Gender Performativity in Hunger Games
Ambiguity lies at the core of The Hunger Game’s central romance plot. How do we know if Katniss’s feelings for Peeta are real or part of her performance in the games? Does she even know the difference?
Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity can help us understand Katniss’s predicament (and our own). Butler argues that gender is a performance, but it’s not a voluntary act or choice. It’s also not an individual act, but a required, compulsory performance that must be repeated ad infinitum. Performing gender is a necessary condition of being in society. If you don’t perform a gender role, you risk being ridiculed, marginalized, ostracized, cast in a circus freak show, locked away in an mental institution or prison, or even killed.
Here’s how Butler explains performativity in her article, “Critically Queer“:
The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning; that there is a “one” who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. This is a voluntarist account of gender which presumes a subject, intact, prior to its gendering. The sense of gender performativity that I meant to convey is something quite different.
Wait a minute! I thought I could get up in the morning and decide who I want to be and how I want to look! I’m feeling very feminine today, so I’ll put on this pink swing skirt…or I’m really in the mood for cargo pants, an old t-shirt, and sneakers. Butler acknowledges that you do have some margin for choice in self-fashioning, but your choices are limited by gender codes and scripts that precede you. Somebody—some community—has already decided that a pink swing skirt is feminine, and that cargoes and ripped t-shirts are masculine. Even if you can choose between those outfits, you have to choose. You can’t come to class naked, or you’ll be kicked out and sent home. And if you insist on going naked, you might get locked up in a psychiatric institution, until you agree to conform to codes about what’s normal and acceptable. Those regulations about what’s acceptable predate you: they existed way before you were born, and they actually allow you to come into being. Here’s how Butler puts it:
Gender is performative insofar as it is the effect of a regulatory regime of gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social constraints, taboos, prohibitions, and threats of punishment operate in the ritualized repetition of norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender construction and destabilization. There is no subject who precedes or enacts this repetition of norms. To the extent that this repetition creates an effect of gender uniformity, a stable effect of masculinity or femininity, it produces and destabilizes the subject as well, for the subject only comes into intelligibility through the matrix of gender. Indeed, one might construe repetition as precisely that which undermines the conceit of voluntarist mastery designated by the subject in language.
When Butler says “there is no subject who precedes or enacts this repetition of norms,” she means that you don’t come into being—you’re not recognized as a person—until you’re subjected to these ideological norms. Being “subjected” to gender ideologies allows you to emerge as a “subject”—that is, as a recognizable, legitimate person. The first thing that happens when you’re born is you’re given a pink or blue blanket. The first question that’s asked, often before you’re born, is: Is it a boy or a girl? This is the machinations of a system of performativity that produces and regulates gender uniformity, categorizing the infinite diversity of human bodies into the categories of “male” and “female.”
There is no subject who is “free” to stand outside these norms or to negotiate them at a distance; on the contrary, the subject is retroactively produced by these norms in their repetition, precisely as their effect. What we might call “agency” or “freedom” or “possibility” is always a specific political prerogative that is produced by the gaps opened up in regulatory norms, in the interpellating work of such norms, in the process of their self-repetition. Freedom, possibility, agency do not have an abstract or presocial status, but are always negotiated within a matrix of power.
So here’s where your limited choices come in. You can choose the pink skirt or the cargo pants, but those choices are still “negotiated within a matrix of power” that has already determined what those choices mean.
In the Hunger Games, the power matrix is exaggerated in ways that make it easier to see how Katniss’s gender—and also her sexuality—are scripted and controlled by a broader network of power. The Capitol (aided by teams of avid stylists and enthusiastic audiences) determines what’s attractive, appealing, and worthy, indeed—what can and will survive. If Katniss refuses the role of the “girl on fire”—the object of Peeta’s desire—she will be eliminated. It is not possible for her to remain outside the compulsory gendered, heterosexual matrix. She cannot just be Katniss Everdeen, androgynous, asexual, self-sufficient hunter and provider. She must conform to a gender matrix that enables and sustains her identity, her subjectivity, her selfhood. And she can’t extricate her true self from her performances in the games: it is those performances that make her who she is. As Butler might say, she’s subjected to a system that produces her as a subject.
To learn more about Butler, read this discussion of performativity in Dino Franco Felluga’s Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1:1 (Nov. 1993): 17-32. Print.
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic Press. 2008. Print.
Felluga, Dino Franco. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Last update: 31 Jan. 2011. Accessed 27 Jan. 2014. Web.
