- Published: September 15, 2022
- Updated: September 15, 2022
- University / College: University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
- Language: English
- Downloads: 39
English:
Judith Butler introduces the most controversial analysis of gender of all time. She argues that gender, as far as it can be viewed as an objective tangible natural thing, it does not in reality exist. She argues that gender in reality is performative, which means that gender is real only to the exact extent to which it is performed (Butler 270). She further argues that gender has absolutely no ties to the material bodily constructions and facts but is rather a social concept, a fictional construction that is thus prone to high levels of contestation and change. Her argument is based on the impression that there is neither essence expressed by gender nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires or advocates. She states that gender is not a fact but the various acts attributed to particular genders bring to life the idea of gender, and in the absence of those acts, the concept of gender would cease to exist (Butler 271). She adds that a body fully becomes its gender through a specific series of actions, which are revised, reenacted, and consolidated as time goes.
Her ideas differ greatly to those of previous feminists who viewed sex as a biological construct but gender as a historical construct. Butler refutes this age-old hypothesis and argues that acts associated with gender affects our perceptions of corporeal sexuality thus the main differences are chiefly influenced by social convention as opposed to biological construction. She argues that sex is an ideological construct, which is forcibly and subconsciously materialized through extensive periods of time (Butler 278). Sex is only as real as we enact the roles associated with a certain sex and is not a static state in which the body exists.
Currently there is an increase in the number of gay and lesbian people in the world. Perhaps they have discovered like butler that traditional gender roles were nothing but social constructs and they were tied to a certain gender only by how they performed certain gender roles.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Excitable speech: a politics of the performative. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ” sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Butler, Judith. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
