17 GENDER

Stacy Holman Jones

Reenactment is a form of performance that does both public and personal work. Investigations of particular events, processes, and structures must attend to how the personal, psychologi­cal, and emotional experience of reenactment speaks to matters of ethics, politics, and power (Agnew, 2007).

Contemporary understandings ask us to consider gender alongside notions of sex and sexual­ity. Sex is defined by a person's biological assignation at birth, including genitals, chromosomes, and hormones, and is considered a physical characteristic. Sexuality refers to a person's attrac­tion to another. Because gender is culturally, rather than biologically, determined, it is not always synchronized with or related to one's physical sex, and one's gender identity can be fluid, fixed, or multiple. Joey Sprague (2016) reminds us that gender research values a

recognition of the centrality of gender as an organizing principle in all social systems, including work, politics, everyday interaction, families, economic development, law, education, and a host of other social domains. As our understanding of gender has become both more social and relational, so has our awareness that gender is experi­enced and organized in race- and class-specific ways.

(p. vii)

Thus, gender is both the nexus around which social, political, and cultural institutions are organ­ized and one factor among many in the performance of identity. In other words, gender is but one component of the intersecting experience of identity.

Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) coined the term Intersectionality to call attention to how oppres­sive institutions, attitudes, and actions in cultures both historically and in the present—including racism, xenophobia, sexism, heteronormativity, classism, religious and spiritual fundamental­ism, ageism, and ableism—are connected and mutually influencing in and through time.

Intersectionality asks us to recognize the impossibility of untangling the multiple strands of individual identity, sociality, and temporality. Reenactment performances explore histories, arti­facts, and norms around gender as they intersect with race, sexuality, and other identity categories in a given context or era (Merrill, 2005; Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000).

Judith Butler's theorization of gender as performative explains how gender in reenactment creates a space for both seeing subject positions as constituted and intersectional. She argues that gender is a repetition of stylized acts, or reenactments and re-experiences of established social meanings around gender identity (p. 191). Gender performativity challenges the idea that there is some “essential” and singular gendered self that then gets communicated socially; rather, gender is a co-constructed and ephemeral performance of emergent selves. Drawing together the speech act theory ofJ. L. Austin (1962), which distinguishes between speech that describes action and speech that incites action, and Jacques Derrida's (1977) deconstruction of the notions of the singularity of speech contexts and the intentionality of the speaker, Butler (1990) writes, “There is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions' that are said to be its results” (p.

Thus, gender and other performatives are not expressions of the “true” or essential nature of identities (or representations of how such identities have operated in the past and so might or should operate in the future). Rather, performativity is a manifestation of gender, race, sexuality, and class so engrained in the way we understand and organize social behavior that we come to think of these performances as natural, right, and authentic. However, because performativity is itself a cultural and historical construction that is both inscribed on and performed through the body, when gender and other performances do not mimetically re-present social or historical conventions, we see plainly the workings and the potential for resistance within performativity (body and embodiment). As Elin Diamond puts it, “as soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment, of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects” and of history “become discussable” (1996, p. 5). In reenactment performances, the constructed and intersectional nature of gender is both embodied and pre­sented to performers and audiences as a site of questioning and contesting identity and history. When a performer and a performance fail to repeat, are discontinuous or “de-formed,” or are in some way a parody, the illusory persistence of a singular identity is exposed as “a politically tenuous construction” (p. 192). In other words, when performers fail to “do” gender “correctly” or do gender differently, we see the constructed nature of identity.

The performativity of gender, as one facet of the intersectional constitution of the subject, makes possible the destabilization of what passes as normal, coherent, and stable in reenactment performances.

When we consider how performative embodiments of “straight things”—“common things that at first pass as natural,” including gender, become “re-enactment[s] when recognized as composed in code, as always already a matter of reiteration” (Schneider, 2011, p. 32), we see how reenactments of the personal, the everyday, and the present might enable us to take up an ethical and political stance on the past (Agnew, 2004). The leaky and radical potential of performativ- ity—that is, the very impossibility of fidelity and completeness in the continual reiteration of experience—or what we might consider a social or political fidelity by means of a calculated infidelity—opens up a field of possibility for generating nuanced, complex, and critical under­standings of social relations and historical events.

Understanding the constitutive effects of gender performativity as a “becoming” might also “queer” historical time, focusing our attention instead on affective time. Where modern­ist notions of time organize history and individual lives as a long march toward and through events that fulfill normative notions of “progress” in the “cycle” of life: birth, growth, labor,

Figure 17.1 Mama Alto, gender transcendent jazz singer and cabaret diva. Such queering occurs across a range of reenactment performances—from those which destabilize “fixed” or “natural” gender roles by failing to precisely or exactly “repeat” them in performance, to those which, for example, place women in roles not historically filled by women, to those which feature non-binary or trans* persons who challenge or confuse the very notion of gender in distinctly gendered roles. Source: Jacinta Oaten.

Figure 17.2 Women reenacting at Colonial Williamsburg. Source: Harvey Barrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. https://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-sa/2.0.

reproduction, and death (Freeman, 2010; Puar, 2007; Halberstam, 2005; Edelman, 2004). What happens, then, when we interrupt, slow down, delay, or refuse that cycle in time and in history, affectively reworking “our habitually time-marked (time-imbued) categories against their own grain” (McCallum and Tuhkanen, 2011, p. 5)? In the space opened up in time and embodiment (gendered and otherwise) in reenactment performances, for example, in the moments when performers

simultaneously can and cannot hit the precise note or strike the exact pose, we feel a leak of affective engagement between the then and the now that brings time travel, as it were, into the fold of experience: shimmering on an edge, caught between the pos­sible and the impossible, touching the interval itself.

(Schneider, 2011, p. 112)

When we deliberately delay or otherwise queer enactments of historical and normative time, we open up space for new forms of relationality, making visible the ways in which subjectivities and events are “imbued with meanings and investigate whose interests were served by those mean­ings” (Agnew, 2004, p. 335). The seeming contradiction of such “delayed performatives” situates gender (and other intersectional subjectivities) in a history of marginalization, oppression, and violence while simultaneously materializing their resistive potential (Harris et al., 2017). Agnew (2004) notes that, “Paradoxically, it is the very ahistoricity of re-enactment that is the precondi­tion for its engagement with historical subject matter” (p. 328).

Performance scholar Theron Schmidt (2015) describes the process of theatrical rehearsal as movement that recollects the future. He writes, “we recollect forwards whilst remembering backwards” (p. 5). Rehearsal enacts the “strange temporality” of preparing for an experience in the act of its making. We begin “as if we are looking back at a previous action, a repetition, a re-enactment, even as we look forward to an event that does not yet exist” (Schmidt, 2015, p. 5). Reenactment is a process of rehearsing the past in order to “understand the present... a gesture of utopianism as well as one of witnessing” (Agnew, 2004, p. 329). When reenactment performances lay bare the performativity of gender, any utopian vision of the present or future based on the historical past is grounded in an understanding that, to extend Jose Esteban Munoz (2009), the past and the “here and now is simply not enough” (p. 96). Bringing together gender performance and performativity, affective understandings of time and history, and queering practices and utopias underscores how paying attention to gender in reenactment scholarship enables us to critically and responsibly attend to matters of ethics, politics, and power.

Further reading

Schneider, R., 2011; Taylor, D., 2003.