Gender Performativity

The theory of Judith Butler

Definitions first!
Performative: term used by Judith Butler to describe gendered behavior as a performance

Fluid: in gender theory, the notion that identity and sexuality are not fixed categories

Discourse: the forms of representation, codes, conventions and habits of language that produce
specific fields of culturally and historically located meanings

Postmodernism: art, literature, social critique and other forms of thinking sharing the view that
human “texts” (ranging from ourselves to society itself, as well as all forms of human endeavor)
can be approached from multiple perspectives, that there is no one “metatext” and that ideas and
texts must be contextualized in order to make some sense of them; a healthy skepticism of fixed
forms and ideas
Definitions first!
Deconstruction: "strategy of critical analysis . . . directed towards exposing unquestioned
metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language”
(OED).

Deconstructive analysis shows the text’s failure to fulfil its “project” by exposing overly simplistic binary
assumptions, gaps (aporia) in the message and by showing the absence of those clearly present.

Hegemony: one group’s multiple levels of dominance over another, including the suppressed
group’s consent to domination; hegemony is less a domination by force than a means of
encouraging participation in one’s own oppression

Identity politics: political action challenging established hierarchies and categorization on behalf
of a non-dominant or marginalized group; the politics of resisting oppression
Performativity explained… with cats!
Performativity explained… with cats!
Source:
BinaryThis.com
 Alternative
Masculinities
camp
androgyny
e.g. Oscar Wilde
Alternative
Femininities
butch
androgyny
e.g. Lea DeLaria
“gender is a kind of imitation
for which there is no original;
in fact, it is a kind of imitation
that produces the very notion
of the original as an effect
and consequence of the
imitation itself” (J. Butler)
Basic points in Butler’s theory
1. A central concept of the theory is that your gender is constructed through your own
repetitive performance of gender.
2. There is no self preceding or outside a gendered self. Indeed, it is unclear that there can be an
‘I’ or a “we” who had not been submitted, subjected to gender.
3. Performativity of gender is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of the
dominant conventions of gender.
4. Biological sex is also a social construction—gender subsumes sex.
5. What is at stake in gender roles is the ideology of heterosexuality.
6. Performativity of Gender (drag) can be subversive.
7. But subversion through performance isn’t automatic or easy. Indeed, Butler complains that
people have misread her book Gender Trouble. “The bad reading goes something like this: I
can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today.”
See you next
week!