Richard Armitage, gender trouble, and status expertise

[This is a theoretical post / building block.]

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Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage) importuned by the Sheriff (Keith Allen) in Robin Hood 2.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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I’ve referred occasionally, particularly while discussing Guy of Gisborne, to what I’ve called Guy’s “gender trouble.” The first time I said it, no one noticed, and the second time, two very astute readers said, “What do you mean?”

I’ve been wanting to write about this idea for years, and just never felt I had the time. Recently a few things came together in my awareness of Armitage, and then I saw a Richard Armitage confession that made me think a lot, and Judi mentioned some of the questions around the gender elements of Guy’s appearance, so it seemed like a good time to start dealing with this question. My attention’s been fragmented, and I’m not sure this is going to be as well-organized as I’d like, but it’s time to starting making good on my insight about writing from the Fall if I want to get somewhere on my goals for the blog.

I’ll begin by defining what I mean (and don’t mean) by “gender trouble” and continue by talking in very general terms about how I think the concept illuminates pieces of Richard Armitage’s work — Guy of Gisborne in particular, but also almost every other major role he’s done from Paul Andrews in Between the Sheets, to the “role of his life” so far, in which gender is up for grabs: Thorin Oakenshield. I did a post on how aspects of this idea applied to John Porter in Strike Back 1.1 without, however, calling it “gender trouble.” I hope to write periodically about how I see this dynamic working itself out both in Armitage’s dramatic performances and its intersections with his performances of self.

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Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) expresses concern over Lucas North’s (Richard Armitage) capacity to return to work, in Spooks 7.1. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Longtime readers know that I’m a fairly strong opponent of the notion that it’s primarily biological qualities or “human nature” that affect our perception of and response to the person and work of Richard Armitage. My position on questions like this was heavily influenced by my discovery during grad school of the now-famous book, Gender Trouble (1990) by Judith Butler, professor of English at UC-Berkeley. In college, I learned that theorists had come to distinguish between “sex” (the physiological quality of being male or female) and “gender” (the cultural expression of being male or female). This division probably seems relatively uncontroversial, as simple observation of culture reveals changes in femininity and masculinity over time. Butler’s most important contribution to gender studies involved assertions against this view. Gender Trouble presented a series of essays that critiqued the vestiges of essentialist views of sex, gender, and sexuality in the theories of sex and gender then prevalent. Butler argued that sex itself is not inherent in a particular kind of a body, but culturally constructed through a series of acts over time that cause observers to associate (for example) the expression of masculinity in gender with the male physical body and the sexual desires of those two with the notion of a male kind of desire, or sexuality.

In other words, Butler’s most important contribution to gender studies was the idea that sex, gender, and sexuality are performative rather than inherent to a particular form of body. (NB: This assertion makes the concept particularly useful to examining the work of any actor.) On this view, seeing someone whom we identify as “male” is a matter not primarily of identifying the body (sex) of the person who occupies a gender, but rather of understanding the performed actions of the person in relationship to other actors and observers (including ourselves). A simplified way of putting this, on Judith Butler’s view, would be to say that a man is not so much a person who has a penis or a beard, but rather a person who performs masculinity successfully. To put it crudely — we know that Richard Armitage or one of his characters is a man not because he has the necessary (to us as viewers mostly hidden) primary or (in some cases visually prominent, as with the beard) secondary sex characteristics of a male (though he might / does), but rather because he acts like a man. And the masculine quality of a man is never something essential, but always a matter of context (personal, social, historical, cultural). This argument — that our current notions of binary sex are constituted by performances rather than physiology — is probably the most notorious claim associated with Butler’s work.

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Harry (Richard Armitage) comes back for one last look at Geraldine (Dawn French) in Vicar of Dibley: The Handsome Stranger. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Hope everyone follows the argument that far, even if you disagree. Please note that Butler’s not claiming that there is no such thing as a body or that primary or secondary sex characteristics have no meaning — although, in a point that’s relatively less important to what I want to say about Richard Armitage, she would assert that the physiological qualities of the human body are much less binary than the scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have led us to think. Rather, on Butler’s view, the physiological quality of the body comes to have meaning through performances of gender. Her point would be that the perception and meaning of the apparent physiological qualities of sex are created by how people act and how others perceive those actions. So she’s claiming that our perception of the body is unavoidably constituted by culture and society. In order to have a particular physiological sex, Butler would say, one must act that sex out via a performance of gender. Only then, through perception, does one come to embody a particular sex.

Additionally, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Butler went on to note that performances of sex, gender, and sexuality are not exclusively independent choices made by the person performing them. As a person becomes a man via his performance of masculinity, he does not decide himself or on his own or even necessarily consciously how to do so. Rather, in identifying himself as a man, performing masculinity, and experiencing male desire, he both acts in response to and in turn contributes to systems of social rules about masculinity. (I would call these “discourses,” but I know that raises hackles among a certain group of readers). These social rules (Foucault called them “disciplinary regimes” because they have the effect of coercing results) make a gender appear “natural” (so that we say that certain elements of performing masculinity are inherent, natural, biological, etc.) Note that an important component of this activity in our society is the performance of the other gender in the binary system, as well as the performance of gender transgressions of various kinds — so that when fans like us react to a performance as particularly “masculine,” we not only act to define that term, but in doing so, we also perform our gender (whatever that is) ourselves.

