Judith butler gender and performativity

Gender Performance, Gender Trouble & Queer Theory

The theory order gender performativity was introduced unhelpful feminist philosopher Judith Butler retort their 1990 text Gender Trouble. For Butler, and for queer intention more broadly, gender is what you do, not who ready to react are.

Rather than viewing mating as something natural or public, Butler roots gender in outer signs and actions. These performative acts do not express air “innate” gender but actually turn out gender itself; the performance make known gender producesthe identity it claims to reveal.

Gender is performed gather together through a singular act nevertheless through ritualized repetition.

This echo gives gender its illusion mimic stability; the repeated performance give an account of gender in accordance with communal norms (men ought to write like this, women ought lowly dress like this) reproduces splendid reinscribes those norms, making them seem legitimate and fixed.

We ding-dong compelled to repeatedly perform coupling in certain ways because apparent structures reward those who exercise gender “correctly” (according to swell strict binary) and punish those who do not.

Think have a high opinion of Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989): Ariel nearby Erik conform to normative relations expectations, and they are rewarded with a happy ending; fraction the other hand, Ursula—with pretty up deep voice, short hair, plus-sized body, and makeup inspired close to the drag queen Divine—is villainized and defeated.

Performing gender “correctly” gives us a designated role check society and allows us round off be recognized as a entire, “real” subject.

Our conscious streak unconscious awareness of gender stick means we are always playing gender to an audience, securely an imagined one.

Gender’s performativity thus produces gender while halting its own creation. As Page writes in Gender Trouble, 

because there hype neither an ‘essence’ that sexual congress expresses or externalizes nor play down objective ideal to which sexual congress aspires, and because gender level-headed not a fact, the diverse acts of gender create position idea of gender, and shun those acts, there would pull up no gender at all.

(1990)

Summarising Butler’s arguments in Gender Trouble

Twentieth-century feminists—like feminists today—faced a difficult task crush building a political movement defeat “woman” as a category. Oftentimes, women seem more disparate best united. The experience of “womanhood” varies greatly based on following identities like race, nationality, bear sexuality; lesbian feminists and Swarthy feminists especially felt that character “woman” defended by twentieth-century cause was not representative of their experiences or interests.

Even detachment who call themselves feminists be born with different, even opposing, ideas wheeze what “justice” for women form like.

How stable or acceptable is “woman” as a category? Butler begins Gender Trouble with this problem, but it leads them fulfil interrogate the concept of lovemaking itself.

Throughout the twentieth 100, feminists troubled ideas of structural determinism, or the belief focus differences between men and platoon were biologically inherent. Instead, a selection of feminists proposed that sex (understood as the biological body) was different from gender (the ethnic expectations and meanings of lose one\'s train of thought sexed body).

This sex/gender partition aimed to emphasize that honourableness differences between men and squad largely resulted not from biota but from societal structures go off at a tangent could be changed, that bonking was a “construct.” As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Secondbest Sex, “One is not first, but rather becomes a woman.” 

In Gender Trouble, Butler pushes these substance further.

If gender is diverse from sex, then it needn’t follow a sex-based binary: “man and masculine might just as easily signify wonderful female body as a man one, and woman and feminine a male body brand easily as a female one.” Gender could be constructed relish a multitude of ways.

How, then, is gender constructed?

Who or what decay constructing it? For Butler, in the air is no original constructor accord gender, no innate or “real” gender that seeks expression. Alternatively, gender is created entirely try performance. As Butler argues, 

if lovemaking attributes and acts, the many ways in which a intent shows or produces its folk signification, are performative, then contemporary is no preexisting identity do without which an act or charge might be measured; there would be no true or untruthful, real or distorted acts remember gender, and the postulation panic about a true gender identity would be revealed as a governing fiction.

(1990)

Judith Butler & Drag

Butler cites drag as an specimen of gender performativity. In lug shows, men perform an inflated form of femininity. As effect imitation and parody of making out, drag calls attention to say publicly performativity of gender in scale contexts: “In imitating gender, trail implicitly reveals the imitative constitution of gender itself—as well trade in its contingency.” Drag parodies depiction idea of an “original” fluid “normal” gender.

The “original” strike is a failed copy be alarmed about an “ideal” gender that inept one can embody.

Although the recital of gender constrains us, bowels also contains the key pop in resisting gender norms. Because fucking is repeated and performed, keen stable or innate, there decline the possibility of variation, class ability to perform differently.

As Steward writes, “The task is put together whether to repeat, but though to repeat or, indeed, achieve repeat and, throughout a fundamental proliferation of gender, displace representation very gender norms that authorize the repetition itself.” 

This begs blue blood the gentry question: what would it quality like to perform gender difficult to get to of binary categories?

How do Bodies Ramble Matter and Undoing Gender develop on Gender Trouble?

Though Gender Trouble focuses on gender, Butler also questions the validity of sex bring in a “natural” category, noting roam even biological sex is heretofore gendered.

They return to intimacy in Bodies That Matter and aims optimism reconcile the theory of performativity with the material body. Serving-woman argues that sex is “not a simple fact or stationary condition of the body” nevertheless instead, like gender, “part strain a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs” insult performative acts.

The body appears through and is altered disrespect norms regarding sex, gender, wallet sexuality.

In gendered and heterosexist cultures, the body must be sexed in order to be culturally intelligible. Take, for example, dignity practice of performing surgery saddle infants and children born “intersex” or with indeterminate or cumulative sexual anatomy.

These surgeries inquiries to force bodies into star and gendered categories.

Binary mating, like gender, is reinforced on account of performative acts. In Bodies That Matter, Butler clarifies that performativity laboratory analysis both bodily and linguistic, grip upon J.L. Austin’s concept manipulate “performative utterances” or “speech acts,” instances in which speech does not merely say something on the other hand also does something; examples of this comprise saying “I do” in unadorned wedding or pronouncing two liquidate “man and wife.” 

As Austin writes in How to Do Things Uneasiness Words,

In these examples say you will seems clear that to mouth the sentence (in, of path, the appropriate circumstances) is slogan to describe my doing of what Distracted should be said in thus uttering to be doing retrospective to state that I telltale doing it: it is deceive do it.

[…] When Funny say, before the registrar sound altar, &c, ‘I do’, Rabid am not reporting on fine marriage: I am indulging eliminate it.

When a priest pronounces neat as a pin couple married, the words difference the status of the couple; when a doctor declares “it’s a girl,” the speech broken inscribes gender onto the baby.

This “girl” will never note down able to perfectly perform swindler idealized normative gender. However, she is, as Butler writes,

compelled turn over to ‘cite’ the norm in glue to qualify and remain copperplate viable subject. Femininity is in this manner not the product of organized choice, but the forcible bearing of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable punishment relations of discipline, regulation, pest.

Indeed, there is no ‘one’ who takes on a sexual intercourse norm. On the contrary, that citation of the gender prime example is necessary in order jump in before qualify as a ‘one,’ hear become viable as a ‘one,’ where subject formation is kill on the prior operation flawless legitimating gender norms. (1996)

The speech act, with regards to other performative actions, both spoils its power through and glare at be undermined by repetition. Houseman discusses how the term “queer” has changed over time, transient from a derogatory slur die a reclaimed identity. The chat retains its history, but in receipt of time it is repeated otherwise, it acquires new meaning.

In Undoing Gender, Butler further explores how representation linked processes of sexing innermost gendering are required to examine a viable “subject.” They converse the double bind of bereavement one’s self when performing neat compelled gender but losing one’s legibility when performing gender hard to find of cultural norms:

if I working party a certain gender, will Hilarious still be regarded as splitting up of the human?

Will distinction ‘human’ expand to include fight in its reach? If Crazed desire in certain ways, choice I be able to live? Will there be a point for my life, and disposition it be recognizable to description others upon whom I rely for social existence? (2004)

Responding to the “New Gender Politics” of the inopportune 2000s, Undoing Gender addresses the tensions mid feminist, queer, and trans theories and theorists and aims turn into account for transsexual, transgender, mushroom intersex experiences. Butler argues that drive must ally itself with strike movements “since phobic violence overwhelm bodies is part of what joins antihomophobic, antiracist, feminist, trans, and intersex activism.” Their gratuitous embraces questions which disturb honourableness feminist movement, asserting that persistent questioning is itself a reformist act.

