05.12.17
The Castration of a Social Construct
For centuries, gender and sexuality were considered distinctly binary. In recent years, however, as more and more individuals question the social construct and are redefining themselves, one starts to wonder: what is gender, what is sexuality, how can they be defined or correctly applied, and is this even possible? As gender theorist Judith Butler states in Imitation and Gender Insubordination, “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original,” for the “naturalistic effects of heterosexualized genders are produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexual identity, one that is produced by the imitation as its effect.”[1] It is no secret that our society is dominated by heterosexuality – it embodies procreation; it is the “original.” Butler refutes this concept by introducing the phenomenon of “gender performativity,” declaring that gender is “a compulsory performance in the sense that acting out of line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence, not to mention the transgressive pleasures produced by those very prohibitions.”[2] In Jean Genet’s play, The Balcony, Roger presents himself as a typically masculine heterosexual male, but it is clear to fellow characters and the audience that much of his sexual and gender identity is performative. Roger’s inability to achieve dominance over his lover Chantal, his revealed fetishes and sexual pleasures, and final act of castration all define his unintentional insubordination of the ideal heterosexual man, emphasizing how gender performativity is cyclic and inevitably self-destructive.
Roger is introduced into the play by Irma, the brothel’s headmistress. She knows him as the plumber who is having an affair with one of her previous and best “whores,” Chantal. She states, “How do you imagine him? Young and handsome? No. He’s forty. Thick-set. Serious, with ironic eyes.”[3] Firstly, his occupation as a plumber is stereotypically male, which pushes him to fit into rigid gender roles within society. Perhaps he pursues it for that reason – he believes that this job frames him in such a way that others and himself will view him as the ideal masculine, heterosexual male. Additionally, a slang term for the reproductive system is “plumbing,” which alludes to his over-attempt to fully embody the part of him that technically makes him male. The fact that Irma describes his eyes as “ironic” highlights his ignorance and transparency, for everyone but Roger can sense his performativity. As Butler proposes, “Sexuality is never fully ‘expressed’ in a performance or practice.”[4] It is more-so insinuated in acts that are not markedly sexual.
In fact, as proven by the many fetishes expressed in the Brothel, a person’s sexuality can manifest itself in ordinary or even distinctively non-sexual scenarios. Roger’s conversation with Armand, a young revolutionary, is full of sexual innuendoes and displays Roger’s intense sexual insecurities and underlying motives:
(Armand, who has been seated, stands up, stretches and looks at himself complacently in a mirror.)
Roger (without raising his head): How long are you going to stand there primping.
Armand: I’m arranging my hardware for the ball.
Roger (severely): Not the ball, the fight…
(A pause)
Do you admire yourself in your role? You want it to last?
Armand (gaily): It has its charm. And it’s better than being at the shop. (He laughs as he looks at himself in the mirror; then, spreading his legs, he plants himself in the middle of the stage.) Like on the enlistment posters for the Marines: the tanks roll between my legs! (He strikes another pose.) Taras Bulba! (He laughs, takes out his revolver and aims at the bottles.) Big Chief Buffalo! We don’t have the right to play. The other side would have painted the town red long ago. They’d have smashed the crockery and shivered the mirrors!
Roger: You itching to do it?
Armand: It’s a little dismal on our side. All week long we operate machines, and on a red-letter day like this, instead of raising hell, we fuss around with a mechanism that may run away with us.
Roger: If we ever had the misfortune of taking pleasure in shooting at men and bottles, it would be good-bye to the revolutionary spirit![5]
Roger begins by degrading Armand, describing him as “primping,” a typically feminine action. In emasculating Armand, he heightens his own masculinity. He clearly feels threatened by Armand’s youth and playfulness, and in order to further dictate superiority, he questions and corrects the young fighter. At the same time, he insinuates genuine curiosity in his inquiry, implying that he is attempting to vicariously live through Armand’s participation in the Revolution. It is unclear why Roger does not fight, but he clearly thinks his knowledge on the subject is of highest value. Armand’s war vernacular is extremely sexual, such as “arranging my hardware for the ball,” or “the tanks roll between my legs!” Guns themselves are extremely phallic, and Armand is presenting war as enjoyable, suggesting a double entendre. Roger does not participate in the same sexual language, but he is clearly egging Armand on in a teasing way; he is clearly interested. Are the two men flirting? Or is Roger flirting with and fetishizing war itself, and shuts himself down (in the form of shutting Armand down) simply to maintain his desired identity? Through this conversation, Roger unintentionally resists the conventional masculine gender role.
To negate his subconscious desires, Roger convinces himself that he has power over others, specifically Chantal. He states that she “belongs” to him, and is outraged when she decides to join a separate group in the Revolution.[6] He exclaims, “But I dragged you –dragged you!—from the grave! And you’re already escaping me and mounting to the sky…. Your name’s on the lips of people who’ve never seen or heard you. Before long, they’ll think it’s for you they’re fighting. You’re already a kind of saint. Women try to imitate you…. (In a fury:) I didn’t carry you off, I didn’t steal you, for you to become a unicorn or two-headed eagle….”[7] She is an object of his love, a sexual ideal that he has prided himself on creating to enhance his masculinity. When she proves that she is, in fact, her own person and can make her own decisions, he feels intensely threatened because his sexual ideal is failing him; it is escaping him. In his mind, he has molded her into the physical form of his sexual/gender ideology—the ultimate performativity. This concept is so clearly elaborate and fantastic, but to him it is most real. Butler touches upon the phenomenon of the heterosexual gender construct, stating, “Indeed, in its efforts to naturalize itself as the original, heterosexuality must be understood as a compulsive and compulsory repetition that can only produce the effect of its own originality; in other words, compulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated phantasms of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real.”[8] Roger is imitating not only the concept of “man” onto himself, but also “woman” onto Chantal, in order to enhance his performance. Georgette, a wound dresser, inquires whether Roger hired Chantal to dress wounds to be close to him. He responds, “That was why, and also that she be born again.”[9] He claims responsibility for making Chantal into a so-called better woman, seeming like he is doing her a favor, when really his motives are entirely selfish. In this instance, he is unknowingly directly admitting to his motives and thus losing control over his presented identity.
