Women keep on practicing what femininity is that culturally prescribed, men are masculine because they fulfill what the society think that is masculinity. They are the sediment of the reiterated practices of implementing gender and sexuality rather than the product of ideal. For Butler, there is nothing actually masculine or feminine. These ideas just reflect the Multiple acts of gender that will change through different generation. This is what it means for performing gender.
Multiple acts of gender practice is constructed by shifting ideological practices. We are ensnared in ideological discourses of gender that encourage by the sex. Most of the people think certain sex should act cooperatively with the assigned gender. The constant repetition of these gendered practices over an extended period of time coheres to the point where we think of and experience them as the natural expression of a unified sexual essence. As to fulfill the natural believe of gender, most of the people will perform as the multiple acts of gender practice to avoid aberrance act.
Let’s use some specific examples just like people’s career aspirations to analyze the concept of masculinity and femininity more easily. First, we should start our analyzation from knowing what the contemporary ideas about their features or behaviors are. For male, they should behave masculinely like a man; they should be powerful, responsible, muscular, intellective and dominative. Through the generational practice, the career aspirations for male have been ineradicably built from different time and space.
In the past, male were expecting to be soldiers,
Links: Salome.htm http://www.penelopeironstone.com/CS203Butler.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity