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Jan van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele (1436) is my favorite infant/old man Jesus painting (fig. 1). I love the details: the luxurious red folds of Mary’s cascading robe alongside the decadent touches on the attendants’ garb, the circular glass of the background windows, the patterned carpeting, and the gold statuary flanking Mary and Jesus on their throne. Although unlikely to grace the cover of any future edition of Gender Trouble, I argue that we can relate many of Judith Butler’s contributions from it to this medieval Flemish painting and the figures’ gendered and racialized physicality. Performativity has steadfastly remained Gender Trouble’s signal intervention, a term that relies on sophisticated psychoanalytic conceptualizations of melancholy, metaphor, and material embodiment. More often, though, this broader framework has been ignored as too dense or unnecessary, leaving performativity as a standalone term open to critiques that it is “merely”: any repeated embodied activity, a nonmaterial linguistic description that describes an already existing reality, or an activity that simplistically champions individual choice divorced from the effects of regulatory social structures.

Issue Section:
Roundtable on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity at Thirty? or Thirty-Five
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