8/26/2023 0 Comments Judith butler gender performativeThis paper confronts Butler’s theory of gender as an individual act and analyzes its limitations outside the western world. Judith Butler’s Gender Performativity theory proved to be one of the most salient works of the rather unexplored realm of philosophy. The feminist movement proceeding the Industrial Revolution propelled philosophical and literary works, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, challenging the traditional perception of man and woman and concomitantly advancing the foundation for gender theory. Challenging gender identity as a natural phenomenon, the parody of drag seeks to destabilize the assumedly natural binaries of man and woman by both deconstructing and exposing their performative and culturally founded reality.The question of what it means to be a gendered individual has been left unanswered in light of its variants. Heller (2020) speaks of the “generative and rich potential” of drag to subvert assumptions of gender as natural, exposing gender as a solely performative act through its “glamorous doing of hyper femininity” (p. Drag becomes a subversive act, a way of exposing the constructedness of gender as it exaggerates female expression. For Butler, drag has significant potential in exposing the performative nature of gender, arguing “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency” (p. Popularised by entertainment media such as Ru Paul’s Drag Race, drag is a significant parodic expression of gender that exists to liberate. In the 21st century, drag is a popular expression, featuring artists who identify as male, presenting themselves in exaggeratedly feminine ways in performance. The term “drag” originated in the 19th century as a way to describe the act of men dressing in women’s clothing. Drawing on the differences in gender representations across temporal and cultural contexts, Butler ascertains that gender is not a fixed, innate phenomenon but rather the causal result of an act of doing, prescribed by the hegemonic inscription of how gender should be “done” within a specific temporal or societal context. However, Butler is keen to establish the nonsensical nature of this representation since gender is not a stable notion and has not been such throughout history. By consistently conforming to the binaries of gender and acting as a woman in the way that cultural powers insist, gender becomes indistinguishable from natural representations of the body. It is important to note the emphasis on “repeated”, which serves to enlighten the ways in which categories of gender become overrepresented as a fact of natural, biological existence. 55) illuminates much of her understanding of the ways in which gender is constructed. 55).īutler’s interpretation of “the repeated stylisation of the body” (p. Sarah Salih (2007) elaborates on Butler’s interpretation of the cultural construction of gender, arguing: “all bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence (and there is no existence that is not social), which means that there is no natural body that pre-exists its cultural inscription” (p. Butler’s theory of the construction of gender is significant in overturning the assumption that the hegemonic processes of power have an innate or natural basis. Butler elaborates on the cultural construction of gender within this production, discussing how women are ”regulated by such structures” and also “formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures” (p. Drawing heavily on Foucault, a foundational thinker in the workings of power, Butler (2011) discusses how “judicial systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent” (p. Exposing the performative nature of gender, then, also serves to expose the cultural construction of those systems which operate to represent the category of women to their own political intent. The overrepresentation of gender as natural has political implications that can be extremely repressing to the reversal of damaging binaries that function within the systems of hegemonic patriarchal power which serve to uphold the otherization of the woman.
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