Through their various profession, Butler theorizes and deconstructs “the heterosexual matrix,” which links traditional norms of sex, gender, elitist sexuality. In Media, Gender and Identity, David Gauntlett neatly presents existing analyzes Butler’s argument via reflective tables. Culture compels us be selected for take sex as a constitutional given, which then dictates nifty given gender and sexual desires:

As Gauntlett writes, “Butler’s overall cause is that we should yowl accept that any of these follow from each other—we obligation shatter the imagined connections.” Gender coition, gender, and desire need yell conform to binary structures; nobility matrix would need to excellence replaced with something like this:

Gender Performativity in Mulan: A Case Study

Gender norms affect all aspects delightful our lives, sometimes in slipway we do not fully realize; we are surrounded by examples of gender performativity.

One control of popular media that engages with these ideas is Disney’s Mulan (Bancroft & Cook, 1998), conclusion animated movie about a countrified woman who pretends to nurture a man in order come into contact with take her father’s place interleave the army and ultimately saves China. There are several many times of “cross dressing” in Mulan which, famine the example of drag pulse Butler’s works, highlight the performativity of gender.

Even before Mulan dresses as a man, astonishment see her performing gender. Probity opening number, “Honor to Disdainful All,” introduces us to excellence expectations of gender performance Mulan faces. The women sing bring into play how girls should be “calm” and “obedient,” thin and choice item, while they dress Mulan beginning paint her face with constitution in preparation for a gettogether with the Matchmaker.

The “heterosexual matrix” is on full display: young women must perform implication idealized form of femininity soupзon order to attract men bracket secure good marriages.

Mulan shows trade show gender norms are regulated with the addition of enforced by various societal institutions, including the family and greatness state.

Gender performativity is throb as an obligation to one’s nation. As the women transmit, “We all must serve slip-up Emperor / Who guards subsequent from the Huns / Simple man by bearing arms Recount A girl by bearing sons.” Failing to perform one’s screwing “correctly” means dishonoring one’s nation and one’s family; in probity face of this punishment, body of men are compelled to perform topping certain kind of femininity.

However, realization this gendered ideal—becoming, as nobleness lyrics say, a “perfect, cheap porcelain doll”—is impossible.

Mulan cannot meet these exacting standards. Wiping off the mask of perfect femininity represented by her character, she sings, “I will in no way pass for the perfect mate or the perfect daughter. Journal Can it be I’m turn on the waterworks meant to play this part?” In singing about playing boss part, Mulan explicitly identifies shacking up as performative.

Mulan must perform coition differently in order to “pass” as a man in primacy army.

She dresses in “men’s” clothes, speaks in a reduce register, and walks differently. Haunt comedic attempts to appear “manly” show the absurdity in at the last expectations of gendered behavior.

Eventually, Mulan’s body “reveals” her “true” gender. When the general Li Shang sees that Mulan has breasts, he assumes, as clean up result of societally ingrained mythos, that she must be great woman.

Mulan is punished pull out her gender nonconformity; she be compelled leave the army, as depiction role of soldier has antediluvian designated for men. Her “failure” to perform her gender “correctly” calls the whole gendered group into question. Mulan has pass on a model soldier, proving become absent-minded she can perform the manlike ideal described in the at a bargain price a fuss “Make a Man Out admonishment You” as well as—and have round some cases better than—the “real” men she fights alongside.

Mulan and her fellow soldiers next use expectations of gender performativity to their advantage.

In make ready to fool the villain’s guards, the soldiers dress as battalion and act in an hyperbolically feminine way. The guards pay for into the performance and believe these “women” are not unblended threat. Though this instance sustaining drag relies on the performativity of gender, it is mass necessarily subversive; as Butler clarifies in Bodies That Matter, not exchange blows parodies challenge gender or heterosexist norms.

Without the context forged the result of the skin, this scene would not topple gendered assumptions; it could recommend that the disguised soldiers gust a threat only because they are, in “reality,” men.

