Abstract
Through a reading of David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly, this chapter brings Judith Butler’s idea of the performativity of gender into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the expression of embodied subjectivity. The chapter brings out how the portrayal of the two protagonists in Cronenberg’s film, Song Liling and René Gallimard, on the one hand illustrates Butler’s contention that gender identity is performatively constituted through a stylized reiteration of bodily acts that produce the illusion of an inner core on the surface of the body and on the other hand points to the limitations of a strictly performative framework. The character of Song Liling is portrayed in such a way as to also provoke questions of how to account for subjectivity or a felt sense of self that cannot be captured by third-person descriptions nor reduced to a product of reiterated performative imitation. Challenging Butler’s simplistic account and dismissal of expression, the chapter turns instead to the account of expression offered by Merleau-Ponty and argues that this provides a non-reductive way of understanding subjectivity as embodying both a first- and a third-person perspective in interrelation and of rethinking the relation between interiority and exteriority without reducing one to the other.
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Notes
- 1.
In articulating gender as a “stylized repetition of acts,” Butler makes reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “a style of being,” Michel Foucault’s “a stylistics of existence” and her own reading of Simone de Beauvoir as offering an understanding of gender in terms of “styles of the flesh.” Style, for Butler, is a “corporeal enactment” that “is both intentional and performative” (1990a, 139). To enact a certain style, of, for instance, gender, is not, she writes, “a radical act of creation,” but rather “a tacit project to renew one’s cultural history in one’s own terms” (1986, 40). She is careful to stress that styles are “never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condition and limit the possibilities” (1990a, 139). How one renews one’s cultural history in one’s own terms is thus conditioned by that very cultural history in which “one’s own terms” are situated but which is nevertheless continuously rearticulated and continued in different directions through singular intentional and performative enactments. Butler’s characterization of style modifies her claim that identity is a product of performative reiteration in so far as it recognizes style as both intentional and performative.
- 2.
The idea of an illusion of an inner core on the surface of the body not only involves a displacement and reconceptualization of interiority but also rests on a view of the body as a surface entity on which such an illusion can be drawn or inscribed. The displacement of interiority onto the surface of the body thus seems to maintain an assumption of the body as a thing, albeit not a thing as the container of an inner core but instead as a surface upon which an inner core is inscribed. By accepting the terms on which the body is conceptualized within a dualistic framework of inner and outer, mind and body, subject and object, the displacement of interiority, in effect, runs the risk of remaining within the very framework it seeks to disrupt. Any displacement of interiority onto the surface of the body must go hand in hand with careful consideration of how to conceptualize the body and bodily surfaces.
- 3.
Further, how one is sexed is regulated in a binary relation which fully excludes one sex/gender from the other. The differentiation of the two opposite sexes/genders has a strengthening effect on both of them; the more the gender terms are differentiated from each other, the clearer and more distinguished is the core and definition of each term. The identity of one gender depends on the exclusion of another, and the exclusionary practices constitutive of gender differences reinforce and stabilize specific gender identities which in a binary relation are limited to being only one of two.
The reiterated practices of performative acts not only account for the continuous affirmation and strengthening of gender identities but also for possibilities of changing these identities. While Butler stresses that there is no possibility for agency outside of the discursive practices through which the very term agency is made intelligible, she also points to the possibility of performing differently: “The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself” (Butler 1990a, 140). However, I agree with Sara Heinämaa that the effects of repeating otherwise and performing differently should not be exaggerated. Heinämaa writes, “By generating alternative combinations of gendered features, performative acts are able to disturb our habits of perceiving and challenge our theorizing about sex and gender, but in so far as these exercises remain momentary or local, they cannot reverse the sedimentation of gender types” (2011, 145).
- 4.
Following among others Beard (2006) and Suner (1998), I will refer to Song Liling with feminine pronouns when she appears in her feminine persona and masculine pronouns when he appears in his masculine persona. When the persona appears as ambiguous, I will refer to Song in the gender neutral zie/hir/hir. De Lauretis rightly notes that the problem of how to refer to Song Liling reminds us of the “constructedness of gender and its overdetermination by language” (1999, 313).
- 5.
Gallimard is, as Jonathan Wisenthal writes, “a Westerner who is totally innocent of the political, social, and human realities of Asia. Gallimard’s Orient is altogether a construction from the outside,” and he embodies Orientalism in the sense articulated by Edward Said. In this respect, Wisenthal argues, Gallimard is like both Cronenberg and Hwang who “wrote works about – and at the same time paradoxically were – Westerners who tried to appropriate and impose an identity on the East” (2006, 5).
- 6.
