As discussed earlier, Burke’s Dramatic Pentad (1945/1969) suggests that there are symbolic patterns to look for in how we perform ourselves every day. For some, the performance of self is an ideal to achieve in line with social norms. For other, the self is a means of resisting normal behaviors and social roles. Let’s begin by discussing some ways in which we hide or intentionally alter our identities to better function in society. Michel Foucault, who we discussed in Module 2 in regard to his archaeology of knowledge, and in the last section of this module in terms of his discussion of bio-power, also provides a foundation to why we perform identities in line with social norms. Foucault (1975/1977) argues that, in reference to the brain state and other identity theories, there is often punishment associated with aberrant behaviors or non-conformist performances.
In his archaeology of prison systems, Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1975/1977) argues that prisoner’s bodies were disciplined both physically and psychologically. The prisons themselves restrict the ability for prisoners to perform their identities freely—and the panopticon, or guard tower in the center of the prison, ensures this by allowing guards to observe any prisoner at any time. The term panopticon literally refers to the ability to see in any direction. The guards may or may not be looking at a prisoner, but the prisoner does not know when the guard might look, and therefore the prisoner behaves.
Foucault then argues that as a society we behave as if someone in a panopticon tower is watching. We police ourselves, behaving within the restrictions of normal social behaviors so as not to get caught. For example, many people report that they are uncomfortable walking around their own homes naked, because this is not an acceptable behavior in public. Yet these people are not in public—so what is really stopping them from going nude? Or imagine driving at night in your car with an itchy nose. Are you likely to pick your nose, even if no one is around who might see?
All the World's a Stage...
Sociologist and communication scholar Erving Goffman (1956) presents a dramaturgical model or dramaturgy that addresses how we perform our identities as part of our presentation of everyday lives. Goffman argues that we live our lives as if we are actors on a stage. Drawing on Burke’s Pentad, Goffman develops Dramaturgical analysis as the study of Social Interaction in theatrical terms. Goffman argues that humans wear different mask back stage than they do on the front stage. In other words, when we know we’re being observed or communicating to others, we play our roles with an audience in mind, whereas back stage we are performing for ourselves. Consider the image below as it represents the multiple faces or masks we wear daily depending on whether we know we are performing in front stage (being observed) or back stage (free of judgment zone).
Studies of the performativity of identity are grounded in performance studies, but focus on the empowering potential of gender and sexual fluidity and political identities. Performativity theories and studies challenge the notion that identity categories, like gender and sexuality, are fixed, stable entities. Instead, building on the performance studies concept that performative acts create meaning. For performative theorists, this idea is deepened to examine how identity is constructed through words and symbolic action, indicating that there is no core identity or core self other than the one(s) performed.
Judith Butler (1990) takes this argument further and says that all identity constructs follow scripted roles that are based in cultural myths. Let’s take a minute and revisit Altman and Taylor’s Onion Model of Social Penetration Theory. For Butler, there are far more than the five layers discussed by Altman and Taylor to a person’s identity. Borrowing from Derrida's deconstruction (1967/1997), we can argue that there is no center to our identities, just like there is no center to an onion. The more we peel back the layers of the onion, the more layers are revealed, until we finally reach an empty center. Butler’s argument works the same way. Our identities, she explains, are constructed daily, with layer after layer being placed around a lack of center, disguising the absence of a stable, solid self. All we are, in Butler’s explanation, is a series of layered performances, each building on the last to create a fiction of a self. Butler argues that identity needs to be viewed as fluid and variable that we behave in different ways in different situations. For Butler, there is not one central identity. Instead, identity is simply the layering of performed masks over each other.
Butler builds Jacques Derrida’s (1972/1988) postmodern discussion of citation, that all identity role acts are copies of copies of copies (and so on). Gender roles, for example, are taught to individuals by their mentors, parents, grandparents, and peers. These roles are passed on through generations of time, echoing the past generation though with some variables present. At the core of this concept, Derrida argues that copies degrade, they change, by the very action of copying. So each copy blurs some of the elements of the prior copy, and adds new elements as well. Think about the “telephone game” as an example, where one person tells a story to the next in line, and that person repeats the story, and so on. If enough people are involved in the messaging, the final version of the story often barely resembles the original. Since the copies degrade and change, how can we know what the “original” was. Does the original even hold value in the current situation?
Identities and social scripts viewed through a performative lens use this concept. Butler explains that performances are never exact copies, because there is always something new and of the person (the actor) in the performance. Therefore, the gender role is only as real as we take it to be. Further, Butler explains that since we do not know what the “original” gender role performance was, of if there was an actual “original,” the idea that social scripts are aimed at certain ideals is problematic, because those ideals themselves are unfounded. Therefore, for Butler, performativity encourages the negotiation of agency within a site of resistance, such as through transgressive or subversive acts, to speak past the silence encouraged by the normalization of gender roles.
...And the People, Merely Players
Gender scholar Elizabeth Grosz (1994) adds to these arguments by focusing on the performative acts themselves. She argues that acts have their effects even if no audience other than the performer receives them. Using Irigaray’s critique of language and the concept of woman as object, Grosz argues that acts don’t have an “other” or opposition in a binary. Instead, performative acts are free of binary constraints. They can therefore take on characteristics within, between, around, and encompassing multiple positionalities, rather than restricted to oppositional binary constraints.
And this brings us back to the central debate in performance and identity studies: whether our selves are biologically and naturally fixed or if they are socially and performatively constructed. In Communication Studies, we haven’t yet reached the end of that debate. To go a little deeper into how this debate impacts our personal identity constructions, we can view the work of Kate Bornstein (1995). Bornstein was born biologically male, and chose sex reassignment surgery in 1986. However, Bornstein never identified as a “woman trapped in a man’s body.” Instead, she explains that she also never identified as a man, and the only other option was to be a woman. Bornstein became a performance artist to express how social norms and restrictions can both reinforce and challenge a person’s sense of self. In her book, Gender Outlaw, she states: “There are only people who are fluidly-gendered, and ...the norm is that most of these people continually struggle to maintain the illusion that they are one gender or another” (p. 65).
So what do you think? Is identity constructed by nature or through nurturing? Is it a combination of both? Do our identities exist outside of what we perform for ourselves and others? Do our performances hide a “true” identity or mask the absence of one? Is identity rhetorically constructed?
References
Bornstein, K. (1995). Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. New York: Vintage.
Burke, K. (1969). A grammar of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Original work published 1945.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc (S. Weber, & J. Mehlman, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Original work published 1972.
Derrida, J. (1997). Of grammatology. (G.C. Spivak, trans.). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Original work published 1967.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. Original work published 1975.
Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
