Symbolic Materiality: Judith Butler’s Theory
of Performativity and Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
Dr.
Stuti Khare
Department of English
Isabella Thoburn College
Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India
Abstract:
Judith Butler is one of the significant
voices in gender identity debates. Butler’s Theory of Performativity provided
us a comprehensive framework to analyze the gender identities. The material
conditions of life create the possibilities of symbolic representations of
bodies that ultimately become the identitarian acts. These symbolic acts as
forced by the material conditions of life, as ritualized in cultural and social
performatives, and as legitimized by canonical symbolic representations, create
concrete gender identities from which it becomes almost impossible for the
material bodies to escape. The Theory of Performativity as enunciated by Butler
takes into account the material performatives as enacted by the bodies and the
symbolic performatives as represented through language. Together the two create
the centre and the margins of gender identities.
Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan born writer who migrated to Canada with
his family at the age of nineteen. As a South Asian Canadian writer, Selvadurai
has carved a niche for himself as a significant voice in exposing the personal
and political marginalization of the ethnic and sexual/gendered minorities. His
novel, Funny Boy, one of the
best-known queer classics in the socio-cultural context of Sri Lanka, is a
fictional narrative of a protagonist who moves on from one gender identity to
another and suffers the pangs of the dominant symbolic. The myth of dominant
gender identities is punctured by the theoretical framework of Judith Butler
and the fictional narrative of Shyam Selvadurai. This paper attempts to read
Selvadurai’s Funny Boy through
the lens of the theoretical framework that Judith Butler has created to
theorize on gender-identities.
Keywords: Gender, Identity, Marginality,
Performatives, Queer
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity is a significant concept in
contemporary gender studies and feminist theory. Developed by Butler in her
influential book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990),
this theory challenges traditional notions of gender as a fixed, innate
characteristic, and argues that gender is a socially constructed performance.
The theory of performativity focuses on the conditions of material
existence and their effect on the cultural narratives. It posits that gender is
a performance in the sense that it is created and maintained through repeated
performances of gendered behaviours. These performances are not simply
individual choices, but are shaped by social and cultural contexts. Individuals
are socialized into performing gender in specific ways, and these performances
are then reinforced and regulated by society. The repetition and enforcement of
these performances contribute to the construction and perpetuation of gender
norms.
For
Butler, gender identity is a performance, i.e., we are not born with a gender
identity- it is not ‘given’, we participate in ‘making’ the gender identity
that we carry. When a human being is born, he is received into the cultural
narratives, with certain significations attached to these narratives. The
representations in these narratives prescribe certain roles for the gender
identity to enact. Material, concrete actions like gestures, dresses are
predefined and made exclusive to a particular gender identity. Besides that,
even language is understood as a kind of performance. For example, ‘female’
language is supposed to be different from ‘male’ language. In due course of
time, as an individual continues to perform certain roles of a particular
gender, it becomes a kind of identity marker for him or her. The narratives
create essentialized images of heterosexual identities, exaggerating masculine
and feminine traits and excluding the ‘other’, alternative identities. Butler
insists that the exclusion or erasure in the gender identity is not because
human beings are ‘born’ with the identity markers but because in a culture,
gender identities are already established and sedimented through “ritualised
repetitions of conduct by embodied agents” (Butler, qtd. In Boucher 112).
Butler’s theory of performativity rejects
the essentialist conception of gender as a natural sexual division or as a
cultural construct. She claims that the body is not a natural, material entity,
but a discursively regulated, cultural construction, (Butler 24) while gender
is a performative that produces constative sex (Butler 11). She conceptualises
gender as constructed through social rituals supported by institutional power
and proposes that gender identities are cultural performances that
retroactively construct the “originary materiality” of sexuality (Butler 10).
The segregations in concrete actions, gestures, dresses, modes of livelihood
and language define the individuals. So, according to Butler, an individual
does not ‘become’ a particular gender-identity through culture, as Simone de
Beauvoir would propose, but because the different genders perform/ enact,
circulate and perpetuate the pre-existing roles scripted by culture:
Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of
repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to
produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political
genealogy of gender ontologies … will deconstruct the substantive appearance of
gender into its constitutive acts and locate … those acts within the compulsory
frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.
