A 1960s French kitchen, with tiled yellow floors and whitewashed cabinetry. Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler and Toril Moi are perched around a dining table, where a young university student hunches. The conversation begins.

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Moi: What a beautiful kitchen, Simone! Absolutely flawless, as usual. 

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Butler rolls her eyes.

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Moi: And that stunning teapot! 

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Beauvoir abruptly stops filling her cup. There is a brief silence.

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Butler: Bold of you to just throw around that label, Toril. How do you know it’s not a kettle, or some other miscellaneous vessel? I’m a little surprised you’d be so careless, given we’ve dedicated our entire careers to that question.

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The student frowns, perplexed. Moi turns to elaborate.

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Moi: Historically, of course, a teapot was just a tea-brewer. Saturated with the essence of teapotness, from handle to spout. Pervasively defined by the ability to produce herbal infusions, since nature evolved the mysterious strainer basket. 

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Butler nods.  

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Moi: But then the new wave rolled in, bringing us shoulderpads —

 

Butler: (Interrupting) Reagan.

 

Moi: And the form/function distinction. 

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Student: Form, as in…?

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Moi: The structure of a vessel. The biology, so to speak. The handle, the body, the steam whistle.

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Butler: And function. Boiling, pouring, steeping leaves… 

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Student: The outward workings that follow from a natural form.

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Butler: (Scoffing) Hardly. Function is nothing more than a cultural construction, a process that converts form into a neutral surface on which culture is allowed to act. There is nothing about the metal body of a kettle or the strainer of a teapot that must dictate its use at the table. Function is a fiction.  

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Student: So, form is neutral?

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Butler: Form itself is a construction. The vessel is merely china, an abstract body that invokes no potential. The teapot is a pouring, a performance. It is in the steeping and serving, the brewing of fragrant tea leaves, that the teapot is made living. It has no signifiable existence prior to the mark of the pouring.

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Student: I find that hard to accept, Judith. In fact, I rather resent the notion that the teapot could be so reducible! My own teapot has pattern, shape, colour. [Butler smirks, Beauvoir whacks her.] It has weathered the fire of the kiln; travelled through kitchen, dining room, and sitting room beyond. Surely that's something more than function, performative or not.

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Moi: Precisely! Your teapot is first a plain vessel, and then a teapot. You get so bogged down in the metaphysical, Judith, that you’ve lost contact with your subject. If form is so constructed, so elusive, how do we locate the teapot as a historical and socialized vessel? It has a place of origin, a unique story, a lived experience. Form and function cannot be the dissociated pair you’d have us imagine.

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Butler: Perhaps, but the idea is to illustrate the capacity for a radical discontinuity between vessel forms and culturally constructed functions. A discontinuity where-

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Moi: Rubbish. The form/function distinction is completely irrelevant for understanding what it means to be a teapot. 

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Spoons clatter onto saucers. There is a tense pause.

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Student: Moving on, Toril. I’d hate for you to be cancelled so early into our soirée. 

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Beauvoir rises from her place and begins to clear the table.

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Butler: That’s nonsense, anyhow. We live in a world where kettles are free to behave as teapots and teapots as kettles. Who is to stop a teapot from hopping on the stove, curious to feel the flames? [Pantomiming.] Who is to stop the kettle from trying some leaves and attempting a brew? Normative function and personal preference do not have to align with a physical form. The cross-performance reveals the mimetic nature, the very constructedness of function. Simone, actually, has said nothing that precludes the teapot from having the body of a kettle.

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Everyone glances at Beauvoir. She remains impassive.

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Student: You quibble! I’d think Simone was far too concerned with the teapot in infancy to divorce function from structure altogether. 

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Moi: Yes, that’s not quite how I understood her, Judith. The lived experience of the teapot is an open-ended and ongoing interaction, a dialogue in which teapots give meaning to existence by their actions. For Simone, the teapot is not a fixed reality, but a becoming –

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Butler opens her mouth.

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[…] though not in your performative sense! The vessel is a situation: a lived and embodied grasp on the world, and it must therefore involve form. The question lies not in the how of becoming, but in asking what values and demands the teapot faces, precisely because she is a teapot.

 

Butler: But surely you tie yourself to formal determinism; asserting that the vessel may only become what its structural features dictate. [Wryly] Your ceramic bottom can only brew, never boil.

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Moi: Untrue. At a baseline, the possession of the usual structural and formal characteristics is what makes a vessel a teapot. But this has no necessary consequences for the norms or cultural arrangements we ascribe to it. Why value the brew over the boil?

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Butler: We'll agree to disagree. 

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Student: A kind of essentialism, that in no way overdetermines the teapot’s freedom. Curious. [Aside] But insufficient.

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Beauvoir begins to wash the dishes.

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Student: Is she planning to speak? 

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Moi and Butler: (Together) Nope!

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Butler: That’s the beauty of the beast; discourse endlessly reframed.

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Moi: Simone had her time, and by the looks of it, we’ve had ours. You’re up, dear.

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The older women smile, and leave the table.

 

References

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Alfred A. Knopf, 2010 [1949]. 

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Taylor and Francis, 2011 [1990].

Moi, Toril. What is a Woman? and Other Essays. Oxford University Press, 1999.