While it is constituted of acts (which are deemed appropriate for men/women), and is performed in that sense, merely reading gender as a performance is insufficient. Performing gender, therefore, is not necessarily a choice that we make. Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences.” (522) Instead, Butler suggests that “ strategy better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs. The idea of gender as performance is lacking, because “performance” implies the ability to step inside and outside of the role it implies the ability for us to stop performing. In this way, we can say that gender is a performance: we take on roles and act out those roles in daily life.Īn important caveat here to note, however, is that understanding gender as simply a performance is a misreading. In other words, what creates gender are the ways we perform masculinity or femininity, in accordance with whether we are presumed to be men or women. This includes our behaviour, dress sense, speech patterns, etc. The constitution of gender can be located in “gestures, movements, and enactments” (519) that we perform everyday. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) predates Butler’s Performative Acts (1988) by almost 40 years, and suggests the very same notion that gender (specifically, womanhood) is created, not inborn. This is the core tenet of her (then-radical) claim of gender identity, but originates years before her. On the first assertion: gender is constituted, not essentialized. For a more specific reading of that idea, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s The Five Sexes (1993) is an accessible and informative look at biological sex, and why current binaries are not only insufficient, but socially constructed. I think she also makes some suggestions that biological sex is a social construction, but I won’t be going into that here. I’ll be exploring three of Butler’s assertions in this blog post. This sentence, in itself, may not mean anything, but it will (hopefully) make more sense when we delve into it further. Specifically, she argues that this identity is constructed through a repetition of performative acts. In other words, we are taught how to be women/men.īutler’s specific argument goes further to nuance how this identity is constructed. It is not an essential or natural (see: biological) phenomenon, but a social construction. The argument that Butler forwards in this article (and later in Gender Trouble (1990)), is simply that gender is performative. Through Powerpoint slides! (Plus complementary paragraphs of explanations, haha.) My best approach is to dissect the argument as I understand it, and make sense of it from there. ![]() I have never read phenomenological work, and so I don’t have much to say about that aspect of the essay. I am apprehensive going into this post because I remain very unsure about how best to make sense of this essay. This is my first introduction into the iconic Judith Butler’s work, and the proper genealogies of gender studies that she pioneered. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, Theatre Journal, Vol. Despite appearances these presuppositions are not counter to,but rather primary to Butler's reading of gender and subversion.Full citation: Butler, Judith. Central to Butler's thesis is that agency is affective that is to say, agency can only beeffected from a gendered position, therefore the subject does not exist prior to its agency, rather isconstituted as the very affect of agency. So what happens when a body performs the so-called 'wrong' gender?Can we think of this as a subversive action in and of itself? To do so Butler argues would assume, firstly,that the performer has the ability and agency to consciously choose his/her own gender and, secondly,that the performance somehow takes place outside of the juridical regime that constrains and bounds itsconstituents. Does it really make no difference if you're black or white, boy or girl, male or female? Is it the dance orperformance itself that produces the body, the identity? Judith Butler argues that gender is aperformative citation, a reiteration of an always already derived identity that takes place within aneconomy of heterosexuality.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |