Especificación de diseños instruccionales IMS Learning Design

As appearance is evidently part of doing gender, Tracy Morison and Catriona

Macleod’s performative-performance analytical approach (2013) becomes helpful. The starting point of their article is Judith Butler’s theory of performativity which they argue has significantly contributed to theoretical debates about gender by shifting the focus from a sex/gender binary onto an emphasis on the discursive construction of sex/gender. They argue, however, that while the theory of performativity provides a rich language for thinking about gender, it offers little guidance on analysing of language use in context. To apply Butler’s concept to analysis, they suggest extending Stephanie Taylor and Karen Littleton’s (2006) narrative -discursive method by infusing it with Butlerian theory.

While the article outlines a method for analyzing interview data, what interests me is their suggestion that the concepts of ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ capture

different aspects of doing gender. As Morison and Macleod explain, Butler’s concept of gender as ‘performance’ has at times been interpreted as implying that people are social

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dupes who cannot help but re-iterate gendered norms, and at times been taken to imply a pre-discursive subject who may intentionally engage in theatrical acts of performing gender identity. Morison and MacLeod emphasize that they are not implying a pre- discursive subject. Instead, they highlight the usefulness of the concept of

‘performance’ as indicating an active subject. Thus, they argue that ‘it is possible to maintain the antiessentialism of performativity while developing an account of gender construction as both inter/active and performed.’ (p.2)

Given the impossibility of people reciting or repeating gendered ‘scripts’ perfectly every time, Morison and Macleod argue that gender is disrupted because of the

necessity of reciting and the impossibility of identical recitations (Lloyd, 1999, cited in Morison & Macleod, 2013). They link this bending of citations (Van Lenning 2004, in Morison & Macleod, 2013), or changes in gendered scripts, to moments of ‘trouble’ in discursive terms. It is then possible to see disruptions of gender in specific interactional moments, where specific enactments of gender may be troubled. Morison and

Macleod’s discussion therefore indicates the usefulness of conceptualizing people as active ‘doers’ reciting gender in specific re-enactments within particular contexts, and their focus is particularly on troubling moments, where ruptures and fissures in

gendered discourses may occur.

Morison and Macleod’s discussion of the extension of Taylor and Littleton’s analytical framework is therefore concerned specifically with analyzing how ‘norms and

regulatory frames are troubled’ (p.7) and how specific performances may trouble gender norms. For Morison and Macleod, the usefulness of infusing a performative-

performance element into a narrative-discursive method lies in allowing them to access what they term ‘the politics of narration’ at ‘the macro level’, which refers to the normative trouble and slow bending of citations, in addition to analyzing trouble at the ‘micro level’ of interactional trouble. This extended analytic focus thus allows them to

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attend to any ‘broader political effects that narratives may have, including the subversive potential of ‘incorrect’ gender performances’ (p. 6)

Morison and Macleod therefore argue for carefully supplementing the notion of

reiterating performativity with the notion of more active subjects, implied in the concept of performance, in order to link interactional trouble with gender trouble in the

Butlerian sense. In their argument, a careful view of the relationship between notions of performance and performativity allows analysts to approach subjects as active, reflexive and imaginative, without undermining the antiessentialist nature of Butler’s work (p.10). While subjects can be seen as actively engaged in doing gender, they always do so from within existing discourses.

For my study, incorporating the concept of performance is interesting in relation to analyzing vlogs. The women vloggers not only explicitly perform in front of a camera with the intention of uploading the vlog to YouTube for others to watch, they also position themselves as if they are the authors of all the vlog content. However, what is communicated in vlogs goes beyond the spoken words, so that appearance, movements, actions and so on form part of what the women are doing as much as what they are saying. The vloggers can be seen to be simultaneously reiterating gendered norms and actively performing gender through speech, appearance and actions.

Bearing in mind the distinctive ways of displaying emphasized or non-emphasized femininity through markers (discussed above), and how appearance may be oriented to in talk, analyzing appearance as simultaneously performative re-iterations of femininity as well as situated and occasioned performances, opens up interesting possibilities for analyzing appearance and performance in vlogs. In my research, appearance,

movements and speech are all analysed as ‘doing’ gender.

This becomes useful, first, when actions and words may appear contradictory, and when vloggers may be seen to be doing several potentially contradictory aspects of femininity

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simultaneously. As an example, one vlogger may be seen to display ‘emphasized femininity’ by wearing make-up that conforms to conventional beauty standards, while

simultaneously sucking a sausage in an imitation of fellatio. In this vlog, both appearance and performance may be seen as iterating known versions of youthful femininity. One is an iteration of norms of what pretty young women look like and the other is a challenge to those norms through a performance of what McRobbie (2009) refers to as ‘phallic girl’ (p.7). It therefore becomes important for the analysis to

consider both aspects and what they do in relation to each other.

Second, it is also possible to distinguish between vlogs not orienting to appearance, giving the impression of being ‘just there’ and not a performance, and vlogs that present performances that are closer to theatrical performance, as in the example with the fellatio imitation. Vlogs can be seen as places where vloggers switch back and forth between performing ‘authenticity’ and performing ‘performance’. Vloggers also frequently occupy a space in between. Keeping the concept of performance in mind therefore aids in analyzing when vloggers may be seen to perform ‘performing’, and what function this may have.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that overt performances are somehow more

performative than non-overt performances, but rather that vloggers blend performances of gender, performances of identity and conventions around what performance looks like in ways that can be noted in an analysis. Paying attention to the variable ways of displaying femininity through appearance, appearance as oriented to in talk, and femininity as performance and performativity opens up potential for analyzing what is opened up or closed down by the discursive resources drawn on by the women, where the ‘discursive’ is conceptualized in the more Foucauldian notion as extending beyond talk and text to include appearance, movements and actions.

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