Judith Butler on performativity and precarity: exploratory thoughts on gender and violence in India

Abstract

Abstract We turn to the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler for
insight into how gender performativity (acting and actions restricted by gender
norms) affects identity and thus individual agency. Gender performativity
underlies the prevailing conceptualisation of women in India as being lesser.
We anticipated that the extreme divide between wealth and poverty and higher
and lower castes would affect women’s vulnerability. Yet, while lower class/
caste women are undeniably at greater risk of sexual assault, even women of
higher social status similarly embody ‘precarity’: a life lived without
predictability, and thus without security. While structural changes have
encouraged increased agentic performativity among women in India, a culture
of condoned sexual violence is nonetheless an ongoing and horrifying reality.
Keywords performativity; precarity; sexual violence; rape; Indian women; caste;
social class; gendered habitus

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Journal of Marketing Management
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Judith Butler on performativity and precarity:
exploratory thoughts on gender and violence in
India
Annamma Joy, Russell Belk & Rishi Bhardwaj
To cite this article: Annamma Joy, Russell Belk & Rishi Bhardwaj (2015) Judith Butler on
performativity and precarity: exploratory thoughts on gender and violence in India, Journal of
Marketing Management, 31:15-16, 1739-1745, DOI: 10.1080/0267257X.2015.1076873
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COMMENTARY
Judith Butler on performativity and precarity:
exploratory thoughts on gender and violence in India
Annamma Joy, Faculty of Management, The University of British
Columbia, Canada
Russell Belk, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada
Rishi Bhardwaj, Faculty of Management, The University of British
Columbia, Canada
Abstract We turn to the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler for
insight into how gender performativity (acting and actions restricted by gender
norms) affects identity and thus individual agency. Gender performativity
underlies the prevailing conceptualisation of women in India as being lesser.
We anticipated that the extreme divide between wealth and poverty and higher
and lower castes would affect women’s vulnerability. Yet, while lower class/
caste women are undeniably at greater risk of sexual assault, even women of
higher social status similarly embody ‘precarity’: a life lived without
predictability, and thus without security. While structural changes have
encouraged increased agentic performativity among women in India, a culture
of condoned sexual violence is nonetheless an ongoing and horrifying reality.
Keywords performativity; precarity; sexual violence; rape; Indian women; caste;
social class; gendered habitus
Introduction
Performativity and precarity are essential to understanding the vulnerability of
women in India, regardless of class and caste. Gender norms define how women
are treated in India, with performativity –which precedes any act of volition and
agency –and precarity –which involves a life ruled by unpredictability –providing a
culture-specific understanding of how gender is conceptualised in India. In this
commentary, we investigate the conditions of women of both upper and lower
classes/castes in New Delhi. We draw on observations and interviews that we
conducted with upper class/caste women, combined with secondary descriptions in
the media regarding gender violence, as well as scholarly publications on middle- and
lower-caste women, all within New Delhi. While structural conditions have changed
in recent decades, enabling women to work outside the home in greater numbers,
©2015 Westburn Publishers Ltd.
Journal of Marketing Management, 2015
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traditional norms and cultural perceptions of women as subordinate to men in the
household prevail (Derne, 2008). To study changes in the role and status of women in
India, we must consider the context of concomitant economic and structural changes.
We begin with a brief analysis of Üstüner and Holt’s(2007) study of dominated
acculturation of poor migrant village women in Turkey, given its relevance to our
study. These authors contrast first-generation village women migrants in the city with
their daughters, who experience no connection to the villages from which their
mothers came. The actions taken by the previous Kemalist government to
Westernise and secularise Turkey (Üstüner & Holt, 2007, p. 46) led to the creation
of Turkey’s hegemonic ideology, the Batici lifestyle, which embraced consumerism.