Gender performances, then, are subject-less productions of a discursive
formation (Butler 43-44).
There
is no external agency that imposes gender identity on an individual- it is
within the individual who is enacting that identity in everyday life. Just as
repeated performances of norms include and define the normative gender
identities in a particular culture, their transgression precludes the non-normative
ones, leading to the demarcation of mainstream (heterosexual) identities from
the marginalised ones. The polarization of sex and gender into the binaries of
male or female excludes the possibility of legitimate alternate sexualities. The myth of dominant symbolic identities has
been exposed by many thinkers of these times yet the narratives of identity
still operate in different forms and structures in the space of nation, gender,
society, culture, law, etc. Shyam Sevadurai’s celebrated text Funny Boy
is one such text that explores the alternate/liminal space between the binaries
of male or female. In this paper, I intend to examine Funny Boy through
the lens of Butler’s Performativity theory. Butler’s theory helps us to analyze
how the characters in the novel negotiate their identities within a society
that enforces traditional gender roles and how they navigate and challenge
societal expectations regarding gender and sexuality.
Shyam
Selvadurai (born 1965) is a Sri Lankan born writer who migrated to Canada with
his family at the age of nineteen. His novel, Funny Boy(1994) is one of
the best-known queer classics in the socio-cultural context of Sri Lanka. It weaves, through the nostalgia and memory of the
protagonist narrator Argie, a personal bildungsroman in the landscape of Sri
Lankan Civil War (1983-2009). It is a powerful coming of age story that delves
into the complexities of queer identity against the backdrop of Sri Lanka’s
ethnic and political tensions. Set in the 1970s and 1980s, the novel follows
the journey of Arjie Chelvaratnam, a young Tamil boy, as he navigates societal
expectations, cultural traditions and his own burgeoning queer identity
The novel
includes six chapters/stories recounting the life of Arjie before his family’s
relocation to Canada following the 1983 riots that posed a direct physical
threat to the lives of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. The novel opens in
1972, when Arjie is about seven years old. The final chapter, “Riot Journal: An
Epilogue,” includes diary entries recording the historical communal riots in
Sri Lanka. The Tamil/Sinhalese conflict, culminating in the 1983 riots appears
as a recurrent trope throughout the novel which concludes not only Arjie’s
narrative but also his relationship with his Sinhalese boyfriend Shehan. The
protagonist of the novel Arjun or Arjie, is the son of an affluent Tamil family
in Sri Lanka. Through a series of past memories, Arjun narrates the story of
his Sri Lankan childhood from a Canadian setting. His transition from childhood
to adolescence delineates the emergence of his queer sexuality in a
post-colonial Sri Lankan society/culture that otherizes and persecutes
non-normative sexuality.
