Judith Butler Sex And Disability

Sex and Disability

Judith Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Construction: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” explains and explores the performativity of gender, and problematizes Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of “What is a Woman?” Riva Leher, artist and author, reflects on the intersections between sex and disability in a personal essay, “Golem Girl Gets Lucky.” Both texts aid us in exploring how we must examine disability as a feminist issue, since oppressive forces faced by women are part of the same social construction as the forces which oppressed disabled people.

Butler states that “gender...is an identity tenuously constituted in time--an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts,” and she makes specific reference to these

acts as “gender acts” (Butler 519). She claims that these “gender acts” are not inherent, though they have been attributed to a natural state of gender in the body, but in fact, are purely socially constructed. Judith Butler references the anthropological, ritual social drama studies set forth by Victor Turner, which affirm that “social action requires a performance which is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation” (Butler 526). She furthers that the social construction of gender is not finite, rather, it shifts and changes based on other social trends and shifts.
Butler opens her analysis with a reflection on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, specifically Beauvoir’s work The Second Sex; Butler shares the belief with Simone de Beauvoir, and many other contemporary feminist theorists that there is a distinction between gender and sex, and that gender has been historically reinforced through repetition Butler links her theory to Beauvoir’s by establishing that “the body is a historical situation...and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation” (Butler 521).

Beauvoir’s definition reinforces the construction of gender by proposing that one must, and should, “become” a woman, that one must purposefully acquire and the skill sets connected to female identity. Although both Butler and de Beauvoir understand that gender is not innate, but rather something to be acquired, Butler further problematizes this social phenomenon. As Butler explains, “social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic sign” (Butler 519).While de Beauvoir’s supports the aim of acquiring gender, and becoming a woman, Butler’s argument aims to point out the social construction of gender, and deconstruct that