The idealised portrait of modern femininity associated with this lifestyle –an
existential threat for the mothers and an ideological promise for their daughters –
beckoned them to escape the patriarchal bonds of village married life for the
independence of women in Turkish upper middle-class society. Gender, class and
ethnicity thus became entwined with national culture and ideology, driving the
creation of a new female identity. The authors find that the daughters ultimately
fail to break class barriers; their efforts were neither credible nor durable within the
context of an ingrained self-identification as being inferior to men.
Although Üstüner and Holt describe the process of attempting to escape
traditional limitations on women’s lives and self-images as ‘staging performances’
(2007, p. 56), this performance has an end goal: to escape from poverty. Other
consumer studies have also reflected on such temporary mechanisms for asserting
identity and escaping repressive consumerist norms (Kozinets, 2002). While
oppressed groups can experience different degrees of autonomy, the structural
positions they occupy in society deter major institutional changes, a perception that
dovetails with Judith Butler’s conception of performativity.
The price and power of patriarchy
India has a shockingly high incidence of sexual assault: in 2013, according to the
latest figures available from the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime Statistics
(2015), 117,035 Indian citizens were victims of sexual assault, with ‘reported’being
an important caveat, since only an estimated one per cent of such crimes are reported
to the police (The Lancet,2014). Victims are often ashamed to report their assaults,
believing themselves to now be impure, at fault, a source of shame for their families,
and potentially no longer marriageable. Annual sexual assault rates have steadily
risen. Paradoxically, this rise may be, in a sense, a sign of progress, since it may
reflect women’s increased willingness to report sexual assaults. India’s capital city,
New Delhi, located within the massive metropolis of Delhi (home to 25 million
residents, according to The Guardian (‘The ingenious Delhi slum’,2015)), has been
described as ‘the rape capital of India’(Prakasan, 2014). New Delhi is a major
commercial hub, with a multi-ethnic population in a constant state of flux: ‘an
unsettling place rather than a place of settlement…’ (Mankekar, 2015, p. 10). In
such an unstable environment, women at every level of India’s heavily stratified caste
society are vulnerable, with those at the bottom bearing the heaviest burden.
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‘Boys will be boys’
It is hardly news that the powerless are at the mercy of the powerful. According to
the New York Times, women of lower caste are at far greater risk of being gang raped
than their higher caste counterparts, (Fontanella-Khan, 2014), and their cases are
even less likely to be prosecuted: ‘When a distressed father is reporting his daughter’s
disappearance to a policeman in India, there are some questions he doesn’t want to
hear. “What is your caste?”is one of them’. Revulsion from the industrialised world,
including mass marches and outrage within India, have had an impact; yet even when
sexual assault cases are reported, and even when assailants are identified, punitive
action is seldom taken.
In addition to caste discrimination, sexual assault in India is further fuelled by fear
of losing patriarchal power, as Indian women increasingly demand social equality.
Derne, Sharma, and Sethi (2014) argue that despite economic changes in India, the
oppressive gender culture, particularly among less educated men, has not changed.
Moreover, the safety of private spaces is less available to lower caste/class women.
More than half of India’s 1.25 billion citizens have no access to indoor plumbing, the
highest rate of any country (Nelson, 2012); open fields and riverbanks serve as open-
air toilets, leaving women and girls at daily risk of assault.
Women living a life of free agency are at heightened risk for violence; there is
danger in going out after dark, in wearing modern clothing, in being with a man who
is not one’s husband. Women in India are routinely blamed for sexual assaults; as one
media reporter opined (Pidd, 2012): ‘Asked by the reporter if there should be a dress
code for women “to ensure their safety”, Mamta Sharma (Chairwoman of the
national Commission of Women [NCW] in India) allegedly replied: “After 64 years
of freedom, it is not right to give blanket directions …and say don’t wear this or
don’t wear that. Be comfortable, but at the same time, be careful about how you dress
…Aping the west blindly is eroding our culture and causing such crimes to happen”’.
