"Performance" after Judith Butler: The Case of Recent Criticism on Margery Kempe by Roberto Vecchi

"Performance" after Judith Butler: The Case of Recent Criticism on Margery Kempe* Valentina Castagna (Università di Palermo)

Reflecting upon current perspectives and theoretical debates in the fields of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies1, I was automatically drawn to think about the number of times the concept of performance appeared in the titles of articles and essays during my recent research on The Book of Margery Kempe (written between 1436 and 1438)2. I was interested in analysing the figure of Margery Kempe from a gender perspective, applying a contemporary critical reading to a medieval text and in particular to a medieval female figure. While researching secondary sources, I saw that in the last fifteen years several scholars interested in this subject have been using the concept of performance to explain Margery Kempe’s strategies of self-legitimization as a speaking/‘writing’ woman, which, incidentally, was also the point I wanted to make3. Some of these articles were entitled, for instance, “A Performance Artist and Her Performance Text: Margery Kempe on Tour” and “Mother, Maiden, Child: Gender as Performance in The Book of Margery Kempe”4.

*A previous version of this article was presented at the conference "Nuove Prospettive degli Studi di Genere in Italia e in Europa", University of Bologna, 17 April 2012.

The Book of Margery Kempe is widely considered as the first autobiography in English and it is significantly mentioned in the entry “autobiography” in John A Cuddon, The Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, Penguin, London, 1999. 3

Here we cannot enter the debate on Margery Kempe’s authorship although it is of course relevant to the question of self-representation: on this topic, see my Re-Reading Margery Kempe in the 21st Century, Peter Lang, Bern, Oxford, New York, 2011; Sarah Beckwith, “Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe”, Exemplaria, 4 (1), 1992 (pp. 171-199); Lynn Staley Johnson, “The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe”, Speculum, 66, 1991 (pp. 820-838); Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania, 1994; Domna Stanton (ed.), The Female Autograph, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1984.

Nanda Hopenwasser, “A Performance Artist and Her Performance Text: Margery Kempe on Tour”, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999 (pp. 97-131); Clare Bradford, “Mother, Maiden, Child: Gender as Performance in The Book of Margery Kempe”, in Frances Devlin-Glass and Lynn McCredden (eds), Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001 (pp. 165-181); Liz McAvoy, “Virgin, Mother, Whore: The Sexual Spirituality of Margery Kempe”, in Susannah M. Chewning (ed.), Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005 (pp. 121-138).

It seemed to me, then, that that of performance is today more than ever a key issue in feminist literary criticism (as in Queer Studies5) as long as the representation of gendered subjects is the focus of the question, although as we shall shortly be seeing the use and derivation of this term is controversial. This flourishing in the use of performance as a category of gender analysis, which has influenced me too, is derived from Judith Butler’s reflections on the concept of gender in Gender Trouble (1990) and knowingly in the chapter entitled “Subversive Bodily Acts”6. It is apparent that although Butler has widely rethought or, better, explained again her use of the concept of performativity, most scholars have, non gratuitously, misinterpreted her first ‘theorization’ of it, as she laments in Bodies that Matter (1993), the book which followed Gender Trouble7. Here Butler takes as her starting point her idea that also bodies are in some way constructed in discourse. She draws on Foucault’s notion of ‘regulatory ideal’ and claims that bodies are governed by the category of gender, considered not as a biological given, rather as a norm, a regulatory and reiterative practice which produces bodies by demarcating and differentiating them (along with race, or ethnicity, as she will add later in the book). As a consequence, bodies which are found not to conform with discursive heteronormativity are excluded, abjected and erased from the dominant representation of gendered bodies (either masculine or feminine). However, Butler adds that the fact “that this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled”8. At times Butler shows some contradictions regarding her idea of performativity. On the one hand, she repeats, performativity is to be understood not as a single voluntary act of self-representation of the subject but as the “reiterative power of discourse” which produces “the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”9. Indeed, she remarks that “the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality” of gendered bodies10, thus creating sexual difference, a concept which, Butler underlines, acts as a reinforcement of compulsory heterosexuality as it is based on the man/woman dichotomy. On the other hand, she claims that since the materialization of the body is never fully complete, this ‘flaw’ constituted by such 5

For a Queer analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, pre- and postmodern, Duke University Press, Durham, 1999. 6

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990.

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", Routledge, New York, 1993.