The issue of Song’s genuineness raises questions of how to understand what it means to be genuine that go beyond the scope of this essay. To be genuine involves reference to a norm to which one is or is not genuine and to a tension within the self between that which is subjectively experienced and that which can be intersubjectively observed in behavior and action. In an everyday sense of the word, genuineness is often understood in terms of being authentic, honest, sincere, or, in the words of an overused cliché, “true to oneself” meaning that one acts in a way that corresponds to one’s subjective thoughts, convictions, or feelings. However, genuineness can also be understood in terms of acting according to a norm external to oneself, as in, for instance, much ritual action. Ritual action is to behave in a proper manner, to repeat, and obey a prescribed form, in short, to be sincere or genuine to the identity of the ritual action rather than being genuine to the subjective thoughts, feelings, and convictions of who one is.
- 7.
In fact, as de Lauretis so carefully draws attention to, the representation of women who do not appear in drag is downright misogynist: “As if to set off the femininity of Song, all the female characters are constructed by similarity and high contrast to ‘Butterfly’: Gallimard’s wife is ludicrous when, sitting in bed with a cold and blowing her nose, she sings a few notes of ‘Un bel dí’ out of tune (and probably because of this soon disappears altogether from the diegesis); Frau Baden’s matter-of-fact attitude toward sex, no less than her naked female body, only serves to incite Gallimard’s desire for the white-robed, reticent, prepubescent girl’s body he imagines in Song; Comrade Chin, whom Gallimard never sees, epitomizes the unwomanly woman – the masculinized, militarized, ‘communist,’ policewoman or prison matron – purely for the spectator’s edification; and the servant Shu Fang, unlike Suzuki, her feminine counterpart in Puccini’s opera, is genderless and merely functional to the plot as ‘servant’” (1999, 321).
- 8.
The performative character of gender in M. Butterfly is further emphasized by the spectator position embodied by René Gallimard throughout the film, save for the very last scene in which he is on stage both enacting and seeing himself as Madame Butterfly.
- 9.
The notion of intercorporeality appears in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings (1968) to describe a constitutive interconnection between bodies, a topic with which he is engaged throughout his writings. The idea of intercorporeality, writes Gail Weiss, “defies any attempt to affirm the autonomy of the body apart from other bodies or from the disciplinary, technological practices that are continually altering and redefining them” (Weiss 1999, 105). The notion challenges ideas of the body as a self-enclosed discrete entity with distinct boundaries and instead brings out a corporeal interconnectedness as the very ground for the individuation of bodies. The intercorporeal being of bodies constitutes the condition for their singularity and singular lived bodies emerge in mutual intercorporeal exchange in which boundaries between them are established, reinforced, challenged, and continuously altered. See also Diprose 2002 and Marratto 2012.
- 10.
As William Beard points out, it is not only as zones of Gallimard’s success that the personal-sexual and the professional mirror one another but also as emblems of his delusion: “A character who makes confident predictions of American success in Vietnam looks, twenty-five years after the fact, as completely foolish as a character who mistakes a man for a woman while having a sexual relationship with him” (Beard 2006, 356).
- 11.
There is an abundance of references to transformation and change throughout the film. Song expresses that zie tries hir best to become somebody else and that zie does not know how to change hir body into that of another. Gallimard, after he has had his “extra-extra marital affair” with Frau Baden, says to Song that he is not who she thinks he is. Also the butterfly theme indicates transformation and change: Butterfly is not only the figure in the opera but also an insect that is given birth through transformation from larvae through cocoon to Butterfly.
- 12.
According to Cronenberg, the portrayal of Gallimard is one of a “willed suspension of disbelief.” Gallimard, says Cronenberg, is not fooled; “He wants to be fooled” (Rodley 1993, 186). Also according to David Henry Hwang, “Gallimard chooses to believe he is heterosexual” and on some level “knows he’s having an affair with a man” (DiGaetani 1989, 145). This willed suspension of disbelief is not, however, all the film is about. I agree with Cronenberg’s contention that it would be simplistic to say that M. Butterfly is a story of repressed homosexuality even though “there is an element of that – coming to terms with his [Gallimard’s] own sexuality” (Rodley 1993, 182). Further, as Rey Chow convincingly argues, a “‘homoerotic’ reading intent on showing Gallimard’s real sexual preference would run a parallel course with the ‘antiorientalist’ reading, in the sense that both readings must rely on the belief in a kind of repressed truth – repressed homosexuality or repressed racism – for their functioning.” Both homoerotic and antiorientalist readings rely on the assumption that there is a truth behind or beneath the surface structure of appearance. Chow continues, “critics who read this story as the story of a confused sexual identity would lend themselves to the lure set up by the film itself, in that they would be seduced into going after the real penis, the visible body part, the ‘fact’ of Song being a male; their re-search would echo the re-search of the antiorientalist critics, who are seduced into going after the real penis, the visible body part, the ‘fact’ of Gallimard being a white man. Be it through the route of race or the route of sexual preference, such critics would be trapped by their own desire for a secret – the secret of cross-cultural exploitation or the secret of homosexual love – which they might think they are helping to bring to light, when in fact it is they themselves who have been seduced. In each case what seduces (them) is, shall we say, the ‘purity’ of a secret – an indubitable orientalism or an indubitable homoeroticism – the way the indubitable love, the pure sacrifice, of an ‘oriental woman’ seduces Gallimard” (Chow 1996, 70).
