Butler believes that masculinity and femininity are not traits that we inherently have, rather they are effects that we perform by the activities we partake in.
Butler argues that gender and sex are socially constructed concepts – concepts used to control people. She argues that we do not possess a gender identity. Our identity is continually constructed: However, she argues that sex does not “necessitate gender.” Homosexuals and transgendered people, as well as heterosexuals who do not follow norms, subvert gender norms and draw our attention to the constuctedness of sex. Butler argues that our gender is never fully constructed. Gender identity is a process. “Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time."[3] We interact with gender constructions. Thus, our gender becomes an activity. Further, Butler asserts that all of this activity is culturally situated. How we interact with gender constructions will be effected by the culture we live in.
It is commonly presumed that the boy will become a man through a ‘natural’ development, based on his chromosomal sex; but nature will not do all the work. The boy’s sex and gender are seen as natural and unified, but contradictorily, behaviour appropriate to them must be actively encouraged throughout his life. Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion that ‘one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one’
Darwinian evolutionary biology, it posits that there are fundamental genetic separations between male and female, which act in the best
Butler argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler's approach -- inspired in part by -- is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors.
Butler says: 'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.' (Gender Trouble, p. 25). In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.
Gender in some retrospect can be thought as performative and reglautory as gender is thought to be regulatory and these ideals are thus created, sustained or undermined through performance, or to be more exact performativity. Performativity as defined by Butler is not a singular act, "for it is always the reiteration of a norm or a set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition" (1993, 12). This reiteration is crucial in understanding performativity. It is through repeated action that these norms are created and lived up to. In relation to discourse, Butler argues that performative acts are statements which also produce that which they say. Her classic example is that of the midwife cry of "it’s a girl" which is not merely a reflection of a biological given but a performative act, binding a gender onto the body (Butler 1993). In other words it produces that which it names (Butler 1993, 7). Thus performative acts are the one domain in which "discourse acts as power" (Butler 1993, 225). Thus concepts of male and female, of gender are historically and culturally unique. These regulatory ideals are indeed fictions (Haraway 1991). The baby girl is not a girl until the midwife declares her so, and thus curtails the possibility of other genders being created and explored.
Criticisms of Butler
Universalising tendencies
e.g. heterosexual hegemony replaces patriarchy
What is being cited?
‘girling’ seems like socialisation thesis
fails to keep ‘gender’ open as promised
norms (Parsons) or discursive regulatory regimes (Foucault)?
Where do these norms come from?
gender trouble - reveal & upset fictional fixity of gender - drag
Does feminism need a stable subject?
see Seidman in Contested Knowledges Ch 7 and Hood-Williams & Harrison
For a discussion of the artificiality of binary sex/gender categories in medical and biological terms, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 1999.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1953, p295