Judith Butler

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Performativity | Gendering | Gender | See also

Judith Butler (1956-) is an American post-structuralist feminist philosopher who has contributed significantly to gender studies and Queer theory.

Performativity

Butler defined 'performativity' based on Austin's Speech act theory. Performatives are utterances that perform the action to which they refer.

Butler used this to consider how gender is created rather than being a pre-existing state. It has been used, for example, to indicate how pornography is less a form of speech as a performative act of sexual degradation.

Performativity is related to suture and interpellation in the way it forces a situation.

Gendering

Gender is a cultural meaning that is attached to people, and not an inherent attribute.

Gendering is a performative act that creates the female, starting with 'It's a girl'. Acting in 'girl' ways thus is what makes a person a 'girl', although this is really a fiction.

The 'girling' continues as the child is interpellated into the subject position, with all its cultural norms (including taboos on incest and homosexuality).

Gender

Gender is not a stable concept and may be subverted or 'queered' by such as cross-dressing and 'drag', even where the person is heterosexual.

In 'Gender Trouble', Butler shows how binaries such as queer-straight, male-female, can be reversed, re-orientated and revised to new meaning. In the 1990s, gay people revised the meaning of 'queer' from an original abuse to something acceptable.