken Butler’s concept out of issues of gender and reapporpriated them for the post-human concept of identity and the disassociation of the self. I will argue that the forming of the subject through the assuming of a sex by performativity and normative ideals is not only limited to gender roles but is, in post-human society, further developed to envelop all of identity, the self, and our understanding of the human.
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