The title ‘Funny Boy’, without the
definite article “the” perhaps implies that the novel is not the story of a
particular funny boy. It also indicates
how language essentializes the cultural discourse by creating a dichotomy
between ‘funny’ and ‘normal’ men. The very first story “Pigs can’t Fly”, in the
novel “lays out the complex system of prohibition, punishment, and compulsion
that governs and structures gender differentiation” (Gopinath 2005,170). Arjie
is alienated from the normative discourses due to his “funny‟ performative
acts. We are introduced to the rigid patriarchal set-up of Sri Lankan Tamil
society in which there are well-defined spatial segregations of male-female
territories and activities/performances. While the area outside the domestic
space i.e., “the front garden, the road and the field that lay in front of the
house” belongs to the boys, the girls’ territory is “confined to the back
garden and the kitchen porch” (Selvadurai 3). Arjun seems to have a natural
inclination towards the female space: “It was to this territory of “the girls,”
confined to the back garden and the kitchen porch, that I seemed to have gravitated
naturally, my earliest memories of those spend-the-days always belonging in
the back garden of my grandparents’ home” (Selvadurai 3 italics mine). By
virtue of the “force of his imagination” (Selvadurai 3), Arije is
selected the leader of the girls’ territory and the the games they play. The
‘girlie’ games like ‘bride-bride’ or ‘cooking-cooking’, essentially include
enacting the ceremonies related to weddings and domestic chores. As the leader, Arjie is always
given the coveted position of the bride, which he relishes because it gives him
an opportunity to wear a saree, to be the self he wants to be and thus
transform himself:
…
by the saree being wrapped around my body … I was able to leave the constraints
of myself and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self… . It
was a self magnified, like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema,
larger than life;…I was an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon
whom the adoring eyes of the world rested. (Selvadurai 5)
When
he is discovered in a saree enacting the role of a bride in “bride-bride” (a
game meant for girls) with his girl cousins, his parents are embarrassed as one
of his uncles, Cyril tells Arjie’s father “you have a funny one here”
(Selvadurai 1994, 14 italics mine). It is through the performative acts like
cross dressing, pinning the veil to his head, applying rouge on his cheeks,
lipstick on his lips, and kohl in his eyes that Arjie’s body becomes a marker
of otherness as these acts are conventionally considered to be in the normative
female space. Thus, these cultural practices become the essentialist gender
attributes. Arjie, being a male, is not supposed to drape a saree and becomes a
laughing stock of his community, a “funny” boy. In the context of cross
dressing popularly known as drag, Judith Butler observes that drag,
reveals the distinctness of those aspects of
gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the
regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag
implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its
contingency. (Butler Gender 175)
Appa,
who is constrained by the normative performatives of gender, warns his wife
Amma, “If he turns out funny like that Rankotwera boy, if he turns out to be
the laughingstock of Colombo, it’ll be your fault,” and “You always spoil him
and encourage all his nonsense” (14). The word ‘funny’ has obvious connotation
of shame and taboo for the actions which are considered inappropriate for his
gender. To Arjie, however, the use of the word seems ambiguous and paradoxical
as Cyril uncle’s usage of the word has a tone of ridicule and mockery whereas
Appa’s tone is suggestive of disgust and warning:
It
was clear to me that I had done something wrong, but what it was I couldn’t
comprehend. I thought of what my father had said about turning out “funny.” The
word “funny” as I understood it meant either humorous or strange, as in the
expression “That’s funny.” Neither of these fitted the sense in which my father
had used the word, for there had been a hint of disgust in his tone (17).
After his exposure, Arjie is suspended between both worlds—he
must work inside the house while both groups continue playing on either side of
the house. This reflects the unmarked territories the sexually marginalized
people are forced to occupy in society. Arjie’s effeminate
manners hint at a possible homosexuality. His father Appa thinks that this
‘unnatural’ sexual orientation is a result of bad parenting or nurturing and
Amma fears he will turn out to be homosexual so prevents him from playing or
watching the girls play. She explains that he
cannot play with the girls anymore because “the sky is so high and pigs
can’t fly, that’s why.”:
‘Why
can’t I play with the girls?’ I replied.
‘You
can’t, that’s all’.
“But
why?”
She
shifted uneasily. ‘You’rea big boy now. And big boys mustplay with other
boys’ “That’s stupid.”
“It
does not matter,’ she said, “the world is full of stupid things and sometimes
we just
have
to do them” (Selvadurai 20)
This is the first time that Arjie becomes painfully aware
of such gendered restrictions even as he cannot understand their rationality.
Gayathri Gopinath observes in this context, “her answer attempts to grant to
the fixity of gender roles the status of universally recognised natural law”
(171) and the discourses on “gender conformity and non-conformity are
narrativized through competing discourses in the story, where the rhetoric of
non-conformity as perversion is undercut by the anti-normative performance of
gender in ‘Bride-Bride’” (Gopinath 2005, 172).
