![]() ![]() Before Gender Trouble, Butler explored this idea repeatedly. But Butler’s basic idea is that our experience of society is always through our bodies. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies. The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations. As Butler summarized it in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”: The French social theorists Butler addresses viewed our bodies as being immersed in social norms, in legal definitions, and in everyday routines. This idea is critical, and bears repeating: Butler is attacking the commonly assumed sex-gender distinction. This perspective opposes any tidy distinction between sex as both natural and bodily and gender as both cultural and historical. Between these six pieces, Butler outlines a distinctive view of gender as tangled up with embodiment. Each essay addresses a particular concern, in most cases focusing on a single thinker. Between 19, Judith Butler published six short essays introducing ideas she would return to throughout her career. Thankfully, a more rarely read set of texts can rescue a reader from despair. Many students have been daunted by the book, and deriding especially challenging snippets has become something of a rite of passage. The book’s wide-ranging line of inquiry, unforgiving style, and often abrupt shifts in focus are well known-and widely lamented among readers. It’s my view that gender is culturally formed, but it’s also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.Judith Butler’s famous 1990 book Gender Trouble features on countless undergraduate reading lists in the humanities. I think there is a real question for me about how such gender norms get established and policed and what the best way is to disrupt them and to overcome the police function. ![]() So there are institutional powers like psychiatric normalization and there are informal kinds of practices like bullying which try to keep us in our gendered place. Judith Butler: Think about how difficult it is for sissy boys or how difficult it is for tomboys to function socially without being bullied or without being teased or without sometimes suffering threats of violence or without their parents intervening to say maybe you need a psychiatrist or why can’t you be normal. Question: How should this notion of gender performativity change the way we look at gender? I know it’s controversial, but that’s my claim. We act as if that being of a man or that being of a women is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start. I was walking down the street in Berkeley when I first arrived several years ago and a young woman who was I think in high school leaned out of her window and she yelled, “Are you a lesbian?”, and she was looking to harass me or maybe she was just freaked out or she thought I looked like I probably was one or wanted to know and I thought to myself well I could feel harassed or stigmatized, but instead I just turned around and I said yes I am and that really shocked her. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman. To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. When we say gender is performed we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world. Judith Butler: It’s one thing to say that gender is performed and that is a little different from saying gender is performative. Question: What does it mean that gender is performative? While her academic writing is dense, Butler has a wonderful and engaging way of talking. Judith Butler explains ‘gender performativity’, a term that refers to the ways in which gender norms are established, policed and resisted. ![]()
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