Ibid., p. 2.

Ibidem.

instabilities becomes an opportunity for rematerialization against the hegemonic regulatory norm11. Which, however, as I see it, cannot but imply the political action of a voluntary subject. Such a belief is supported by the idea, which Butler emphasizes, that construction is a temporal process depending on historical sedimentation through the reiteration of norms. The effect of naturalization of gender (with the man/woman dichotomy) is a result of reiteration. It is precisely the need for the repetition of the norm that highlights the instability of the process of naturalization, revealing all the gaps from which the excluded can enter discourse (a dangerous but necessary operation) and deconstruct it from within12. Thus, the excluded by the norm, the erased, disrupt the order of discourse and return through the “discursive possibilities opened up by the constitutive outside of hegemonic positions”13. It is at this point of Butler’s discussion of sexed identities in Bodies that Matter that the concept of performance, more than that of performativity (the distinction mustn't be underestimated) somehow comes back showing its potential for the subversion of power discourses through bodily acts. Butler rethinks the notion of gender performativity focusing on the questions that it has raised after the publication of Gender Trouble, doubts (or misinterpretations) probably supported by the examples taken from the drag experience: [...] For were I to argue that genders are performative, that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night14. And she adds, “such a willful and instrumental subject, one who decides on its gender, is clearly not its gender from the start and fails to realize that its existence is already decided by gender”15. What is at stake here is the concept of agency, of “critical agency”16. Although she wonders whether the emphasis on construction cannot but appear incompatible with that of a choosing subject, Butler finally remarks that it is the same “paradox of 11

See ibid., pp. 1-2.

See ibid., p. 10.

Ibid., p. 12.

Ibid., p. x.

Ibid., p. 15. The concept of agency is meant as "la capacità attiva dell’individuo nel suo rapporto con la società", and the process of acquisition of agency through actions of self-empowerment cannot but pass through the repossession of the body (V. Fortunati, G. Golinelli e R. Monticelli, “Introduzione” a Studi di genere e memoria culturale. Women and Cultural Memory, Bologna, CLUEB, 2004, p. 15).

subjectivation” that enables the subject to resist the norms of cultural imperialism in spite of their “constitutive constraints”17. The effect is that of identifying agency as a “rearticulatory practice”18 which remains within power but becomes a critical tool of self-representation for those subjects who had been left out from the dominant discourses. It is so, I think, that performance comes to be seen by the majority of feminist literary critics as an empowering act or series of acts performed by a subject who calls herself into discourse in order to deconstruct the monolithic gendered identity she has been given through the repetition of normative regulatory ideals (that is to say the performativity of gender). The subject performs subversive bodily acts that aim to unveil the historicity of performativity which otherwise appears to have “an act-like status in the present”19, as a result of the continuous reiteration of the same set of norms. What Butler later underlines in Undoing Gender, is that it is through the body that we come in relation with the others and that at the same time we cannot think ourselves if not in relation to those with whom we come in contact20. It is through the regulatory ideals, the social norms, that the body is subjected and at the same time enters discourse. As the social conventions change, the discourses on the body and the perception of the body change, as well. It is not a case that in the same book, Butler remarked that the processes of construction and deconstruction of the self are the one dependent on the other and that they are continuous because of their historicity21. Our experience is defined by these processes closely characterized by (and depending on) the social conventions which influence the formation of our identity within a specific society and cultural and historical moment22. So, if we take The Book of Margery Kempe as an example and we focus on the analysis of Margery’s strategies of self-representation, we can see how the concepts of performativity and performance both apply, the second constituting itself as a method of deconstruction of the first. In an interesting article published just a few years ago, Liz McAvoy takes as her starting point exactly Butler’s critique of the notion of fixed

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 15.

Ibidem.

Ibid., p. 12.

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, Routledge, New York, 2004.

Ibidem.

