identity affiliations and gender performance

The readings for this week were about identity and how it is formed. Specifically in art history, identity is a way to understand the motivation behind the work. As in, if art was made by a woman, then she probably made it a certain way because she was a woman and had certain life experiences. In the history of art history, this reliance on the identity of the artist has created many parallel art histories. Women’s art history, African American art history, and others are looked at as separate happenings instead of being interconnected. Even as more emphasis was being put on certain categories of people, women, African American, homosexual, there were some that were resisting the labels of identity. They wanted to be more than just a homosexual artist, they wanted to be artists who happened to be homosexual, African American, and/or women.
In the article “Performative acts and Gender Constitution,” Judith butler attempts to define what gender is and isn’t. Gender is a series of repeated acts that both the actor and the audience believe. This belief that the series of acts equals a certain gender has been repeated throughout history and because of this repetition many people believe that gender is natural. That there are certain ways each gender should act according to their sex. The interesting thing about this is that when a person does not “perform” their gender according to social norms they are punished, which implies that deep down society knows that gender is NOT a natural concrete set of rules, because if it were than all behavior would be natural. I’m not sure how much of that makes sense, but it was pivotal to me (see image). I began to draw parallels between how art has been thought of and how that thought process has changed. Initially art was thought to have this innate meaning that was universally understood by all, no matter what context it was put in or who the viewer was. There are definitely still people who believe this, but many contemporary practitioners and historians have come to understand and accept that the meaning of a piece of art lies somewhere between the viewer, the art, and the context in which it’s seen. And from this weeks reading, that is very similar to how I understand gender, that we perform in certain ways, depending on where we are and who our audience is; our audience understands our gender because we are acting in accordance with societal context and we are dressed in a certain way.
Another facet to identity is ethnicity. David Hollinger argues for the idea of “post-ethnicity.” The reason that Hollinger feels there is a need for a new way to look at ethnic identity is because past methods have failed. Multiculturalism does not go far enough to include the diverse array of people and although it worked well when it was growing in the 1980s and 1990s, it has failed to be updated since then. Post-ethnicity takes the cosmopolitanism that was prevalent in multiculturalism and pairs it with the idea that identity is voluntary. We choose to be affiliated with certain groups, as opposed to have a concrete identity that just IS. Hollinger feels there are three main groups that are affecting Americans thoughts about ethnicity. The business elite who don’t care much about actual Americans because they do most of their business overseas, a group that sees themselves as trans-national and therefore do not care much about a national community, and the third group is the “middle Americans,” the Evangelical Christians who feel strongly about America but believe that it belongs only to the people that look like them (white, middle class, and straight). After reading this section I am left wondering how I fit into America. I don’t affiliate myself with any of the 3 constituencies that Hollinger outlines, I do feel that I would identify with the idea of post-ethnic. I have always hated the idea that a label was going to be chosen for me by an outside force, and this label might fit some aspects of my personality and the rest must be flukes because they don’t fit a certain way.

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