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Gender Studies: Gender, Identity, Performativity

The study of and the medicalization of sex and sexuality.

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The topic of gender and sexuality being performative is an obvious yet difficult concept.

We perform our gender. Wether it is what is expected of us or what we aspire to be perceived as, it is all performance. This performance in inherently cultural, a “man” has a different performance in one culture as compared to another. 

Sexuality is the same way. The cultural “default” sexuality is different depending on the culture and time period. How that is expressed and its limits are also performative in nature. many cultures do not have the distinction between different types of “love” as we do in the west. 

Much of our understanding of this topic is heavily influenced and extensively talked about by Judith Butler. One of their main points is that expectations and the resulting behavior defines your gender. 

Digestible Information

Expectations and Survalence

More on Gender Expectations

Refrences

Taylor, Dianna. Review of Butler and Arendt on Appearance, Performativity, and Collective Political Action, by Judith Butler. Arendt Studies 1 (2017): 171–76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48511468.

  • “Butler aims to articulate concrete ways in which “acting in concert can be an embodied form of calling into question inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political”“
  • “Gender is performative, Butler argues, in the sense that it gains intelligibility through its expression. Like a performative speech act, gender calls into existence that which it names in the sense that engaging in a set of behaviors construed as “feminine” does not express one’s internal essence; rather, it is through engaging in those behaviors that one constitutes oneself and therefore becomes intelligible as a “woman.””
  • “Arendt, public space within which persons can appear before and be recognized by one another, and hence engage in collective speech and action (i.e., politics), does not exist prior to this coming together but rather is created by it and remains in existence only for as long as people remain assembled.”

 

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893 

A video Essay

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