‘HAPPY’ AND ‘UNHAPPY’ PERFORMATIVES

Abstract

As a cultural and societal system with a hegemonic status, heterosexuality is often represented and imagined as not only normal and ideal but also as fixed and monolithic. There are, however, possibilities for queering heterosexuality from within. This paper considers the ways in which heterosexuality is made into a norm through reiterative visual performatives, but also the ways in which normative heterosexuality is challenged. It is my aim to show that ostensible ‘wrongdoings’, forms of ‘unhappiness’, or ‘infelicities’ within heterosexuality may very well form viable performatives of gender and sexuality.

Notes

1. Current explicit talk about heterosexuality is obviously connected to the increase in the representations of homosexuality in the media. Rosemary Hennessy, for instance, dates the radical change in the media visibility of gays and lesbians to the beginning of the 1990s (2000, 134–35). The first appearance of the term heterosexuality supposedly occurred in medical literature at the end of the 1860s (Katz 1996, 10).

2. Visuality, that which is seen, is a broader phenomenon than the realm of images, and the very same issues that will be analysed in this text through audiovisual media texts may of course also be considered in relation to extra-medial corporeal deeds.

3. On weddings—both as media spectacle and a performative bordering on the private and the public—see Paasonen (1999).

4. Since the mid-1990s several volumes on heterosexuality have been published. See, for example, Jackson (1995, 1999); Katz (1996); Richardson (1996); Thomas (2000); Dixon (2003); Ingraham (2005). Compared to the myriad studies on non-heterosexuality, they are still scarce.

5. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (2000, 312) define the effect of heteronormativity as ‘a sense on rightness’. This applies, of course, only to those heterosexuals who aim towards the norm.

6. In Gender Trouble Butler reads Austin's ideas through Jacques Derrida's text; but she does even this reading mostly between the lines, without mentioning Derrida, her partner in dialogue, too often. In an interview with fellow researcher Vikki Bell, Butler unabashedly admits that hers is not a loyal use of Austin:

I suppose the use of Austin became important because you know it is a theory of the performative, and this is a word that I have been using all along without quite dealing with him, which has already been somewhat scandalous. I think in Gender Trouble I actually took it from Derrida's essay on Kafka, ‘Before the Law’ which had Austin as its background but which I didn't bother to pursue. (Butler quoted by Bell 1999, 164)

7. Elizabeth Freeman also discusses Austin's example of the utterance ‘I do’ in the wedding ceremony, and the unstabilising potential of that very performative (2002, 33–34).

8. The bridal white first emerged in England around the mid-1600s, and in the United States the ‘white wedding’ dates from 1830s onwards (Freeman 2002, 19, 25).

9. Judith Halberstam argues that heteromasculinity, especially, associates with minimalism, and exaggeration of either colour or form is often understood as a sign of the feminine, queer, and even monstrous (Halberstam 2005, 121).

10. The example of marriage is interesting also if one thinks about the position of registered partnerships, and the arguments used for not making them legally equal with heterosexual marriages. In Austinian terminology ([1962] 1999, 17), gay and lesbian weddings may be described (depending on the context and thereby the legal status) from the angle of hetero norm either as ‘misinvocations’ when a procedure does not exist or it cannot be applied in a proper manner, or ‘misapplications’ when the procedure exists but it cannot be applied in the desired manner. Normatively, they may also be thought of as ‘misexecutions’ when the procedure exists and it can be applied but the ritual as such has problems.

11. On the political possibilities and restrictions of parody, see Butler ([1990] 1999).

12. Sexual orientation is a concept that has been criticised and challenged but also resignified in queer theorisation (Ahmed 2006; Butler [1990] 1999, 64; and fn. 23, 205).

13. I follow here Lee Edelman's idea and use the capital letter to emphasise the symbolic position of the child, hereby not referring to children as living or historical beings, or individuals, but rather to the figural or fantasmatic Child (2004, 11.)

14. A recent American study conducted by Nanette Gartrell and Henry Bos, however, emphasises the healthiness of the children of lesbian couples. See Fiore (2010).

15. The title of the series in itself refers to normative heterosexuality: it crystallises the ‘normally’ organised family relationships and the imperative marital status.

16. The slang term ‘cougar’ is applied to older women dating younger man, and it has also recently been used in titles of media productions. See, for example, the comedy series Cougar Town ( 2009–).