Feminist Performativity Theory and Higher Education

Feminist theory does not always have to question the use and experience of gender. It can also address the dichotomies between subject and object, nature and culture, people and technology (Van House, 2011).

The assumed nature of these categories is considered pre-determined but feminist theory asks the critical spectator to consider how these categories are constructed and become assumed ways of knowing. Feminist theory requires the spectator to commit to understanding “knowledge as situated and embodied, rather than abstract” and well as question assumptions about agency (Van House, 2011). Higher education institutions provide a platform for questioning who is the subject and who is the object, how knowledge is abstracted rather than encouraged to be situated, and who has agentic privilege within the institution.

Throughout this analysis, participants in higher education, whether student, faculty, or administrator, will be referred to as spectators. Through Diana Taylor’s concept of performance (Taylor, 2015), students, faculty, and administrators become spectators, which is to say that they are both participants in the system as well as watching the system.

In the classroom, all students are spectators engaged with the performance of higher education.

However, performance theory has not yet been applied to higher education. Since the call for more feminist and queer theory in higher education several years ago (Renn, 2010), not much progress has been made. The field of higher education is insular and does not often rely on other disciplines for help with understanding educational issues. Feminist and queer theory, however, was written and continues to be developed to be applied across disciplines, providing new ways of understanding to broaden traditionally limited perspectives.

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I will demonstrate the ways in which performance theory invites further interrogation of higher education as an institution and creates new ways of understanding higher education as a performance. As a higher education scholar, I have a unique perspective of higher education that requires constant renegotiation of my position within the institution. Brechtian theory, performativity, and disidentifications, applied to higher education, require a deeper understanding of complicity in the system of higher education which is central to the identity of a higher education scholar.

Brechtian Theory

Performance theory relies heavily on the application of Brecht’s analysis of performance. Brecht’s central concept called “Verfremdungseffekt”, the Alienation effect, is “the technique of defamiliarizing a word, an idea, a gesture as to enable the spectator to see or hear it afresh” (Diamond, 1988:84). The Alienation effect attempts to make foreign what feels normal, stable, and necessary. Manufacturing emotional distance to force the spectators to see the performance in a new perspective, the Alienation effect makes the comfortable uncomfortable and the known unknown. In the dramatic setting, “Brecht theorizes that if the performer remains outside the character’s feelings, the audience may also, thereby remain free to analyze and form opinions about the play’s ‘fable’” (Diamond, 1988:84). The Alienation effect reminds the spectator that the performance is just a performance and that the characters or participants should be viewed critically and free from emotional connection.

Part of the Alienation effect, the gestic moment “in a sense explains the play, but it also exceeds the play, opening it to the social and discursive ideologies that inform its production” (Diamond, 1988:90). The use of the gestic moment allows for the audience to notice how the performance is attempting to comment on the political climate, explaining why the performance is useful for more than the current moment. While not always a political commentary, the gestic moment does always require the spectator to engage with the performance beyond the context of the performative gesture.

The gestic moment is also a moment in which the audience is asked to think about the underpinnings or purpose of the performance. A gestic moment sometimes occurs near the climax of the performance to drive the spectators to have a revelation about the show. It should spur spectators to think about what the performance is saying about society and force the spectators to rethink the intent of the performance they have been watching. Through a gestic moment, the spectator finds meaning outside of the performance to carry with them.

Application of Brechtian Theory

The Alienation effect of studying higher education while being part of the institution of higher education causes a distinct distance between practice and theoretical understandings of higher education. As a result, there is a constant renegotiation of understanding of higher education based on experiences in the classroom, with faculty, and other students. The Alienation effect creates an acute awareness of the performativity of the space of education and who is set up for success in the system. Spectators in higher education who hold marginalized identities are consistently alienated and aware of the stark contrast between the expected contributions to higher education by their peers with dominant identities and their own.

In the study of higher education, the Alienation effect also appears through the repetitive analysis of every day encounters within the practice of higher education. When studied theoretically, higher education can become quite abstract and the academic study of the institution itself far removed from the daily practices that reinforced the hegemony of education. The best higher education scholars and practitioners are those who can theorize in embodied and material ways, affecting change through their scholarship and daily practices.

Gestic moments appear in higher education when students, faculty, or administrators realize their own complicacy in the system of higher education. When studying in the institutional setting of universities, participants both contribute to the dominant discourse of education as well as benefit from it. Those who work in higher education and are working to critique and change the system have many moments of realization in which their understanding of education is called into question and changes dramatically as a result.

Judith Butler’s Theory of Performativity

Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (1988) states that gender is not a stable identity but is instead tenuously constituted in time, consists of stylized repetition of acts, and is instituted through the stylization of the body. Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In gender’s performative nature resides the possibility of contesting its reified status. Butler defines performative as both dramatic and non-referential. To Butler, dramatic means that gender is a rehearsed act that requires actualization and reproduction as reality. Gender as a performative means that gender is only real to the extent that is performed.

Butler’s concept of gender is non-referential, meaning that gender is not referring to a thing it has done, but the act is the thing itself. Gender is not “always already” or essential to human existence. Instead, each act of gender performance contributes to the social understanding of gender. Each repetition shapes the individual’s gender as well as the possibilities of normative gender and social gender. Possibilities of transformation are found in the arbitrary relation between performative acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, and in the breaking or subversive repetition of that stylized act.

Eve Sedgwick (1993) writes about queer performativity as a strategy for the production of meaning and being, in relation to the affect shame and to the later and related fact of stigma.

