Gender Non-Realism: Rereading Judith Butler’s Performativity in Dialogue with Śaṅkara’s Advaita

Abstract This article seeks to put Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as performative in active dialogue with Śaṅkara’s perspectives on the formation of the “I.” Butler argues that gender has no ontological essence and that the sense of its reality is achieved through the constant reiteration of actions and language. As such, epistemologies that invoke performative gender conceptions should be abandoned, as they are doomed to further reify these oppressive constructs as ontologically real. Śaṅkara, from his own distinctive socio-ritual background, argues that all phenomenal traits are unreal, that is, lacking in any ontological stability. However, he simultaneously asserts that developing provisionally valid understandings of these attributes, without mistakenly positing their ontological depth, is in fact possible. The aim of this article is to put this latter perspective on epistemology—denoted by the term “non-realism”—in conversation with certain contemporary feminist debates on gender, to argue that the deconstruction of gender does not necessarily imply an inability to make gender-related epistemological claims.