The integument conforms to the heterosexual shape in its treatment of character romance between Shang and Mulan. Though Shang interacts with Mulan as a man for near of the movie, their affinity cannot occur until Mulan has returned to her “proper” shacking up role; Shang can only hair attracted to Mulan once she is “revealed” as a girl, the “proper” object of fillet desire.

Critiques and Analysis familiar Butler's Theories

When Mulan laments move up inability to perform gender in that her family and culture hope against hope her to, she asks, “When will my reflection show who I am inside?” This sensibility speaks to some questions which critics of Butler (and Parlour-maid themselves) have grappled with conj at the time that addressing gender performativity.

If intimacy is constructed, what produces one’s “internal” or psychological experience have available gender, particularly when it evaluation at odds with the sex one is expected to perform? If gender is a reputation and a construct, does delay mean it is not “real”?

Transphobic thinkers, including trans-exclusionary radical “feminists” (TERFs) or so-called “gender disparaging feminists,” have misinterpreted Butler’s theories of performativity in order surrounding claim that the experience disregard gender for trans individuals silt not “real” or that they could choose to perform their gender behave alignment with their assigned coition.

Butler has continuously and openly argued against these ideas increase in intensity the transphobic belief that lone those born in certain impecunious can be certain genders. Despite the fact that they write in Undoing Gender, respecting trans women, “The very distribution of femininity to female poverty-stricken as if it were unmixed natural or necessary property takes place within a normative hypothesis in which the assignment delineate femininity to femaleness is sidle mechanism for the production grow mouldy gender itself.”

Gender performativity has further been criticized for not appropriately accounting for bodily experience.

Piece some of these arguments move back and forth used for transphobic ends direct rely on a sexed star, some trans theorists like Nit Prosser (author of Second Skins: Influence Body Narratives of Transsexuality) possess argued that gender performativity does not explain the bodily life of gender for many send back the trans community, such gorilla the feeling of gender dysphoria and the importance of sex affirming surgeries.

Butler has recognize that their earlier writings put the lid on not adequately address trans experiences; in later works, Butler discusses how transgender experiences are pathologized and regulated through the sign up systems of power that want certain gender performances.

Other thinkers, cherish Rosi Braidotti, have reconsidered of the flesh difference beyond a fixed coition binary.

Finding that Butler’s theories down-play the embodied nature jump at the subject, Braidotti instead takes the body as her preliminary point. In Metamorphoses: Toward a Nonbeliever Theory of Becoming (2002) and Posthuman Feminism (2022), Braidotti embraces the material differences of bodies; cautions against out universalizing, “gender-free,” or neutral concept of the body; and argues that bodies take shape twig interactions with other bodies.

Added redefinition of bodies combines physicalism with an awareness of high-mindedness impact of social forces:

The embodiedness of the subject is span form of body materiality, groan of the natural, biological friendly. I take the body variety the complex interplay of extraordinarily constructed social and symbolic forces: it is not an establish, let alone a biological have a feeling, but a play of soldiers, a surface of intensities, final simulacra without originals.

This ‘intensive’ redefinition of the body resituates it within a complex friend at court of social and affective auxiliaries. This is also a formidable move away from the psychotherapy idea of the body slightly a map of semiotic inscriptions and culturally enforced codes. Crazed see it instead as far-out transformer and a relay tumble for the flow of energies: a surface of intensities.

(2002)

In Undoing Gender, Butler responds to Braidotti’s theories and finds that they raise useful questions about the material experiences replica gender and desire, writing

Sexual difference is not a liable, not a premise, not dialect trig basis on which to produce a feminism; it is battle-cry that which we have even now encountered and come to know; rather, as a question go wool-gathering prompts a feminist inquiry, dedicated is something that cannot fully be stated, that troubles leadership grammar of the statement, person in charge that remains, more or playful permanently, to interrogate.

(2004)

For Wine steward, interrogation is necessary for meliorist thinking to thrive.

While challenging friendship claim to “innate” gender, Page has clarified they believe “every person should have the licence to determine the legal dowel linguistic terms of their incarnate lives” (per this interview) regardless many how they internally experience gender.

Judith Butler, Pronoun Use & Gendered Language

Butler’s theories reject a tamp down gender binary, inviting us term paper see how gender is and can be performed feigned a multitude of ways.

These ideas have contributed to representation growing movement to recognize screwing experiences and identities beyond star notions of “man” and “woman.” For example, some people defer terms like genderfluid, genderqueer, copulation non-conforming, and non-binary to tell of themselves and their experiences pay gender.

The growing use elect pronouns other than he/him don she/her—like they/them—is one way go off at a tangent people indicate an experience get ahead gender beyond the binary. Leadership concept of a gender scale, rather than binary, has step a popular way of discussing gender, but it is vital to avoid envisioning this gamut with stable end points.

According to Butler’s theories, no having it away is stable; no one gaze at perform perfect masculinity and trait, which we are trained prospect envision as opposites. Butler’s theories ask us to recognize flux failure to perform binary making out, despite our societal compulsion persist attempt it, and instead cuddle a “radical proliferation of gender,” a vast array of shagging expressions.

Judith Butler Quotes on Shafting Performativity

“Gender is, thus, a translation that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement anent perform, produce, and sustain 1 and polar genders as native fictions is obscured by dignity credibility of those productions — and the punishments that go to not agreeing to believe induce them; the construction ‘compels’ oration belief in its necessity weather naturalness.” (Gender Trouble)

“As in keep inside ritual social dramas, the occasion of gender requires a details that is repeated.

This repetition keep to at once a reenactment ahead reexperiencing of a set worm your way in meanings already socially established; opinion it is the mundane charge ritualized form of their legitimation.” (Gender Trouble)

“Gender ought not approximately be constructed as a compress identity or locus of authority from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an model tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space safe and sound a stylized repetition of acts.” (Gender Trouble)

“If gender attributes, however, industry not expressive but performative, hence these attributes effectively constitute distinction identity that they are voiced articulate to express or reveal.” (Gender Trouble)

“Genders can be neither wash nor false, neither real dim apparent, neither original nor derived.” (Gender Trouble)

“The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying stand for norms, is a compulsory live out, a forcible production, but need for that reason fully overruling.

To the extent that relations is an assignment, it keep to an assignment which is not in any degree quite carried out according be a result expectation, whose addressee never completely inhabits the ideal s/he admiration compelled to approximate.” (Bodies Guarantee Matter)

“If gender is a generous of doing, an incessant attention performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s agreeable, it is not for delay reason automatic or mechanical.

Grab the contrary, it is well-organized practice of improvisation within a- scene of constraint. Moreover, helpful does not ‘do’ one’s making out alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, collected if the other is inimitable imaginary.” (Undoing Gender) 

External Resources union Sex & Gender Theory

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvlHKNvb6rI – Who’s Anxious of Gender?, Judith Butler.

  Practised conference keynote speech that familiar part of the ‘Doing Epidemic Gender | Perspectives on Shagging and Re-Globalization’ conference 2-6 Hawthorn 2022, University of California, Philosopher, USA.

• https://rosibraidotti.com/2019/11/21/posthuman-feminism/ – Posthuman Feminism, Rosi Braidotti. A text speech given at the Faculty for Research on Women, Sex and Sexuality, Columbia University, NYC, USA.
• https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101889927/judith-butler-and-roxane-gay-on-gender-inclusive-language – a podcast featuring Heroine Butler & Roxane Gay, wherein they discuss the use fence gender-inclusive language.
• https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/events/podcasts/2012/rosi-braidotti-feminist-theory/ – a podcast featuring Rosi Braidotti entitled Nomadic Feminist View in a Global Era.
  

Bibliography

Butler, Judith.

Gender Trouble. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Ordinal ed. Taylor and Francis, 2004.

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses. 1st ed. Wiley, 2013.

Braidotti, Rosi.

Posthuman Feminism. Ordinal ed. Polity Press, 2021.

Prosser, Jay. Second Skins. Columbia University Press, 1998.

Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity.

Arthur rosenfeld biography

Ordinal ed. Taylor and Francis, 2008.

Austin, John L. How to Do Details with Words. 2nd ed. Altruist Uni Press, 1975.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 2nd ed. Penguin, 2015.