Once Chantal, a major part of his sexual construct, is assassinated, Roger is unable to maintain his performativity and begins to give into his true sexual identity. He reenters the brothel in which he discovered Chantal, but because he cannot mask part of his sexual identity within her, he is forced to embody it entirely on his own. As he plays the part of Chief of Police, his interactions with the Slave reveal his true sexual fantasies and identity. At first, he does not want to be left alone with the him, but once the Slave begins speaking and venerating him, his mindset transforms entirely. He falls in love with glory, with the idea that people feel pain under his power. The Slave describes the pain of those who built Roger/The Chief of Police’s mausoleum, how “the cement is molded of tears, spit and blood” and “the workers’ eyes and hands that rested upon [them] have matted [them] with grief.” He insists, “We are yours, and only yours.” This gives Roger extreme sexual exuberance, as he cries, “Everything proclaims me! Everything breathes me and everything worships me!”[10] He has never felt so powerful. The major irony is that he is actually under the control of the brothel and is only participating in this scene for the pleasure of the real Chief of Police. His illusion of glory is then shattered when he notices that the Slave has left. His mood descends into extreme anxiety because, again, he has lost his source of sexuality. This proves that the heterosexual identity he tirelessly attempts to maintain is inaccurate, for the male Slave could not be more opposite from Chantal, his ideal woman, but he provides for Roger the most thrilling of sexual pleasures.
In this final scene, Roger’s failed performativity as a heterosexual male comes into full frontal view. Butler claims that “sexuality always exceeds any given performance, presentation, or narrative which is why it is not possible to derive or read off a sexuality from any given gender presentation.”[11] Roger’s true sexuality is more powerful than his contrived gender narrative, so it inevitably exceeds him. Throughout the entire play, and likely his entire life, Roger’s performativity is constantly threatened and debunked. In the play’s concluding act, he gives in and the complete irony of his character is exposed. In the beginning of the play, Roger states, “Men don’t revolt in order to go chasing after a female.”[12] This is ironic because he ends up essentially revolting the Revolution in order to chase after Chantal, a major piece of his artificial sexual identity. Additionally, he previously exhibited extremely negative views towards the brothel, yet he returns and experiences the height of his sexual pleasures. Louis alludes to this moment earlier in the play when he tells Roger, “But what you love in Chantal is the very thing you’re bent on destroying, the thing that made it possible for her to enter the brothel, the thing that’s still part of her….”[13] He is encouraging Roger to accept his true sexual desires instead of shutting them down, for clearly rejecting them isn’t satisfying or successful – everyone can see through it, and Roger is not experiencing any pleasure.
Therefore, Roger’s final act of castration is not at all surprising. In removing the part of his body that society deems most manly, he frees himself from the heterosexual male ideal that has limited him for so long. Roger has essentially defined himself by his male organs; he has tried to match his sexual identity with the gender constructed around the penis. Because he fails at the ideal male, he decides to separate his penis from his sexuality entirely, for castration will make it an ineffectual sexual organ. Therefore, his genitalia will no longer define his sexual and gender identity. This action is also in defiance of leaving the brothel, so in castrating himself, he is leaving his testicles behind in the only place they belong. As Butler argues, “Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that which, to some degree, can never appear. This is perhaps the most fundamental reason why sexuality is to some degree always closeted, especially to the one who would express it through acts of self-disclosure.”[14] Because they are so impacted by society, true sexuality and gender are undefinable. In his constant attempts to define his sexual and gender identities, Roger proves that he actually has no control over his sexual self-presentation. The major irony is that once he gives up attempting to define himself, he most successfully does so. Towards the beginning of the play, Georgette describes, “The main thing, as Roger says, is that the rebellion start off by despising make-believe.”[15] In the end, make-believe proves to be Roger’s truth. In mutilating himself, he disfigures his reality and draws it closer to fantasy, highlighting the construct of gender as a falsity.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Imitation and gender insubordination. N.p.: n.p., 1991. Print.
Genet, Jean. The Balcony. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958, 1960. Print.
[1] Imitation and Gender Insubordination, 313
[2] Imitation and Gender Insubordination, 315
[3] The Balcony, 48
[4] Imitation and Gender Insubordination, 315
[5] The Balcony, 54-5
[6] The Balcony, 61
[7] The Balcony, 64-5
[8] Imitation and Gender Insubordination, 313
[9] The Balcony, 64
[10] The Balcony, 110
[11] Imitation and Gender Insubordination, 315
[12] The Balcony, 57
[13] The Balcony, 66
[14] Imitation and Gender Insubordination, 315
[15] The Balcony, 55