Sedgwick asks her readers to view performativity in terms of habitual shame. The transformations that result from shame open a lot of new doors for thinking about identity politics. Shame, according to Sedgwick, is an affect that delineates identity without defining it or giving it content.

Application of Performativity

Using Butler’s understanding of gender as performativity, the higher education classroom is a performance. Each session of a class is referential and citational, looking back to the normative classroom. Seeing the classroom as a performance allows for the radical transformation from normative classroom to a space that questions the intent of higher education, opens the space for defying power dynamics, and radicalizes higher education from within.

In feminist classroom spaces, the professor often expresses that they would like to be called by their first name or have all of the students sit in a circle to disrupt traditional power dynamics. However, as time goes on, this classroom also becomes normative. At the same time, the performative aspect of the classroom includes the professor not acting in a feminist manner or continuing to control the dynamics of the classroom, the students’ understanding of concepts, and the translation of concepts outside of the classroom. Without continuous and critical analysis of the classroom, any classroom will become a repetition of the norm.

Sedgwick’s theoretical concept of performativity stemming from shame and stigma offers a new way of considering identity formation for both spectator and actor – or faculty and student. In the ideal feminist classroom, shame would be shared amongst faculty and students. However, as it is now, the shame is primarily held by students who are fighting against the stigma attached to their academic performance. To avoid shame, and eventually stigma, many students prepare a performance of mastery of the material covered.

Disidentification

Jose Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification creates a new queer space that allows for critique, rejection, and acceptance of ideals that previously was not available. Muñoz writes about “disidentification [as] a performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz, 1999:97). Muñoz writes here about how minoritarian subjects, or marginalized identities, can be explored through performance to combat the hegemonic dominant identities (white, cis, male, straight, middle-class, nondisabled, etc.) and resist binary oppositions.

Muñoz expands upon this definition by saying that “[disidentification] is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification” (Muñoz, 1999:97). Disidentification falls outside of accepting identities and rejecting others, imagining a new space in which the binary is taken for what is useful and rejected when it is no longer beneficial. Later in his book, Muñoz writes, “disidentification, as a mode of analysis, registers subjects as constructed and contradictory” (Muñoz, 1999:115). We can use disidentification, then, to question the ways we construct identities in contrast to the dominant, accepted identities and why the response to an identity is a binary opposition.

Application of Disidentification

The feminist classroom has developed in opposition to the dominant classroom dynamic but need not necessarily be a complete counteridentification. While there are power dynamics of the normative classroom that should be rejected, the feminist professor, administrator, or student can identify the strategies of dominant discourse that work for their purposes and leave the rest. Disidentification opens a new way for the creation of feminist classrooms, allowing for resistance against the dominant ideology of higher education while continuing to exist within the institution.

In institutions of higher education, marginalized populations consistently have a more difficult time succeeding in their pursuits due to the system of higher education being built for dominant identities and perpetuating hegemonic discourse. Educational scholarship often positions marginalized students in a way that forces them to counteridentify with the presumed college student who is white, male, cis, nondisabled, etc. This binary of marginalized or dominant does not allow for much space of exploration of identity, particularly because every person holds some combination of dominant and marginalized social identities.

Disidentification continues the conversation of subjects as constructed, as mentioned previously, because identity is formed in contrast or concert with others. Those involved in the institution of higher education, in any developmental capacity, consistently identity and counteridentify with those they appreciate or do not want to emulate. Faculty should be keenly aware of this fact, as they impact the identifications of their students. Students, however, should be taught how to disidentify with higher education. Learning how to be critical of higher education while still reaping the benefits of the institution is essential to the success of students in higher education.

As a scholar of higher education, disidentifications allows for the space to hold both the value of the institution along with critiques of it. While the institution has beneficial policies that support the research and continued scholarship of higher education scholars, the research produced often points to the many flaws in the hegemonic discourse of education. Scholars of higher education, then, have to exist in a continuous contradiction of benefit and critique.

Conclusion

Higher education needs the critical perspective of feminist and queer performance theory to produce more meaningful spaces within the institution and produce scholars who are critical of their own work and the intention of the institution. The use of performance theory should incite change in the way that higher education scholars think about themselves, the work they do, and the impact they have on the institution of higher education.

Performance theory should cause scholars to question who is the subject is in the classroom and who is the object, or whether the distinction is necessary. The construction of a feminist classroom should not rely on the reinvention of a binary opposition but allow for the creation of a space that is neither in line with the normative classroom nor completely opposed.

As spectators, students, faculty, and administrators are both audience and actor in the system of higher education. They experience the Alienation effect of being within the institution while producing work that combats the institution. They recognize gestic moments, even if they do not name them as such, when they reach points of frustration in the classroom or with policies of higher education. As performativity shapes the dynamics of the classroom, and the institution by extension, the spectators are asked to watch the changes, participate in their materialization, and hold the institution accountable.

Seeing higher education as a performance allows for the development of the field to move beyond the understanding of higher education as a policy-based institution. As a daily practice of performance, higher education is continually reproducing the dominant discourses in the classroom, through interactions with students, as well as reinforcing the binary oppositions that are assumed to be so central to education. Performance theory presents a new avenue through which to see higher education, allowing it to be a site of identification, counteridentification, disidentification, Alienation, gesture, and performativity. With this fresh perspective on higher education, scholars can begin to imagine new futures for the institution of higher education that resist binaries and allow for the fantastical imagination of new and queer spaces within a system that was not designed for that purpose.