Latest hits: if gender is performative that means it’s fake and patriarchy doesn’t exist! I don’t know who Judith Butler is!
Can you please explain this in simple words to someone not knowing too much about how gender is ‘performative’ ?
I’m not a native speaker but I’m usually okay but new things needs to be learned :-)
A link is welcomed too ofc!
Stealing the answer because I’m nowhere near as articulate on this matter:
The basic (and simplified) idea is that gender–what we think of as masculine and/or feminine–is performed in the ways we act, speak, dress, move, etc. and doesn’t really exist outside of that performance. We learn how to perform this way from dominant culture and conventions–what someone might (incorrectly) call “normal male” or “normal female” behavior. But these “normal” qualities (and genders themselves) don’t actually exist–rather, we are all repeatedly mimicking them and are rewarded for doing so (or punished for not doing so). We merely impersonate the qualities we’ve been taught match the gender we’ve been told we possess (like females being demure or males being aggressive) until those impersonations (and gender itself) become belief and seen as something natural and assumed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dddcq/eli5butlers_gender_performativity/
So, in a nutshell, the assertion is that gender is entirely nurture and not nature.
Yeah, sorry, that is an extraordinary assertion and I’m going to need extraordinary proof.
Are there people for whom gender and sex don’t neatly match up, or even those for whom it is purely performative, sure.
But they are statistical outliers, and not representative of the majority experience.
People can be different then the statistical norm, and that’s ok, but to assert that this norm is entirely cultural is over the top self serving.
Gender is definitionally cultural. A person’s sex is nature, but the bundle of signifiers that denote gender (as well as which categories exist at all) are largely arbitrary and divorced from that, and vary greatly across time and place. Women wearing pants was unheard of a century or so ago, and would 100% be perceived as queer, nowadays it’s completely normal. There were times when dueling was a virtually mandatory rite of passage to being considered a man. There are also historical cultures with more than two genders, and it’s not as if people in those cultures were biologically different from others.
There’s nothing “extraordinary” about this claim.
There are clearly things that fall under physical differences. People with penises will always find it easy to stand up while peeing, and that affects how bathrooms are arranged. These things fall under their sex.
There are clearly other things that don’t fall under those physical differences. Men can have long hair styles, but western culture doesn’t usually go that way. That hasn’t always been true, it’s more common now than it was in the 1950s, and other cultures make entirely different choices for hairstyles between men and women. These things fall under gender.
Which means gender is performative by definition. You fall into society’s rules for gender, or you deliberately break them, but it’s never something encoded in DNA or anything. If it is, then it’s sex, not gender.
My understanding (and it could be incorrect) is that this is more of a definitional/philosophical thing.
Though you are more than welcome to read directly from the source Judith Butler who (to my understanding) first started this theory on gender:
https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1650/butler_performative_acts.pdf
There’s certainly a non-performative part, I feel it inside of me. But when I’m looking at other people I can’t see that, I can only see the performance. Tbh I’m not very good at doing woman despite my internal sense of self. Most of the things people think of in women are not very appealing to me, so I don’t do them. And I think it’s fair to say a lot of those things, like wearing certain kinds of clothing, are definitely not nature, but arbitrary.
Basically, there’s two (maybe more) things going on here both called gender which is very confusing. I’m sure the internal feelings are very correlated to biological factors, but the other parts? No.
