Preview

Butle Butler Performativity Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
539 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Butle Butler Performativity Essay
A central concept of performativity is that one’s gender is constructed through the repetitive performance of gender. Butler’s theory does not accept stable and coherent gender identity. Gender is “the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repetitive acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being(Butler, 1990, p.33).” What Butler means that gender is performative is to say that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed (Butler, 1990,p.278).” Notably the repetition of the acts in performativity is an imitation or miming of the dominant conventions of gender. Butler argues that “the act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Butler, 1990, p.104). …show more content…
She aims to say that imitation of the gender idealisations with ones constant and repeat effort is a sign of hegemonic heterosexuality. Based on the repetition of imitation, gender normalizing sciences was established in order to produce a correct sex, the binary gender norm that one can be ether male or female. This suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome. The effort to become its own idealisations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is constantly haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself(p.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    How, according to “The Functions of the HQ Unit in the Multi-Business Firm,” do economies of scale and economies of scope provide cost advantage opportunities to firms? · What considerations would be relevant to a firm’s deciding which strategy (scale or scope) to adopt? · How does the choice of executive focus – strategic planning, strategic control, financial control – influence HQ functions and approaches in a multi-business firm?…

    • 443 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout history there have been many different theories of sexuality developed. Two well-known philosophers, Freud and Beauvoir have created their own ideas of what sexuality is and the ways in which it developed. These two different philosophers have created theories that can be compared and contrasted in ways in which makes one think about their own beliefs of sexuality. These two philosophers biggest difference is in the way in which they view feminine sexuality. In this paper I will compare and contrast the theories of Freud and Beauvoir and explain why I agree with Beauvoir’s understanding of sexuality more than I agree with Freud’s.…

    • 456 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    When we have been exposed to a specific role of gender all our lives, it is difficult to accept different scenarios. A different scenario would be when society would not be able to accept a powerful and non-emotional woman, or a very sensitive man. An example of this is children are educated of what roles a man and female play. In Disney movies, such as Aladdin, children are shown roles of women and men. A young girl is given to a man just to own more land. It shows society what role a man has over a woman. Anna Quindlen author of a short essay “Gay” and Gillianne N. Duncan author of “Why Do We Hate Our Bodies?” are examples of how the norms of society shape and make people judge others only because they are different. In “Gay,” Quindlen tells a story about her friend’s friend, about how a family would rather lie about the sexual orientation of their dead son, than tell the truth and be judged…

    • 1993 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Feld insisted on maintaining the family tradition although he could not make the pancakes the way his wife cooked them. Mr. Feld’s change of gender roles supports Butler’s claim that gender is performed. Mr. Feld attempted to perform in the manner which was natural for his wife being that she was a woman.…

    • 1195 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Having read Marilyn Frye’s “Willful Virgin…,” I got the unshakeable feeling that Frye, a vocal lesbian, has quite the superiority complex as a result of her own absence from “the patriarchal institution of female heterosexuality” (130). Throughout her essay, she argues that women of the heterosexual persuasion are bound to the patriarchy, from which lesbians, lacking any attachment to men, are immune, and without such female heterosexuality, the patriarchy and all its manifestations would cease to exist.…

    • 389 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Exploring the construction of hegemonic masculinity, we go through a contradicting state of the definition of manhood. Although contradictions appear, it is socially adapted and able to reside without conflict. Take manhood as this, “We think of manhood as a transcendent tangible property that each man must manifest in the world” (Kimmel, 1994). Meaning that manhood is merely an idea which is drilled into a man’s head by society, “Gender, we said, was an achieved status” (West and Zimmerman, 2015) in other terms, manhood is a socially agreed upon idealization of how men should act or who they should be. In West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender”, Hegemonic masculinity is accomplished by the unavoidable categories of sex and gender and ways we act upon them; collaborating together in a socially constructed standard of how to be.…

    • 1536 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Butler questions whether these gendered behaviors are natural as they are learned from one’s performance of a “gendered” individual to keep heterosexuality among their culture. If she had it her way, she would simply like to let one subject “be” and see how he/she becomes on his/her own. This would determine the true natural gender of subjects, instead of having them act in specific roles they might not agree with. However, this would never happen as many feminists defend the idea of a concrete identity because they believe it’s crucial for the advancement of interests of women. Butler argues, “My point is simply that one way in which this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions” (905). Ultimately, Butler is stating it is a mistake to characterize women as possessing the same assets. Because by doing this, gender regulations are reinforced by staying divided into two categories, men and women. But more importantly, where does this leave individuals who are “confused” or “not able to identify” with a…

    • 1124 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gender Roles In Moonlight

    • 865 Words
    • 4 Pages

    By showing why Chiron falls into the hegemonic ideal of a man and concealing his sexual identity and then showing his eventual realization of this, the audience is painted a picture of a man whose personality is severely corrupted by the dominant view of masculinity. As a result, Barry Jenkins succeeds in presenting a heartbreaking yet important argument advocating for changing the status quo of gender and sexuality…

    • 865 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    general. I will examine how these categories influence one other, how these categories influence feminism, and how feminism, in turn, influences them, along with how these categories affect women. Specifically, I will argue that the construction of the 'normative', which helps produce feminist theory discourse and action, perpetually reproduces categories of exclusion, through the notions of representation and identity politics, the production of a split between gender and sex, and through Butlers views on gender and performativity.…

    • 347 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In her work, Gender Trouble she specifically discusses the power of language and performative nature of gender and gendered bodies. Mary Bryson, another theorist in gender and sexuality studies, provides perspectives regarding queer pedagogy and queer linguistics which tie back to the work I discuss regarding how language, queer theory, and queer academia relate to one another.…

    • 653 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Social theory works on the main of principles of operant conditioning, but it also acknowledges imitation and identification as means to sexual behaviour and sexuality.. These two processes are useful in explaining the development of gender identity or one’s sense of maleness or femaleness .A good example of social learning theory is the gender identification of a little girl from associating with her mother, how she dresses, what she does among other associations (Klein, 1969).…

    • 692 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Woman and men are separated into “separate spheres” consisting of certain standards. Since they are limited in what they can and cannot do, the ideology of separate spheres emerged, making many people create “gender roles”.…

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Best Essays

    Performativity

    • 2465 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Performativity is one of the difficult terms to define because of its interdisciplinary nature in which it is used. Even though such is the case, it is often used to name the capacity of speech, as a production of the speaking body, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to perform a type of constructed identity (Felman 1980:68). In this paper everyday performativity will be used in differentiating it from mere performance and establish what role it play in interpellating us as raced, gendered, classed, ethicized and national subjects.…

    • 2465 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Compulsory Heteronormativity

    • 4212 Words
    • 17 Pages

    Rich Adrienne. 1980. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existance. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (4): 631-60.…

    • 4212 Words
    • 17 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gayle Rubin created the sex/gender system concept in the year 1975. She created this term to offer a new way of thinking about the difference between sex and gender. She defined the sex/gender system as “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (WRWC, 2015). The sex/gender system has many explanations that attempt to address how our sex plays a role in how we learn gender. A few of these theories include: cognitive-developmental theory, social learning theory, gender schema theory, social interactions and gender roles, and lastly, performativity theory. In this essay I will explain how the sex/gender system is created and reinforced from the perspectives of feminist theorists.…

    • 936 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays