For Butler our understandings of gender are historically, socio-culturally and linguistically formed. There is no natural gender. We are not born already gendered and gender is not a stable foundation of identity. Gender is instead performative, occurring through the citation and recitation of powerful and conventional, but also subversive, gender norms. This is always an
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embodied process: the body is written and shaped linguistically by norms surrounding it. To be embodied is to be performative. Agency is enabled through social structure, emerging from our encounters with regulatory gender norms. Consequently, there is always room for change, which can occur both in the form of resistance based resignification, and the recitation of subversive gender norms. Moreover, subversive norms can grow in their own repetition to become conventional and powerful gender norms. It is in this way that the gender order is made and remade through practice. As Butler explains:
“It’s one thing to say that gender is performed, and that’s a little different from saying gender is performative. When we say gender is performed we usually mean that we have taken on a role, we are acting in some way, and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we, the gender that we present to the world. To say that gender is performative is a little different because, for something to be performative, it means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman... We act as if being of a man or being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that’s simply true about us, a fact about us. Actually, it’s a phenomenon that’s being produced all the time
and reproduced all the time” (Big Think, 2012).
Discussion
A Butlerian analysis of this family’s journey, stories and photos will shed light on the enabling structures that shape the identity work of these young women. Following Butler, I argue that identity for these young women is a performative process marked by the stylisation of their bodies. As I trace the photo’s the girls take, my analyses ventures into the online world of Facebook. Here I will draw on Butler’s concept of embodiment to argue that although Facebook is detached from the physical body, for these young women it is a space of embodied performativity.
In the following chapters we will hear from the girls their own voices and view the photographs that they chose for inclusion in this research. I will draw on Butler’s argument that the ‘body is a series of possibilities’. As I trace socio-cultural structures that surround these young women, we will see the different ways these young women are ‘doing’ their bodies. Selfies and photo taking
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are a crucial part of the girls’ identity experimentation, as it is through the camera lens that they performatively explore their bodies. Their photos illustrate how repetitive this process is; as the girls repeatedly take photos of themselves they learn what looks ‘good’ and what looks ‘bad’. Just as gender norms through repetition come to appear internal, seamless and naturalised, by repeatedly taking selfie photos, the girls have come to know their bodies well. In this way they are skilled at choreographing their bodies to perform gender norms. I will draw on Butler to examine the different ways the sisters use their bodies to cite particular gender norms through photography. The very best of these photos are shared on Facebook. Hence, the girls are using Facebook as a performative space in which embodied identities are produced through the sharing of photos that have been choreographed.
As the girls reflexively discuss the photos they have taken, our conversations reveal a series of strategies at both conscious and unconscious levels. To unpack these strategies the girls and I discuss the specific gender norms they are citing. Our discussions reveal the challenges of becoming a Western woman in a non-white body, as I explore the blurred lines between the popular and conventional ‘ways of being a young woman’ and resistant and subversive ‘ways of being a young woman’. At a glance modelling themselves on celebrities such as the Kardashian sisters (which the sisters do) may appear to be a conventional act, yet for the girls citing such celebrities is also a way of engaging in resistance against Hindu gender norms.
Many of the girls’ friends on Facebook are other Bhutanese youth. In chapter six the girls discuss the importance of Facebook among Bhutanese youth; they will highlight how Facebook is a space free from Hindu caste, gender barriers and adult supervision. The girls describe how many Bhutanese youth use Facebook as space to performatively explore with Western gender norms. Here, the girls’ resistance against Hindu caste and patriarchy is shared with and supported by other Bhutanese youth.
In the following chapter I will explore my participants’ family history, and the politics that resulted in them becoming refugees and ending up in New Zealand. As my participants share their stories and experiences we will see the impact that local community structures of caste and gender have on refugees during their resettlement process. The girl’s mother, Sarah, will share her early experiences of New Zealand and her strategies for raising her daughters in a new
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country. Here, we will see how agency within this family has been enabled by structure. As the family has been marginalised by the Hindu caste system, Sarah has encouraged her daughters to take up ‘Kiwi ways of being a young woman’. In doing so a family strategy has emerged that is resistant to the Hindu caste system through the citation and recitation of Western gender norms.
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