02/23/2015 - Judith Butler Performative Acts and Gender Constitution

Adra Maner

02/23/2015

Women’s studies

02/23/2015 - Judith Butler Performative Acts and Gender Constitution

' In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time -an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self (Butler 1).’

I quoted this section because to me it summed up my first steps to learning that there  were other options besides just woman and man. I found this text as a whole a little difficult to understand but there were parts of it that stood out particularly in my mind such as the section above and the section I included below.  From birthday as Female we are taught by our parents, and by society, because even despite some parents who wish to raise their children without defining them society tries to do it anyways, we are taught how to be a ‘Woman’ or how to be a ‘Man’ and what each of these titles entail. As a woman I was taught to walk softly, stand up straight, lose weight, wear makeup, and that I should dress femininely and modestly thought the modesty section may also come from my background in Southern Baptist churches.

Men are taught a separate set of almost default actions. These default actions are much like the movements of a video game character when you are not moving, or thinking about anything in real life, the character will slouch a certain way or move it head back and forth or any number of programmed actions like that. However when we think about our actions and make a conscious effort to make our own choices and not just let the preprogrammed acts define what we do we  see that these acts may not be all that appealing.

‘To be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project’ t. The notion of a 'project', however, suggests the originating force of a radical will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term 'strategy' better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis