Is _____ a Trope?

As I was reading the final section (pp. 2551-2553) of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in our anthology, I was struck by the connection Butler’s idea concerning the performative nature of gender makes with Gates’ conception of the performative nature of race (which we talked about last week), so much so that I was wondering if particular sentences describing or defining gender in Butler’s text could still make sense if one swapped out the word “gender” for the word “race.” Perhaps I am stating the obvious here, but is race not written on our bodies by culture/history in the same way that gender is (Butler 2543-2544)? This prompted me to consider whether or not all aspects of identity are performative (and if not all, then most, but then which elements of identity are “natural”?). This growing inquiry, which is not, obviously, fully developed in this blog entry, finds another foothold in Thompson’s article “Is Race a Trope?” (from which my title finds its source), when she explains how the theatrical work of actor Anna Deavere Smith performs diverse characterizations of not only race, but “ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions” (127). Is there nothing natural in individual identity? Are all of the various pieces of identity listed above not inherent in individuals, but indeed constructs of culture/history/society, and thus always changing as time marches on? Is nothing about identity fixed and concrete? Of course, it is all a matter of opinion in regards to which theories one prescribes to, but it is an interesting existentially phenomenological discussion.