- 13.
Here, Chow makes an explicit statement regarding what Song and Gallimard really are, namely, two men, and thereby implies that there is and has always been a reality behind the performance that has been going on for years. Even though Song’s gesture may well be intended as a revelation of a reality behind appearance (and indeed hir final words to Gallimard “Under the robes, beneath everything, it was always me” does indicate such an intention), this revelation, I argue, should be understood in terms of a transformation.
- 14.
While Butler explicitly discusses the performativity of gender (and its constitutive force in establishing the belief in a prediscursive sex), her claims already in the early works are not limited to gender but rather concern the formation of the subject more generally. Performativity, she says in a 1994 interview in Radical Philosophy, “contests the very notion of the subject” (Butler 1994, 33) and following Althusser’s account of the interpellation of subjects, Butler argues that the I only comes into being through being called and that this constitutive naming takes place prior to the I (Butler 1993, 225).
- 15.
This is a charge directed against Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender from several different theoretical perspectives and points of departure. See, for instance, Susan Hekman (2000) who argues that Butler’s theory is fundamentally flawed by the presupposition “that there is no middle ground between the metaphysical modernist subject on one hand and the total deconstruction of identity on the other.” “[I]n her zeal to deconstruct the modernist subject,” writes Hekman, “Butler embraces its polar opposite: the subject as fiction, fantasy, play” (2000, 290). See also Benhabib et al. (1995), Heinämaa (1997), Hood-Williams and Cealey Harrison (1998), and Moi (1999).
- 16.
In this preceding courtroom scene, René is exposed to the “truth” of Song’s gender as he enters the courtroom to testify about the spy activities. Also Song is exposed and on display before the court and before René’s eyes that resist meeting his look. The portrayal suggests that the burning question at the trial is not one of the two lovers’ acts of espionage but rather concerns their relationship, their concealment of desire and sexuality, and, ultimately, their troubling of gender. Revealing how irrelevant the judge’s question “Did he [Gallimard] know you were a man?” was to the two lovers while they lived their reality of Butterfly, Song responds, “You know, your honor, I never asked.” The courtroom scene removes the viewer together with Gallimard from the reality of the fantasy of Butterfly. At the same time, and with equal, if not stronger, force, this reality remains, and the courtroom scene, with the theater-like form of the trial with actors and audience, appears as a fantasy, a performance in the reality of the fantasy of Butterfly.
- 17.
The film never shows Song’s sexual organs which in a sense makes his nakedness more ambiguous. Cronenberg says in an interview, “I didn’t want to show [John] Lone’s cock because suddenly it becomes a scene about a cock. I think it’s important that Jeremy [Irons] sees it for an instant, that’s all. I don’t think we need to see it. […] Nakedness, not the cock, is important in our scene” (Rodley 1993, 183).
- 18.
Already in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes, “there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself” and in the later The World of Perception, “there is no ‘inner’ life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person” (1962, xi; 2004, 88; see also 1968, 138).
- 19.
In his foreword to Gary Madison’s The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur writes, “the theme of expression […] tears us in one stroke away from the philosophy of the subject and the object” (1981, xvi).
- 20.
This is not to say that subjective gestures and thoughts never succeed in expressing intentions, nor that it is impossible to find meaning in what has already passed. However, the expressed meaning is a necessary alteration of both the given meaning of the means of expression and the intended meaning with which the expression is carried out. A solidified and institutionalized meaning has the power of cutting through the subjective intention with which an expression is expressed, but the intention also exceeds the given meaning which it thereby necessarily alters through the expression. Once it has been expressed and created, the new meaning falls into a “fund of kindred expressions” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 35) and is solidified but continuously open to reconfiguration and necessarily altered in new events of expression.
- 21.
At another point Merleau-Ponty writes, “I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent’s looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in some otherworldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man […] anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing voice…” (2004, 83).
- 22.
In his candidacy to the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty writes that his work so far has in the first place been concerned with reestablishing “the roots of the mind in its body and in its world, going against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness” (1964b, 3f).
- 23.
As Merleau-Ponty writes in the very beginning of The Prose of the World, “We believe expression is most complete when it points unequivocally to events, to states of objects, to ideas or relations, for, in these instances, expression leaves nothing more to be desired, contains nothing which it does not reveal, and thus sweeps us toward the object which it designates” (1973, 3).
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Acknowledgments
An earlier draft of this essay was presented at the conference Bodies in Crisis organized by the Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health at the University of Iceland in November 2011. I owe great thanks to everyone participating in the discussion that followed my presentation. I am also grateful to the members of the Body/Embodiment group at the Center for Gender Research, Uppsala University, and its sibling group at Northeastern University, Boston, for giving me helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I would finally like to thank two anonymous peer reviewers for their thorough readings and thoughtful comments.
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Käll, L.F. (2016). Performativity and Expression: The Case of David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly . In: Käll, L. (eds) Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities. Crossroads of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22494-7_9
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