Judith Butler believes that gender is performative, meaning that it is something that is enacted and not something that is innate. She argues that gender is not fixed, but is something that is constantly performed.
Actually, Butler’s argument has been influential in feminist theory and politics, inspiring a range of critical perspectives on sex and gender. Her work has influenced debates around the construction of sexualities, sexual orientation and practices of resistance to heteronormativity.
Philosopher’s theory of performativity was first developed in her early essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988), which attempts to account for the emergence of gender as a social phenomenon within language itself. Butler argues that gender is produced through repeated stylised acts which are then taken to express or reveal an underlying truth about an individual’s identity. This notion of performativity can be understood as a way of explaining the process by which social “givens” come to be established as “naturally” occurring phenomena; an effect of discourse or discursive practice, rather than a result of essential characteristics or processes which belong uniquely to human nature or biology (see Foucault).
Butler’s own analysis of her theory is perhaps best summarized by her assertion, made in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), that “gender must be understood as the repeated stylization of the body” (p. 33).
