Judith Butler Bodies That Matter

This semester, I am taking Intro to Sociology and we have been looking at different perspectives of our society. One thing we are studying is how from at such a young age, we are taught to assign gender roles. In Patricia J. Williams’ magazine article, “Are We Worried about Storm’s Identity- or Our Own”, an essay taken out of the Nation magazine (June 2011), she tells a story about Storm, whose parents choose not to reveal the sex of their baby. She is a legal scholar and examines issues related to law and culture. Williams focuses on all the stereotypes that we associate with gender, how we as a society find social order in assigning gender roles, and the need to have the proper pronouns so that we know how/what to label a person. The author’s use of ethos and logos really brings the point home that we need to be more open about all the possibilities associated with gender and pronouns.

In Octavia Butler’s Dawn the idea of gender is deconstructed and reformed from the typical human’s definition. Often people do not consider the role of gender in society today. Usually the first thing one notices when meeting someone new is their gender or their presumed gender. However, there becomes a problem when the person whose gender we perceived identifies as a different gender. Butler forces the reader to examine how they judge and perceive gender. While the ooloi are actually “its” their personalities seem to imply a certain gender. The transgender community often brings up this issue because these assumptions of gender based on our judgments of what defines a male and what defines a female can skew how a transgender person is treated and addressed. In Chapter One of Gender Through the Prism of Difference by Anne Fausto-Sterling, the idea of expanding the number of genders based on one’s biological differences is examined through the five sexes theory. By now the concept of gender being defined solely by one’s biology has mostly been left in the past but the question remains of how do we truly define gender? How does being outside of the social norms that Michael Warner talks about cause us to feel shame when discussing our gender and our perceptions of gender? In this essay, I will argue that preconceived notions of gender create shame when a person’s own perception of their gender does not fit the social norms. This stigma around the limited and strict definitions

But if the former idea is extended to the latter, Butler clarifies that “to claim that all gender ... is drag is to suggest that ‘imitation’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its binarisms” (Butler

Esther Newton’s Mother Camp: Female Impersonators of America provides a unique perspective of American culture from a marginalized, often silenced part of society: drag queens. Newton’s 1960s ethnographic study offers commentary on some of the most basic understandings of America by analyzing the culture of the (mostly homosexual) drag subculture. One of the concepts Newton explores is that all gender is an act. Some conventional wisdom that many accept is the idea of a gender binary, as well as associations of masculinity and femininity with sex. As the typical drag queen involves a man adopting the attire and mannerisms of a feminine woman, he is challenging what society expects of him. Newton argues that the drag queen/female impersonator

According to Judith Butler, gender is not biologically rooted but socially constructed. Gender is “a stylized repetition of acts […] which are internally discontinuous [so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (Butler 140-141). Gender is something learned from social surroundings, it is an imitation of the dominant conventions of gender.

Drag queens and kings, are the individuals who represent a very prominent part of marginalized queer culture. They wage war against the formulated category of male and female, which has been fossilized within our society. Using weapons like clothes and makeup, they transform themselves in order to confound, amaze, and deliver a unique and revealing kind of performance. Although, drag queens have fiercely and fabulously strutted themselves into the limelight, their counterpart, the drag king, has remained a more downplayed subculture, which mainstream society is numbly indifferent to. Many have speculated on how men could more successful pull off being women, while women being men remains, according to society, as unauthentic and purely performative. Author of “Drag Kings: Masculinity and Performance”, Judith Halberstam writes that the reason drag queens have become more accepted is because of the social insistence that masculinity “just is” and therefore cannot be performed by women, while femininity is inherently artificial and therefore more easily performed and embodied. However, these social perceptions of gender are no more than that, perceptions. The underlying truth to these drag subcultures is that they reveal something unsettling about society and the individuals who live within its social parameters. When drag queens and kings “imitate” gender, many think it entertaining but nevertheless an imitation, that at the end of the day the queens on stage are men and

Judith Butler questions the belief that behaviors of either sex are natural. She proposes a rather radical theory that gender is performative and that sex is constructed. When gender is being performed, it means that someone would take on a role, acting in such a way that gives society the idea of their gender and constructs part of their identity. To be performative means that we produce a series of effects.Gender is constructed and is not in any way connected ‘naturally’ to sex.

“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”. The definition for sex and gender is different depending on which theory one uses to describe each concept. There is the Biological, Psychological and Social Constructionism theory. This essay will highlight each of the theories definitions for sex and gender but, will focus on the Psychological theory as an opposing theory to Butler’s beliefs of gender and sex as performative. Intersectionality allows one to embody more than one identity at any given time.

Her essay deals with the conceptual presence of gender within society that functions as the primary element in expected behavioral roles. Drawing upon previous philosophic and psychoanalytic thought, Butler espouses a theory rooted in the concept of social agents that "constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all matter of symbolic social sign." (Butler 270) Butler asserts that gender is not based on an internal identity or self-definition, but rather on perceptory, reflective notions of performances. Gender itself, in its unstable temporality, is defined by Butler to be "an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts"--an ephemeral performance from which social constructs are formed. (Butler 270) In this analysis, Butler establishes the notion of gender as an abstracted, mass perception which is rendered concrete by the fact of its common acceptance. It is a shared reality of the public, it's existence is a consequence of society's mutual acknowledgment. In this light, Butler describes the concept as being purely temporal--the appearance and perception of gender constitutes its reality. As a result, the examination of gender construction is the examination of its performative, perception-based manifestation. Upon breaching the collective assumption of the actuality of gender, its mutual acceptability is undermined, rendered unstable, and therefore, non-existent.

Judith Butler’s article on “Performance Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” denotes that gender identity represents a performative accomplishment induced by social taboo and sanction (Butler 520). Even though Butler’s theory on gender performativity has played an influential role in cultural studies and feminist theory, certain areas of philosophy provide significant insight into critical social theory. From the perspective of critical legal thinkers, Butler’s idea of performativity is linked with her views on gender and plays an important role in legality as well as politics. Critical theory in gender performativity presents a social theory to critique and change the society as opposed to the traditional theory. Similarly, critical theory has the objective to explore beyond the surface of social life to unveil the assumptions that limit a proper understanding of how the world functions. The concept of gender performativity instigated by Butler’s book, Gender Trouble, starts by reflecting on the female identity (Fagot 3). In other words, Butler criticizes the critical approaches to feminism that influence the idea of identity politics and the notion of female identity. Similarly, the various approaches seem to ignore the idea that all the various identities come from the effects of repressive regimes and authority as well as the issues raised by the feminists. The concept of gender performativity has a social and cultural obligation

Gender is one of the most heated terms in the English language during the 21st century, whose role seems to be constantly changing, always on the move, reflecting new updated meanings for society. Gender roles often portray the fairness and justice of any given society, hence the more equality genders reach, the more advanced and sophisticated the society is considered to be. They also suggest a set of rules that males and females have to follow and play their parts in order to define genders. However, the ambiguity of society’s confinement, like an invisible hand around everybody’s neck, draws attention to the artificiality of what we define as “acceptable” behaviors.

In the article, “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meaning of Gender,” the author, Aaron Devor, is trying to convince his audience that gender shapes how we behave and relate to one another. He does this by using an educational approach, describing gender stereotypes, and making cultural references. These rhetorical devices serve his larger goal of getting readers to reflect on how their childhoods formed their genders. “Maleness and femaleness seem “natural,” not the product of socialization.” (Devor 527) Throughout his article, he makes us wonder whether or not gender is recognized through socializing.

As Lorber explores in her essay “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender, “most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life” (Lorber 1). This article was very intriguing because I thought of my gender as my sex but they are not the same. Lorber has tried to prove that gender has a different meaning that what is usually perceived of through ordinary connotation. Gender is the “role” we are given, or the role we give to ourselves. Throughout the article it is obvious that we are to act appropriately according to the norms and society has power over us to make us conform. As a member of a gender

In answering the critiques and critical misinterpretations of her work in ‘Gender Trouble’, Butler here further illuminates the nuanced formation of the gendered (and sexed?) self and subject as act of power within powerful repeated acts. This critical observation – that “(t)here is no power that acts but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability” is important in thinking through gender identity formations for both transgender and cisgender populations. For if performativity is an enacted/embodied constructionism in service of cultural intelligibility and recognizability then there is no identity or body inside of culture/society that escapes this dynamic. (That trans* and non-normative bodies are held up as perfect if not sole exemplars of this dynamic by a cisgender society speaks to the Foucauldian insidiousness of discursive power.) That the same rewards and punishments (and internalized Panopticon influences) that shape transsexual identities would also concurrently shape cisgender ones is an aspect of social control that is notably absent in arguments

Judith Butler’s essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” calls for a new way to view sex and gender. Butler argues that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo”. In this case, gender is not constituted by what one is, but rather what one does; the performative acts constitute gender. In other words, gender is not the starting place; it is an identity repeatedly constructed throughout time. Butler is trying to show us a feminist perspective of sex and gender. She attempts to follow Beauvoir’s path in a fight against society norms.