Women are encouraged to marry as early as possible, as protection against sexual
assault; a man is deemed capable of providing protection from predators. From the
uneducated male point of view, the act of sexual assault is an indicator of machismo.
As Mulayam Singh Yadav, an Indian politician and member of the national
parliament, said in defence of a group of convicted gang rapists who had received
death sentences: ‘Boys will be boys…They make mistakes’(Fareed, 2014).
Gender as imposed performance
Gender norms in Butler’s view are predetermined. Meijer and Prins (1998) rejects
any form of biological determinism and argues instead for a consideration of gender
as constructed through social norms and rituals, with gender identities as cultural
performances that retroactively construct the original materiality of sexuality: in
essence, copies without originals. Butler (1993) suggests that the experience of a
self in control, of having a core identity, however temporary or ineffective it may be,
does not really occur. If a woman raised in an inherently repressive culture
experiences free agency, Butler argues, it is only because she is not fully aware of
the norms governing her situation. She considers thought and action as originating
not from one’s sovereign precondition but rather from a subjectivity resulting from a
language that precedes and supersedes the ‘I’. Women who are noncompliant with
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existing norms simply do not count, are not recognisable. With that caveat, Butler
reports that performativity does provide instances for the remaking of a successful –
i.e., an independent –gendered identity.
Meijer and Prins (1998) uses Foucault’s analysis of power to explore how gender is
articulated through performativity. Individuals can develop pre-dispositions within a
social matrix to think and act in particular ways, which Thompson and Üstüner
(2015) term ‘gendered habitus’. Joy and Sherry (2003) develop the idea of habitus by
building on Merleau-Ponty’s(1962) discussion of skill development through virtual
enactments. Opposition to power is possible within this framework because, Butler
posits, gender parody destabilises the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.
For Butler, there is no original identity associated with the constitutive subject,
although she recognises a form of pre-discursive affective individual identity,
described as actions taken by a political individual in her earlier version of
performativity (Butler, 1993; Meijer & Prins, 1998).
The theory of performativity presupposes that norms act on us before we have a
chance to act at all and that when we do act, we recapitulate those norms, perhaps in
new or unexpected ways, but always in relation to the norms that precede us. The
body is implicated in specific ways (Joy & Venkatesh, 1994). We are far from being
sovereign individuals capable of independent decisions, simply because we are the
products of the ongoing process from which our view of self and of the world are
derived. As Butler notes (2009,p.xi)‘If what I want is only produced in relation to
what is wanted from me, then the idea of “my own”desire turns out to be something
of a misnomer. I am in my desire, negotiating what has been wanted of me’. When
subversive changes actually do occur, such advancement is due to ‘a certain historical
convergence of norms at the site of…embodied personhood [that] opens up
possibilities for action’. Further, as Butler states: ‘The performativity of gender has
everything to do with who counts as a life, who can be…understood as a living being,
and who lives, or tries to live, on the far side of established modes of
intelligibility’(iv).
In Butler’s view, the enactment of gender allows for the remaking of gendered
reality along new lines: gender is prompted by obligatory norms for individuals to
behave in a particular way. This reproduction of gender is always a negotiation of
power (Bristor & Fischer, 1993). When gender is expressed in unexpected ways, the
possibility exists for transgressing social norms. To sustain itself, power must
reproduce itself, and therein lies the possibility of unleashing unexpected effects.
For Butler (2009), the Derridean notion of iterability can be inserted into the
Marxian concept of domination, opening up possibilities for redefining oneself,
even as such possibilities are potentially complex and can aptly be termed precarious.