See Olivia Guaraldo's preface to the Italian edition of Undoing Gender, "La disfatta del gender e la questione dell'umano", in Judith Butler, La disfatta del genere, Meltemi, Roma, p. 7.

gender identities in Gender Trouble23. She declares that the theory of the performativity of gender, on the one hand, shows how Margery is perceived by her society (and in particular by those who accuse her of being a Lollard, a heretic) and, on the other hand, it allows us to read Margery’s gendered identity as disrupting the conventional medieval social roles for women from within. The hostile authorities, both clerical and civil ones, expect Margery to respect her roles as a wife and a mother, and to stick to the private, family domain. The gestures and acts that Margery performs, such as travelling on her own (that is to say, without her husband), preaching and talking of the Bible in public (and, we should add, asking scribes to have her life written down) do not comply with the acts that constitute her gender, Margery does not fit in the idea of woman. Although she is a wife and a mother, she subverts the norms which regulate such social roles, by distancing herself from them and looking for a social role in the public domain. She represents a social threat as, furthermore, her anti-normative status is supported and reached through the enactment and “inappropriate appropriation” of the image of the virgin. In this way, not only the icon of the mother but also that of the virgin are subverted. Drawing on Butler’s positions, McAvoy argues that Margery, like other medieval women, was “able to negotiate with [her] sexualized body the restrictive hegemony of gendered identity”24. She demonstrates how through the “re-appropriation” of the role of the virgin, Margery actually gains a social position from which to speak and express herself thus recovering “agency in her re/construction of the self with which much of her text is occupied”25. McAvoy, in fact, maintains that if “Margery’s gendered body as wife or mother has no specific ontology beyond the acts which help to constitute its ‘reality’, then contained within these acts is always the potential for re-contextualisation and therefore subversion of their traditional hegemony”26. In other words, McAvoy affirms that Kempe plays with gender stereotypes based on female sexuality and enacts them in order to be legitimized as an independent woman, speaking for herself, by the system which denies women’s agency. It is well known that while, on the one hand, medieval women’s bodies were important because they granted the reproductive capacity, on the other, they were feared and demonized because they were considered as a threat of 23

Liz McAvoy, “Virgin, Mother, Whore: The Sexual Spirituality of Margery Kempe”, in Susannah M. Chewning (ed.), Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005 (pp. 121-138).

Ibid., p. 122.

Ibidem.

Ibid., p. 124.

corruption. As a result of this dichotomy, Margery’s body is seen as “the site of conflict between opposed ideologies and conflicting desires”27. The body is the means through which her identity seeks affirmation, through the repetition of acts, constructing different “styles of the flesh”, as Butler calls this sort of gendered public (or “dramatic”) actions, which generate conflicting identity representations in Margery’s narrative. Margery is constantly trying to make her sexual role clear; in order to construct the image of the virgin she shows herself to be constantly worried about her chastity, which is actually the result of performative acts, and she feels that it is continuously under threat. Incidentally, it is not by chance that her attempts at becoming an entrepreneuse and affirming herself in the commercial domain, shortly mentioned in the first chapters of the book, all end in failure. It is only within the field of mysticism and through the legitimization of the revelations of Christ that she can find a place of her own in her society. Although this form of legitimization through the law of the Father, we may say, may be criticized and considered risky because Margery is listened to only thanks to God’s and the archbishops’ authorizations, her mysticism and in particular her piety become evident through public bodily acts which are subversive. Margery is continually rejected by her travelling companions, mainly because of her excesses in the physical manifestations of her devotion and contrition, which are expressed through bodily phenomena such as weeping and swooning. The body as conveyer of values is a concept constructed and shaped historically in order to maintain a stable, regulated social order. The boundaries of the body and of bodily acts are established by norms which instate and naturalize the appropriate limits of bodily representation. These acts are patterns with historically determined regulations upon which the collectivity agrees. Every member of society is expected to conform to these norms or else be rejected as abject. If gendered identity is the enactment of these series of actions, we might argue that not only does Margery make use of the language of physicality to follow in the tradition of medieval female devotion, but she even shapes her place in society by playing with the concept of abjection and claiming back her place as a speaking subject. To conclude, the case of the most recent readings of The Book of Margery Kempe based on the concept of performance is not isolated. The term performance keeps being used in journal articles and essays which question the traditional representation of gender. I felt that because performance appeared to be so central in contemporary literary criticism, it was necessary to compare with the help of this case study the way the term was used by Judith Butler to the way it has been interpreted and reused by 27

Ibid., p. 126.

feminist literary critics linking it to the concept of agency as a “rearticulatory practice”28.

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Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 15.

Staley, Lynn (1994), Margery Kempeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dissenting Fictions, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania. Stanton, Domna C. (ed.) (1984), The Female Autograph, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. Windeatt, Barry (ed.) (1985), The Book of Margery Kempe, Penguin, Harmondsworth.