notion.
As Butler states, misguided assumptions about the categories of gender have great consequences, consequences which could be avoided if we worked to deconstruct the gender binary. She states: “In an understandable desire to forge bonds of solidarity, feminist discourse has often relied upon the category of woman as a universal presupposition of cultural experience which, in its universal status, provides a false ontological promise of eventual political solidarity” (Butler 523). But this is indeed a false promise: many people are grouped into the category of “woman,” and therefore their needs are thought to be taken care of by an assumed solidarity, while in truth, many women, including disabled women, silently face interlocking structures of oppression. The morning after having sex with another disabled person, when she steps back out onto the sidewalk “behind two slender blondes, per usual, [she feels] like a troglodyte lurking behind their thoughtless, easy gait.” (Leher 252). But, remembering her lover’s kiss, she thinks: “perhaps...it is a melancholy thing to be forgettable” (Leher 252). Human connection, behind closed doors, does a far greater job of validating her than the assumed universality of womanhood.When perpetuating the construct of gender causes minimal problems for the majority of women, they continue to write their own fiction between the confines of the social construct, which in turn furthers the necessity for the construction of gender.
Butler explains the social performance of gender by making a comparison to a theatrical performance, a scenario we are comfortable identifying strictly as performance. Gender performativity affirms itself, and in doing so, continues to isolate individuals and groups who are excluded from the rewards of adherence to gender acts and norms. In Butler’s words, “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status” (Butler 520). We can better understand Butler’s conception of gender performativity on the stage by exploring Leher’s experience with the sidewalk, or, as she sometimes refers to it, the catwalk. Leher states, "All women know that the sidewalk is a catwalk. From before the first faint ringing of puberty, we are judged on the quality of our flesh" (Leher 234). Butler explains that the elements of our gender are perceived to be “exterior, surfaced, open to the perception of others” (Butler 521).The only reality of gender exists in the performance of gender. Gender is not natural. Gender is “put on,” “daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure” (Butler 531). Butler furthers her exploration of performativity by contextualizing gender performance in our lived world. She states: “On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality; the disquieting effect of the act is that there are no conventions that facilitate making this separation” (Butler 527).
We can see in Leher’s experience that Butler is correct; we have not yet learned to recognize nor criticize the performativity of gender in our world. In public, Leher also states that strangers “don’t look long enough to decide whether we’re attractive or not” (Leher 236). Furthermore, if strangers do look long enough, they will not have a favorable reaction. Leher recounts facing relentless “public cruelty, such as the always popular ‘What’s wrong with you? Hey ugly chick’” (Leher 232). On the street, in the public performance of gender, she is involuntarily desexualized based on her identity as a disabled woman. Leher laments that until old age, she “will be one of the crip girls who scare the panel of judges” (Leher 234). In the private sphere, too, Leher experiences isolation from social womanhood. Leher recounts: “[my mother] tried to keep me in her maternal stronghold so that I could remain unthreatened by the desires of men” (Leher 236). Growing up, the elder men and women in her family, social community, and religious community decide to put her in hiding, and isolate her from the joys and strifes of womanhood. She recalls that their “one great hope was that I’d find a ‘nice crippled boy,’ and we would take care of each other in sweetly platonic fashion” (Leher 239).
Leher discusses the level of unsafety she feels, not only the discomfort from judgemental glares, but also the fear of physical endangerment. She shares that when she leaves a store front, “the keys are already in [her] hand as [she] come home again” (Leher 231). Growing up, I was also taught to keep my keys in my hand on my walk home, not only for convenience, but also for safety, since keys clutched between my knuckles could serve as an effective weapon if I were to be approached or attacked. In her personal essay, “Golem Girl Gets Lucky,” Leher describes a her reality, wherein shaky banisters, multiple flights of stairs, and shag carpet--all which pose little to no threat to able bodied people--pose such considerable danger to Leher as to lead her to believe she’s found herself on “an episode of When Apartments Attack” (Leher 246). When she becomes intimate with another person, she shares that she often goes through “A Panic Inventory,” where she scans her body and concludes: “There. Is. Not. One. Inch. Of. Me. That. Is. Normal” (Leher 248). Leher also expresses the relief and safety experienced from leaving the performative space. In her words, “each [door in the “gauntlet of security gates and doors”] that closes behind me lets me drop another defense” (Leher 231). Fear for one’s safety is an aspect of womanhood, and something that Leher is able to share in with able-bodied women, but the fear of having to defend oneself at any given moment on one’s walk home is something that, in an ideal world, no person should experience.
The greatest isolation Leher felt growing up was regarding her sexuality. In the “sidewalk mating dance,” Leher states that disabled people are “winnowed out as undesirable breeders” (Leher 236). She describes her own body as “soft tissue [hanging] from angular and wayward bones,” and comments that her body is “not built for the performance of Womanhood” (Leher 234). In the section of her personal essay subtitled “The Closet,” Leher explains how disabled women attempt to distract from their disability by sexualizing themselves in other ways. For instance, “crip girls wear plunging necklines to draw the eyes away from our bent backs” (Leher 240).
In “Golem Girl Gets Lucky,” Leher focuses on the exclusion from womanhood that she experienced in relation to sex and disability. After facing humiliation from her mother for having a crush on a boy in school, Leher states her “feelings about boys grew as ingrown and confused as a toenail” (Leher 239). In her memory, “the day my first college boyfriend asked me out, I literally thought he was talking to someone behind me” (Leher 244). As a disabled woman, society repeated and reinforced the idea that sex, desire, attractiveness are were not options for disabled women. Though affirming these aspects of womanhood is problematic, and society constantly hypersexualizes young women, and sets up women as objects for male attention from birth, there is validity in Leher and other disabled women’s exclusion from these aspects of the construct of female gender. Leher recalls: “outside of ‘special’ school, I saw the normal girls being prepared for womanhood. Early gifts of kitchen toys and playtime makeup led to prom frocks and high heels” (Leher 242). These social constructs, linked to the social construction of womanhood, are problematic in some aspects, but this fact has largely been acknowledged by the women who are included in the social rites of passage. Now, we must acknowledge a previously unseen area: the exclusion of groups of women from the construct of womanhood.
In conclusion, we must continue moving forward, and working to include all people within our understandings of community and solidarity, with or without the gender binary. In reflecting on this learning, I was spurred to think about media representations of the intersection between sex and disability. In Leher’s personal essay, she recounts: “I vividly remember a few made-for-TV movies in which a normal person (usually female) would be attracted to to a disabled person” (Leher 242). She continues, stating that there was a loaded ethical bend to these films, recognizing that in these movies, “attraction to a crip was a display of the hero and heroine’s moral perfection” (Leher 242). These films posit the disabled person as an object of pity. Leher also recounts “[stumbling] upon images of disabled women,” and finding “they were simply fetish objects” (Leher 244). Leher’s discussion of representation in film propelled me to think about modern representation of disabled people in film, especially in reference to the intersection between sex and disability. Two films came to mind: The Sessions and Me Before You.
The Sessions (Dir. Ben Lewin, 2012) disrupts our misconceptions of the crossroads between disability and sexuality by eliminating pity, and allowing Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) to engage in sex as normally as one can with a sex surrogate. The context is still strange: a sex surrogate, hired to facilitate O’Brien’s first sexual encounter, but the film does not make sex and disability mutually exclusive; O’Brien is invited to engage in interactions with the sex surrogate in the same manner, save a few extra logistics, as any able bodied person who would hire a sex surrogate.Though the film can be lauded for normalizing the relationship between sex and disability, the film still features an able bodied actor playing a disabled person, which is not only problematic, but also perpetuates the trend in Hollywood of taking roles, especially roles where the character is disabled, away from disabled actors.
Me Before You (Dir. Thea Sharrock, 2016), released last week, is another film which attempts to examine the intersections between sex and disability. The film, a romance, focuses on the relationship between Will Traynor, a quadriplegic man and Louisa Clark, his caregiver. Although the film foregrounds the story of a person with a disability, the tragedy of the plot is intrinsically linked to his disability. The film’s crucial plot point (spoilers ahead) seems to state that despite the budding, plentiful romance between the characters, the life of a disabled person is not as valuable as the life of an able bodied person, and tragedy, in the film expressed through an assisted suicide, is the only option for disabled people. The director has spoken out in defense of the film in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, stating “It’s a fictional story about how important the right to choose is. The message of the film is to live boldly, push yourself, don’t settle.” Despite her claims, given the low level of visibility of disabled persons, especially in Hollywood studio films, adds to the burden of representation, requiring modern filmmakers to avoid stereotypes and problematic representations of minority figures since there are so few representations to speak of. In both of these films, the disabled person represented is a white, cis gendered male of an elevated social class. In both cases, the disabled person has greater privilege than Riva Leher, but as mentioned before, we must examine disability as a feminist issue, and continue to examine the intersections between gender, disability, and all forms of social identity. Both women and disabled people face unique needs, a wage gap, and larger barriers to access. Since both fields examine power, privilege, and access, they are naturally and inextricably linked, and we must continue to make our feminist strides intersectional and inclusive.