hoop dance and queer performance
By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)Part two - background
Historically, literature on the use of public space has largely examined male activity, as a binary emerged between the public being a man’s space and the private being a woman’s space. Jurgen Habermas characterised the public with notions of discursive design, rationalisation, and discussion. His notion of the ‘public sphere’ (1974/1964) has been widely contested, since it produces a dichotomy between public and private space and a mechanism for the exclusion of women (for example, Crossley and Roberts, 2004:24). This dichotomy has frequently been compared to a binary understanding of sex, that is being male or female, and subsequently of gender: being a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. The notion of gender is widely understood as a construct of society (Butler, 1988) comprising replicated behaviours that guide how one is meant to act as a man or a woman, because of one’s deemed binary sex. Men are often expected to be brave, strong, and dominant: these characteristics are associated with the public sphere. This illustrates how the understanding of public and private dichotomy of space in the academic literature has been entangled with concepts of binary gender. Judith Butler’s work conceptualises gender as a social construct that is separate from biological sex. Using Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir in Butler, 1986:35), Butler unpicks what it means to enact the behaviours associated with one’s binary sex, and calls this “gender performativity” (1988:527). Unlike a literal, overt performance, performativity happens in subtle behaviours that are learned and become an act of doing. She explains that, in this way, “one does one’s body” as the body receives signifiers from the environment as a guide through possibilities of existing corporeal styles: the body, then, “is never fully self-styled” (1988:521).
Since the 1800s, the sight of women on the street has indicated their use for sex work and their presence outside the home indicated their assistance for men (Buck-Morss 1989:119). In comparison, Walter Benjamin, who wrote about early consumer culture in the rise of the department store, describes the iconic figure of the flâneur: the man free to explore and loiter in the city, who takes pleasure in looking and viewing (1969:170). The flâneur is continually referenced to this day, perhaps to the point of overuse (Sarlo and González, 2001), which denotes its persisting relevance. These are the “historically constitutive” acts that gender is built upon (Butler, 1988:530), repeated throughout history to form these social norms associated with men in public and women in private. These historic accounts of male and female behaviour situate gendered performativity in the city and trace the diminished power of women in public space. Fran Tonkiss discusses common knowledge to this day that women are more afraid to walk alone in the street than men (2005:102), even though statistics show men are more likely to experience assault (2005:104, also see Day et al. 2003:312) and that this perception of space extends patriarchal control. Women’s psychological fear that influences their lack of confidence in public, for fear of sexual harassment, is gender performativity in Butler’s terms, as it is an indicator of how one acts according to one’s sex. Ultimately, Butler’s core argument is that, “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (1988:523), for example, avoiding being alone outdoors as a woman because of historically established fear and lack of agency due largely to male domination of public space.
Butler’s work informs queer theory a discourse that began by examining lesbian and gay identity but expands its framework to examine any identity that falls outside heteronormative identity. Queer theory challenges the conception that sex correlates with gender and sexuality, seeking to understand the arrays of possible “mismatches” (Jagose, 1996:3) that destabilise heterosexual norms. Butler’s work on performativity is essential to queer theory as performance is the basis on which identity is constructed and maintained. As a queer person who does not always associates with the gendered acts that comprise ‘womanhood’, I mobilise this notion of performativity with reference to queer theory to show how my practice of street hooping challenges the expectations of how a ‘woman’ in public space has been seen to act through time.
~COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR PART THREE~
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