Foucault, Butler, and Kellor

You will excuse my shaky grasp of Judith Butler’s theories.  She believes that gender is “performed.”  That is, rather than characteristics being in essential categories authentically inhering in people (a mouth full), people make up forms of sexuality and gender and perform them.  Frances Kellor provides evidence for Butler’s position. 

Michel Foucault discussed the use of sexuality by regimes of power.  And, my Foucault is vulnerable to refinement.  However, heterosexuality being crucial to the socio-economic structure and reproduction provides evidence that sex and power impact each other. Furthermore, the very title of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, implies that it changes over time.  Like Butler, Foucault eschews the idea of essential gender types over time.

We do not know about the intimate details of Kellor’s sexual relationship.  She hunted little curly hairs from her lover Mary Dreier.   However, Kellor had a somewhat Victorian sense of decorum.  So raunchy sexual details will not be forthcoming. However, illustrating both Butler and Foucault’s ideas, Kellor performed gender consciously to impact the power structure.

People who were children along with Kellor in her small town of Coldwater, Michigan, claimed she walked and talked like a boy.  She had biological transgender tendencies.  But in changing her name from the feminine “Alice” to the masculine “Frances” and her use of athletics to impact gender characteristics shows she also understood gender to be performative.

In her book Athletic Games in the Education of Women, Kellor said that sports would help women shake their femininity.  By this she meant they would exchange their passive subjective domestic concerns for an active role in righting public problems.  Sports would teach women to fight in public and thus perform gender differently as Butler would expect.  And, herein, ala Foucault, Kellor’s call to have women mend public ills, conveyed an understanding that gender can impact the power structure.