Arjie’s sexual disposition becomes a cause of concern for
his parents. Because of his desire to
indulge in what are traditionally associated as ‘feminine’ activities, he is
made to feel different from the rest of his male cousins who mock at him for
being too effeminate. The sense of pleasure he derives from dressing up as a
bride, watching his Amma wrapping a saree or his preference for games played by
girls sets him apart from other boys. Branded as “pansy,” “faggot,” and
“sissy”, he is forced to abandon his favourite
childhood games and adopt the rules of the normative, patriarchal adult world.
Thus, from the feminized private sphere, he is hurled into the masculinized
public sphere. This marks the beginning of a sense of exile and
loneliness for him as he is “caught between the boys’ and the girls’ worlds,
not belonging or wanted in either” (Selvadurai 39).
The pejorative
title, “funny” becomes his identity-marker for the rest of his life which
classifies him as a deviant other and prevents him from acting out his natural
inclinations. This also marks the beginning of
the sense of gendered alienation which will continue to haunt Arjie for a long
time. As he remarks poignantly, “Yet those Sundays, when I was seven, marked
the beginning of my exile from the world I loved” (Selvadurai 4).
The dialectics
of normative and non-normative dominates the discourse in Chapter 2, “Radha
Aunty” also. Radha is Arjie’s paternal aunt who has recently returned from
America. Her body through her “dark skin, unkempt hair, flat chest and American
apparel” defies the ideal of Tamil feminity (Gairola 5). There are parallels
drawn between Radha Aunty and Arije - both of them are viewed as the ‘deviant
other’ as they deviate from the gendered performatives of conformity and
perfection. When Radha, who is engaged to a man of the same ethnicity, is
discovered having an affair with Anil, a Sinhalese, her mother, Ammachi,
confronts her:
“You think this is funny?” Ammachi said after a
few moments. I could tell she was really trying to control herself.
“No,” she replied brightly. “I think it’s very serious.”
“Let’s
see how serious it is when Amma [mother] puts an end to your acting in The
King and I,” Kanthi Aunty said (74).
According to Lo, the dialogue between Radha and her
mother creates the binary opposition of “funny/serious” as “Radha deliberately
exploits the double meaning of the word “funny” in Ammachi’s rhetorical
question, managing to announce her anti-traditional attitude towards the
cross-ethnic relationship” (Lo 203). In the next passage, Aunt Doris warns
Radha not to commit the same mistake as she did because “Life is a funny
thing, you know. It goes on, whatever decisions you make. (79). Here “funny” have
philosophical connotations as it suggests the fluidity of meanings, and the
incomprehensibility, the strangeness of life.
Radha Aunty seems to implicitly sense
Arjie’s sexuality and does not press him for the truth. She invites him into
her room and allows him to play with her makeup and jewellery. However,
ultimately Radha is compelled to perform the feminine role and conform to
societal expectations of heterosexual relationships. Her struggle to fit within
these norms and her rebellion against them highlight the restrictive nature of
gender performance.
As Arjie grows older, he grapples with
his own understanding of his sexual orientation. Appa begins to suspect Arije’s sexuality and decides
that Arije needs to be transferred to Victoria Academy, a school that promotes
imperial values, as he feels that this school will help change his son’s sexual
orientation. When Arjie asks his brother Diggy why he must be sent to the
ex-British colonial school, Diggy says that Appa “doesn’t want you turning out funny
or anything like that” (205). Arjie feels “a flush rise into [his] face,” and
he refuses to meet Diggy’s accusing gaze when the latter asks, “You’re not, are
you?” (205). According to Lo, this ‘flush’ suggests shame and desire: “Arjie’s
flush is a sign of shame and desire. It suggests shame, as though he is being
looked at by an imagined internalized authority, creating desire, signalled in
a flush” (Lo 207).
In the
Victoria Academy, with its rigidly heteronormative background, masculinity and
manhood are identified with the capacity to perpetrate and tolerate violence
and aggression. Young boys are expected to model their behaviour on the
dominant masculine stereotypes. Arjie’s brother, Diggy warns him that he should
“Never complain” (206) and “Once you come to Victoria Academy you are a
man. Either you take it like a man or the other boys will look down on
you” (207). The italicized expression in this statement hints at a sadistic and
masochistic tendency to inflict and bear pain and violence.
