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).
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.