Butler redefines gender as a type of performance by essential saying gender is not stable or predefined, but instead is created through performance acts (ones’ language, gesture, and all other symbolic social signs). These acts are discontinuous as one chooses their own acts according to the social situation. In order to relate this to a better understanding of the social world, an example of a drag queen was used. As drag queens dress up and perform acts that creates an illusion of their abiding feminine gendered self during intermittent periods of their lives. Butler also helps understand the social world itself a factor in the way someone performances gender.…
It breaks down gender stereotypes regarding masculinity and femininity. Similar, Judith Halberstam discusses the definition of masculinity (Halberstam 1-5). Moreover, Butler argues that sexuality also needs to be addressed through performance. Homosexuality and any other sexuality aside from heterosexuality…
Butlers idea of gender performance can be linked to Zimmerman and West concept of ‘doing gender.’ West and Zimmerman believe that gender is something we carry out, rather than something we are. It is a ‘routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment.’ (West and Zimmerman 1987: 126). "Doing gender work" refers to the performance of societal activities, interactions and perceptions which is used to define behaviours as either feminine or masculine; performing specific roles according to ones occupation.…
Gender roles play a huge part in society’s life because they help regulate behaviors and attitude that are socially acceptable. Aaron Devor, a dean at the University of Victoria and author of the article “Gender Roles Behaviors and Attitudes,” argues that men and women have clear rules and guideline in society on the way they should act. Traditionally, masculinity defined as being aggressive and domineering, while feminity defined as nurturing and passive. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was set in the late 19th century, when Victorian gender roles were very restricted. However, society behavior and attitudes about woman began to change.…
Susan Stryker’s issues with this theory of performativity are that she believes that by Butler arguing against gender as a fixed quality of our being, she is treating gender as if it were some totally flexible choice of a cherry-picking subject. Stryker mentions in (De)subjugated Knowledges, multiple criticisms of Butler’s work. Critiquing Butler on the basis of “the self-understanding of many transgender people, who consider their sense of gendered self not to be subject to their instrumental will, not divestible, not a form of play” (10). Stryker’s critiques of gender are more nuanced because she views transgender identities as a means of challenging the fact that no one can accurately make an ontological claim about their gender identity.…
For Butler, drag complicates and destabilizes these binaries of gender and sex that we have come to accept as natural. Drag reveals that gender is itself a performance and repetition…
Modern feminists see sex as biological, and gender as a socially constructed idea. Judith Butler argues that neither sex nor gender is “hardwired”. Butler’s ideas hold the notion that an individual is never entirely male or female, but is in a constant state of change. Butler is also one of the leading sociologists in queer theory, which is a school of theory that first began from gay and lesbian studies. Queer theorists, such as Butler, maintain the idea that all sexual behaviors are socially constructed.…
Essentially, Butler raises the question of does the body truly need to be sexed? And if sexed does a person’s gender truly have to act in accordance to the conventional and hegemonic notions of gender that exist in these fixed states of corporeal permeability and impermeability. In this discourse the body acts as a pre-existing surface which cultural inscription defines a both a person and their gender exclusively. But the act and implication of such a definition, results in creation of a clear and fixed divide between the male and female sexes, and by participating in this rhetoric, ultimately the body becomes bounded and constituted by the cultural and political forces at play. This concept consequently imposing an imperative and comfortable…
‘“Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender,” Judith Lorber’s article written in the mid 90s, describes western societies as having two genders: men and women. Lorber explains that, while they not wholly separate genders, transvestities and transexuals are “crossover genders” (2007: 43) floating in between society’s two genders. Society’s framework for gender affects everything a person does from the moment that person is born, without them even knowing it. The clothes a person wears, the friends a person makes, the job that person ultimately does or does not get: all affected by gender.…
In some earlier interpretations, sex and gender were looked upon as complementing each other. As in the piece, Interpreting Gender, Nicholson, states that if the body is view through the lenses of social interpretation, then sex is the underlying layer below it. This statement introduces her coatrack perspective where our sexed bodies (male or female) are the coat racks, which provides the foundations in which gender (coats) is constructed (woman or man). Although this perspective shows how these two connect, it also displays how the two can be separable where one can be sexed a female and be gendered a male or vice versa. This coatrack perspective also can apply to gender cross-culturally, where depending on context, one’s sex and gender could have different meanings.…
The 1965 Barbie advertisement supports Judith Butler’s theory in Gender Trouble of gender performativity. In the performativity of women, certain actions associated with femininity have been repeated to form a concrete idea of what a true woman is. Butler supports this idea with the statement that the “expectation produces the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (Butler xv), meaning that the constant pressure for women of all ages to be feminine, demure, and motherly creates the idea that there shouldn’t be deviations from these standards. Butler defines performativity as, “Not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally…
Performativity is how the way you “do gender” intersects with how you choose to show your other identities. This complex combination leads to a wide web of possibilities and constraints (Nelson). Intersectionality and performativity are so crucial in our everyday lives, often in more ways than one realizes at first. As Butler said, gender isn’t something we have or something we are, it is something we do. We make our identity through how we perform our gender, yet while it seems there should be endless possible results from this, reflective of how each person has different identifies and expresses them in different ways, this is not the case.…
According to Butler, the theory of performativity tries to explain that gender is socially constructed in the sense that people learn the set of behaviours, attitudes and roles that have been assigned by religion, medical science, and other forms of authority to each biological sex, male or female. In this manner, people imitate these characteristics, fitting them into their personalities and thus come to believe that gender is a natural consequence to their sex (Butler 1990).Thus performativity is achieved by the ‘’repetition of acts’’, which have been already given to us since birth and before it, in order to create a perception of who we are and how we need to act in this society, in particular a western society (Butler 1990). Butler, through research, observation, and work, has brought a change in the idea that gender is fixed, meaning a person is solely masculine if he is a male or feminine if she is a female. She proposes through her theory that since gender is something acquired from society, it is flexible and in a continuum (Butler 1997; Hawkes & Scott 2005:…
Gender Trouble as a perspective work to interpret Caryl Churchill’s essence of main characters in Cloud Nine Woman discrimination, patriarchy, lack of feminism movements – statements that make us nowadays shocked of the Ancient Time. These reasons made female part of the world started to cope with these problems. The present paper will study one of the biggest and most discussed nowadays problem of the gender equality and feminism movement of Western world. To describe this, I will take into account the Gender Trouble work by Judith Butler as a tool for characterizing Caryl Churchill’s characters in Cloud Nine. As Butler stated in her work that gender is something that is quite different apart from sex, her main point was lead to consideration…
One final video drives the point of how gender and sex are ingrained in society when a young boy (roughly 10 years old) compares the fandom with gay subculture, illustrating how constructions of gender have been modeled for him. Bussey and Bandura suggest, “A great deal of gender-linked information is exemplified by models in one’s immediate environment such as parents and peers, and significant persons in social, educational, and occupational contexts.” His experiences with social relationships inform his perspective on gender performance, reifying the binary when he states, “I know that it’s not straight, not normal for a male to watch My Little Pony.” Accusations of homosexuality by friends, family, and complete strangers is one layer of allegations fans contend with, however, there are insinuations of zoophilia.…