#JUDITH BUTLER GENDER PERFORMATIVE DOWNLOAD#

The heterosexual society is thus responsible for oppressing, through taboos, the deviants. Any discourse that establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of exchange that define what it is that constitutes bodies” (p.2544). Butler quotes Mary Douglas’ Purity and danger who “suggests that the very contours of ‘the body’ are established through markings that seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence. The oppression comes from the society as a whole based on the heterosexual norm, translated in daily acts and behaviors. Butler is here suggesting a new feminism, since the problem is not anymore the recurring inequalities that occur between men and women but the determination of who are men and who are women and the oversimplification of gender-identity implied in a masculine society.Ī new feminism is proposed as the real problem seems to be a masculine hegemony that perspires through social interactions and prevents people to perform, to express freely their chosen gender. In other words a society based on phallocentrism curbs, limits the freedom of those who intend to remove heterosexual boundaries.

People participate to this promotion through their actsįirst, Butler explains that the restricted boundaries of our body are due to masculine hegemony and that such a dominant culture prevents the motion, the displacing of boundaries. A society that promotes masculine hegemony and based on phallocentrism a. The solution, according to Butler, would be to loosen identity/categories to broaden the margins of our society (II). In order to present Gender Trouble, we need to explain what Butler consider as the source of the problem affecting the deviants, the queer: a society promoting masculine hegemony and based on phallocentrism (I). In other words, is our identity a given or a performance? The question Butler asks is: “Does being a female constitute a “natural fact” or a cultural performance, or is “naturalness” constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex?”. It is actually related to Nietzsche’s idea that there is no doer behind the deed: with Butler it is gender or sexuality that does not exist before it is performed in a social context.

Rather, it is a matter of historical contingency that we see the body as we do”. Our pleasures, desires and pains do not emanate from a prediscursive body. Digeser confirms that, according to Butler, there exists no natural necessity to see bodies as ordered into distinct sexes: “whatever sense of giveness or facticity we may possess about our bodies is a matter of historically sedimented practices and performances. Therefore life is a succession of performances. This intent gives birth to a performance, seen by Butler as the moment where we decide to express our gender. Since it is an extension of our intention, our gender or what we express as sexual subject, is never fixed and can change over time. The emphasis Butler puts on the will, on the intention, is important as she is not only suggesting that our gender is built and not received at birth, but is also pointing out the plasticity of our gender. Gender can be defined as the way we express our sexuality for instance the way a female intends to express her sexuality will define her gender, and this can be also applied to any human being. While Simone de Beauvoir stated :‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ Butler’s thoughts on gender could be sum up by ‘:‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a gender’. Butler explores the way we shape our identity through social interactions. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity has been published in 1990.

#JUDITH BUTLER GENDER PERFORMATIVE DOWNLOAD#

Download this article: Butler: Gender Trouble. ” American Journal of French Studies, 2021.

Judith butler gender performative