***John Porter makes a crack about “conjugal visits” when Layla (Jodhi May) appears in Chikurubi Prison, in Strike Back 1.3. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Drawing in Foucault raises a third essential moment of Butler’s argument: performances of gender are a means of constituting and negotiating power between parties involved. Not all performances are successful, not all are created equal; some are deliberately parodic; but a successful performance of gender is one that offers its performers a means of taking or losing or mediating power as the performer desires.

Summary of this section, then:

When I write, in the analysis of a scene, that an Armitage character finds himself in gender trouble or creates gender trouble, I am arguing that something in Armitage’s performance of gender in that particular setting makes the traditional or expected gender/power axis unstable.

I would also argue that Armitage’s games with, or even at times outright subversion of, gender performances constitute a striking feature of his acting style, which brings me to my next point, but.

How could it be otherwise? Two caveats.

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Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) kisses Margaret (Daniela Denby-Ashe) in episode 4 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Before I get there. First. Longtime readers of the Armitage blogosphere may remember a few posts that RAFrenzy wrote in response to Strike Back and Spooks 9 about Richard Armitage as alpha or beta male in various roles he played (particularly here and here). I’m not so much disagreeing with her as taking a different, more contextual, performance-oriented route to approaching my discussion of Armitage and gender. The main similarity in her argument to mine is the congruence that we can observe varieties of ways to appear male and that Armitage’s work mixes these varieties up in interesting ways. However, I wouldn’t have chosen that schematic for explaining Armitage’s work. First, in its original articulation, the alpha / beta distinction is essentialist in its reliance on dynamics of animal behavior. Second, I haven’t found it very useful for explaining human interactions, mostly because the exercise of gender power is so much more subtle than simply whether someone is acting aggressively or less aggressively. In my perception, power, its expression, and its exercise are more complicated than simply dominance and submission, leadership or hanging back, silence or articulation. Alpha / beta discussions assume the very standards that I’m trying to critique here — and that I think Richard Armitage’s performances often subvert. I want to decide from within the scene just exactly how Armitage’s work assess and attacks, overtakes, or undermines the gender dynamics, not start from a previous assumption about what exactly constitutes dominance (and whether Armitage’s performance achieves that standard). Finally, the circulation of gender performances and power are not unidirectional; they do not result solely from the choices of a performer, but also emerge in the responses provoked in him and which he provokes in others. I’m hoping that gender trouble will provide a more diffuse, less rigid framework for looking at Armitage’s work than comparisons to biologistic schemata.

And second: It’s really important to me to emphasize the contextual quality of the arguments I will be making. Although I think certain patterns in Armitage’s manipulation of or responses to gender / power in his dramatic work can be observed, I am not talking about Armitage’s own personal notions of gender or sexuality, about which I have the necessary information to say exactly nothing, and I will keep it that way. I know that some people will misunderstand what I’m saying here on purpose in order to serve their own ends, so let me say clearly: I AM TALKING ONLY ABOUT ARMITAGE’S PERFORMANCES OF SEX, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY HERE. When I say, “Armitage performs sex / gender / sexuality in the following way,” I am not saying “Armitage’s sex / gender / sexuality is as follows.” To assert “Armitage performs desire” is not the same as asserting “Armitage desires.” I have a lot of information about the first and none about the second. I hope everyone keeps this difference in mind as they read these posts.

So, to summarize what I’ve been trying to say so far: Armitage’s acting draws interest, I will argue, via its gender performances.

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Lucas North (Richard Armitage) the moment after kissing Sarah for the first time in Spooks 7.2. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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What I want to add as a second but equally important point is also verges on something I’ve talked about before; that is, Armitage’s use of power and status negotiations between characters in his acting. Understanding Armitage’s work from the perspective of performances of gender enhances our capacity to evaluate them as performances that are inherently and always about power and negotiating power. Even more than the creation of gender trouble in Armitage’s acting, the theme of status negotiation may be the most striking feature of his work. Armitage is what one calls, as I’ve mentioned before, a status expert. At the time I broached that topic, there was some suspicion of what I was saying, apparently, but I think it’s perhaps clearer now that the matter of power plays a role in his own thinking, in light of his own remarks about his status vis-a-vis Gandalf (and how Ian McKellen gave Armitage his status) and what he’s said about the nature of Thorin’s leadership in some of the press about The Hobbit.

Armitage uses both conscious and unconscious moves, along with an employment of some of his more marked physical characteristics, to negotiate power. I’m thinking about things like the variable permeability of physical boundaries that he signals with his body; hand, chin, lip, mouth, eye, and head position playing counterintuitively against the status he gains by being tall; particular gestures that we see often enough from him that they appear to belong to a repertoire (though Thorin Oakenshield has significantly complicated an assessment of such tendencies). I’m also thinking of characteristic styles of speaking, particular vocal timbres and pitches that signal particular emotional responses; and the way that all of the above are used to create responses that in turn provoke.

I had originally planned to talk about some examples of this second point, but I am going to leave it for now and hopefully move on to examples as soon as I can.

And I want to add one last point — Armitage’s performances of gender and power are executed in ways that may be likely to appeal to particular segments of a female audience. Now there’s a cliffhanger assertion.

More soon.

~ by Servetus on July 29, 2013.