Ironically, it
is this school that becomes the space for Arjie’s sexual awakening. Butler argues that the performative nature
of gender also opens up possibilities for subversion and resistance. By
recognizing that gender is not an inherent truth but a constructed performance,
individuals can expose the arbitrariness of gender categories. Thus, through a
series of poignant and often painful experiences, Arjie begins to embrace his
identity as a queer individual. Selvadurai sensitively portrays the process of
self-discovery and the importance of self-acceptance, ultimately showcasing the
transformative power of embracing one’s own authentic self. It is in this
school that he finds his male lover Shehan Soyoza, a Sinhalese gay/ queer.
Soyza is described as a misfit in the Academy, he is often bullied by his
classmates and is considered to be an “ills and burden” student by Black Tie,
the principal. The rumours about his alleged homosexuality have isolated him,
making him the laughing stock of the whole school. It is interesting to note
how Shehan’s deliberate performatives of non-normative gender and sexual
identities disrupt the conventional binary understanding of gender. His long
hair, or the delicate built of his body deny him the “normal” identity and
place him in an undefined liminal space.
Arjie finds himself deeply attracted to the confidence
with which Shehan wears his queer orientation and through Shehan he learns to embrace his own sexuality as
a gay. In fact, Shehan’s “anti-normative performance of gender” helps
Arjie in breaking away from the patriarchal structures of Victoria Academy and
realize his own sexual choices (Gopinath 2005, 172). The culmination of their
mutual attraction and love for each other is enacted in an intense scene in the
dark garage where they hide while playing hide-and-seek. This scene marks his
initiation into sex by Shehan. However, the guilt that Arjie feels on almost
being found out is indicative of the fact that somehow, he has also
internalized the normative codes of his society. Arjie and Shehan’s homosexual acts are performatives
that never culminate in a long-lasting relationship because same-sex
acts remained officially illegal in contemporary Sri Lanka. Due to the increasing violence of
Sri Lanka’s Civil War, he has to leave Shehan, and Sri Lanka altogether, to
flee the country as a refugee with the rest of his family. An individual
who cannot be accommodated into the traditional heteronormative binary will
occupy a rather ambiguous position vis-a-vis the society and the nation-state.
Stuck
in an imagined space, he loses any sense of gender, any sexual, ethnic, or
national identity. Arjie’s liminality robs him from possessing any single
subjectivity. A slippage in language always misrepresents: there is no way of
describing a boy who is different from other boys that does not risk defining
or implying that he belongs with the girls. Understanding gender in terms of a
binary opposition of boy and girl offers no place for Arjie, just as language’s
power to name deprives him of a proper space. (Lo 210)
Butler’s theory of performativity has had a powerful
impact on queer theory, challenging essentialist notions of gender and
providing a framework for understanding the social and cultural conditions of
gender identities. It encourages critical reflection on the power dynamics
inherent in gender norms and opens up possibilities for alternative and
inclusive understandings of gender. In this context, Funny Boy by Shyam
Selvadurai amply depicts the effects of performativity on gender roles and
identity in the human world. The dominant gender-roles have essentialized
heterosexuality to the extent that the other gender performatives are
prosecuted by the cultural economy in every aspect. It is not just the space of
human relations where the effects of dominant/marginal gender performatives are
realized, they are also realized in other cultural spaces like education,
profession, social recognition, economic acts and many others. The protagonist
of this work, Arjie continues to suffer because he belongs to the space of the
gender identity which is excluded from the norms of heterosexuality. Arjie is
not essentially abnormal or outlawed, but the encounters of life that he
experiences are interpreted through the lenses of the heterosexual norms and
thus he stands criminalized, brutalized and excluded from the so-called human
world.
Overall, the theory of performativity enhances our
understanding of how gender is constructed, performed, and contested within the
complex social and cultural dynamics depicted in Funny Boy. It invites
readers to critically examine the ways in which societal norms shape
individual’s performances of gender, and encourages a broader, more inclusive
understanding of gender identities and expressions.
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