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Thinking about what is and what might be …. Dr Dorothy Morrissey Department of Arts Education and Physical Education Mary Immaculate College, Limerick dorothy.morrissey@mic.ul.ie. Gender ‘as’ performance.
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Thinking about what is and what might be … Dr Dorothy Morrissey Department of Arts Education and Physical Education Mary Immaculate College, Limerick dorothy.morrissey@mic.ul.ie
‘All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances;/And one man in his time plays many parts’ As You Like It 2, 7:139-142
‘. . . the purpose of playing … was and is, to hold, as ‘t were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ Hamlet 3, 2: 21-25
To be female [ . . .] has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project . [ . . .] Discrete genders are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished [ . . . ] because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. [ . . . ] The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is [naturalised and] obscured by the credibility of its own production. Butler, J. (1988, p.522)
Performativity • Cultural codes (performatives) that precede, exceed and are separate from the performer (e.g. codes related to being male or female) • Performativity refers to the ways in which these codes are maintained through repetition and regulation
Gender • In public discourse, the ‘masculine’ is identified as the norm • Non-normative experience silenced and sanctioned Bourdieu (2001); Butler (1999)
No Job for a Woman: The Impact of Gender in School Leadership (NASUWT, The Teachers’ Union, 2010)
The Career Progression of Women Teachers in England: a Study of Barriers to Promotion and Career Development (Final Report of the Women Teachers’ Careers and Progression Project, June 2005)