The precarity of Indian women
The state of precarity characterises the lives of those deemed by the powerful to not
matter, whose lives are inherently precarious. Precarity is thus applicable to all
potentially disenfranchised ‘others’: the impoverished, women, members of the
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, and anyone viewed as lesser by the
dominant social order. The precariat are by definition vulnerable. In India girls, with
their potential dowry costs and lower social standing, are all too often literally deemed
disposable. Ultrasound screenings to determine gender and female foeticide have been
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criminalised in India since 1994, yet sex-selective abortion is nonetheless ongoing, as
evidenced by India’s unequal sex ratio (Chandramouli, 2011). Estimates of the number
of female foetuses aborted each year are as high as 500,000 (BBC News, 2006). There
are no reliable data to assess how frequently female infanticide occurs among those for
whom ultrasounds and abortions are financially unobtainable; a 2012 documentary It’s
a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words in the World (http://www.itsagirlmovie.com)
investigates female infanticide, and uncovers evidence of its tragic reality. The nation
state expected to protect vulnerable groups might itself play a role in creating and
sustaining such vulnerability, whether through legal inaction or simply by disassociating
itself from human misery.
Are middle and upper class women more secure? Derne et al. (2014) report that
by 2011, middle- and upper-middle class women, wearing Western outfits with
impunity, began frequenting public spaces such as movie theatres and shopping
malls, and had little difficulty finding jobs, a feat unheard of even a decade earlier.
According to Derne et al. (2014), such women now hold two jobs, the same ‘second
shift’(Hochschild & Machung, 1989) familiar to women in other industrialised
nations, with their day job followed by a night job comprising household chores, as
the structural dominance of males in households continues.
The influence of Bollywood
As reflected in Bollywood movies, the articulation of erotic desires must be
superseded by familial obligations (Mankekar, 2015, p. 134). According to
Mankekar (2015, p. 136), ‘the pursuit of erotic desire becomes the hallmark of a
particular kind of woman: upper class, professional, yet “Indian”in her loyalty to
family and to traditional customs and conventions’. The upper-class woman
sometimes ruled by desire is a threat to Indian notions of the pure and sacred wife,
who is legitimate only if she acts in culturally appropriate ways. The Madonna and
whore identities may exist separately, but do not overlap. Precariousness is
everywhere, even when re-signifiers of gender occur.
Precarity as a social condition derives from the imposition of vulnerability by
social norms, arising from political decisions and social practices that protect some
but not others. Butler (2009) conceives of this vulnerability as perceptual as well as
material. Movements of precarious people are directed against social exclusion,
exposing and opposing such exclusivity (p. vi). According to Butler, capitalism
entrenches the risk of abjection through precarity, whereas more resilient economic
systems may seek to avoid the risk of abjection.
In closing
How does Butler’s‘unspeakable population’speak and definitively assert itself over
deeply entrenched repression? Our exploration of Indian culture suggests that
gendered habitus socialisation is not as uniform as Bourdieu (1984) conceives it to
be, because of India’s caste system (see also Thompson & Üstüner, 2015). Attempts
to change gender ideologies have done little to reduce sexual violence against
women, and negotiating a new female identity remains a Sisyphean task. Precarity
guides performativity, not only because of social censure, but also because of the
constant threat of violence.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge receipt of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
[grant number e2013-165], granted to the first and second authors to study luxury brand
consumption in India.
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About the authors
Annamma Joy is a Professor of Marketing and Faculty Research Coordinator in the Faculty of
Management at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, Canada, and is the
corresponding author. Dr. Joy’s research interests are consumer behaviour and branding, with
a focus on art, fashion, wine and luxury consumption in China and India.
Corresponding author: Annamma Joy, The University of British Columbia, Canada
T250 807 8606
Eannamma.joy@ubc.ca
Dr. Russell Belk is the Kraft Foods Canada Chair of Marketing at the Schulich School of
Business, York University, Toronto, Canada. His research involves tends to be qualitative,
cultural and visual and involves the extended self, meanings of possessions, collecting, gift-
giving, sharing, digital consumption and materialism.
Rishi Bhardwaj is a doctoral student supervised by Professor Joy at the University of British
Columbia. His doctoral dissertation is on consumer aspirations and luxury brand management
in India.
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