Gender Performance, Gender Melancholy

Judith Butler, like Foucault (social construction of gender in The History of Sexuality, 1976) before her, stresses the performativity of gender. Gender identities are not constitutive but rather  are constructed from repeated performances of gender norms. Butler critiques compulsory heterosexuality and its binary dictates, and sees no need to pathologize performances that do not conform to norms. She critiques as well core gender identity: There is no core identity, only attributes of identity constructed from citation of cultural norms. Normative gender performativity requires the splitting of stereotypical feminine and masculine traits (such as dependency/agency; passivity/activity) which must be repudiated to attain normative gender identity. These binary heterosexual constructs  are performed, while the unmourned, lost homosexual components are barred from performance, and the more entrenchedly their loss is disavowed, the more intolerant of them in others one becomes. Viewed this way, it is normative femininity and masculinity which are pathological for they are sustained by splitting and projection. Performance of them is both symptomatic as well as bulwarking of cultural norms.

Butler  emphasizes a second contribution to the construction of gender identities: Gender identity is constructed from lost and ungrieved homosexual love (e.g. the boy for his father, the girl for her mother) which results in melancholy gender. Melancholy gender results both from repudiation of that of the opposite sex split off as the ‘other,’  as well as from repudiation of same-sex love objects whose loss remain unmourned. Relying heavily on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917; SE:14), Butler accepts Freud's theory that the ego is constructed from internalization of lost (because forbidden) love objects. This forbidding of love objects in the oedipal period is preceded by the taboo on homosexual love. In repudiating this same sex love, normative femininity and masculinity are embued with melancholy.  (Freud, of course, denying the importance of relationships, reduced this to the intrapsychic, cementing the one-person psychology.) 

Lynn Layton updates Butler to a two person psychology by reminding us that norms are conveyed in a relational matrix and come in a multiplicity of competing norms. Layton critiques Butler stating that dominant norms are not always repressive, and also that internalized relationships are varied and “do not necessarily conform to dominant norms.” Instead of melancholia as described by Freud, Layton sees a resemblance closer to Lacan’s ‘narcissistic’ development of identity: “the Lacanian ego is a structure built on the refusal to mourn losses.”

Layton connects dysthymia to the pain from disappointing relational patterns [insecure attachments?]. This, she says, is what creates melancholy, not -- as Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930, SE: 21) noted -- a trade off to be part of civilization. Instead, “dysthymia is produced by narcissistic intergenerational relationships that do not tolerate difference…”  She further states, in a beautiful tribute to intersubjectivity, “Difference that does not reduce to sameness (Irigaray, 1985) is only produced in relationships where self and other are both subjects, in relationships of mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988). In this mode of relating, identifications are not solely forged from a refusal to mourn, the ego is not a substrate of such identifications, and performances of gender or anything else need not violate self or other.”   

Butler, J. (1995). Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification. Psychoanal. Dial., 5(2):165-180.                                                 
Layton, Lynn. (1997). The Doer behind the Deed. Gender and Psychoanal., 2(2):131-155