Gender Performativity is a term created by feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a stable gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person's gender act. This effect is one of true gender, a fiction that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them" ^[1], . Butler calls these repeated authoritative acts performative, and the larger field of cultural practice in which they generate meaning gender performativity. Feminism is a social theory and political movement primarily informed and motivated by the experience of women. ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... Image:J Butler. ... This article is about the year. ... Gender Trouble is a 1990 book by Judith Butler that is highly influential in academic feminism and queer theory. ... The gender symbols used to denote a male or female organism. ... The Performative is the part of speech representing the information conveyed by the fact that a speaker chose to say a particular sentence. ...

Butler's foremost concern with gender performativity is the way in which these repetitive actions escape notice as contingent and socially constructed performances and become naturalized as expressions of a fundamental gender truth. The socially constructed aspect of gender performativity is perhaps most obvious in drag performance, which offers the potential for a revision of gender categories in its emphasis on the discursive contingency of any single gender performance. However, this is not to say that an understanding gender performativity leads to the ability to subvert existent gender categories altogether. Butler explains that drag cannot be regarded as an instance of free play or as a "voluntarist account of gender", where "there is a ‘one’ who is prior to gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender decides with deliberation which gender it will be today".^[2] Subsequently, drag, or any performance for that matter, cannot be regarded as the unfiltered expression of its performer’s will or intent. Rather, she suggests that what is performed "can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility". ^[3] Look up Drag in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

What is barred, Butler suggests in both "Critically Queer" and "Melancholy Gender"^[4], is the subject's ability to grieve the loss of the same-sex parent as a viable love object. Following from Freud’s notion of melancholia, such a repudiation results in a heightened identification with the Other that cannot be loved, resulting in gender performances which allegorize and internalize the lost love that the subject is subsequently unable to acknowledge or grieve. Butler explains that "a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed (taken on, assumed) through the incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love, an exclusion never grieved, but ‘preserved’ through the heightening of feminine identification itself". ^[5] Sigmund Freud His famous couch Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior. ... Melancholia (Greek μελανχολια) is a mood of non-specific depression. ...

Political Potential and Limits

The usefulness of performativity as the underpinnings of a transgressive political practice remains a subject of healthy debate. Butler suggests that "[t]he critical promise of drag does not have to do with the proliferation of genders…but rather with the exposure of the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals", though such remarks fail to indicate how the failures of heterosexual regimes might be actively and explicitly exposed. ^[6] Much of the discussion surrounds Butler’s inability to differentiate clearly between notions of performativity and performance even when pressed to define a clear division. Generally, it is considered that the former describes the entirety of a process of discursive production and the latter a specific type of theatrical self-presentation – one that embraces a notion of the subject’s agency in a manner that Butler derides as voluntarist and an affirmation of heterosexual norms. However, it is difficult to imagine a substantive politics of resistance that precludes a notion of voluntarism and performance. Performativity (Callon 1998) is a concept in economic sociology, specifically those in the constructionist camp, that challenges the assertions made by structuralist camp (Granovetter 1985). ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

According to Butler, the only thing that makes a gender performance subversive is that it is "the kind of effect that resists calculation”, which is to say that signification is multiplicitous, that the subject is unable to control it, and so subversion is always occurring and always unpredictable". ^[7] Moya Lloyd suggests that the political potential of gender performances can be evaluated relative to similar past acts in similar contexts in order to assess their transgressive potential: "Even if we accept that there are incalculable effects to all (or most) statements or activities, this does not mean that we need to concede that there are no calculable effects". ^[8] Conversely, Rosalyn Diprose lends a hard-line Foucauldian interpretation to her understanding of gender performance’s political reach, as one’s identity "is built on the invasion of the self by the gestures of others, who, by referring to other others, are already social beings". ^[9] Diprose implies that the individual’s will, and the individual performance, always be subject to the dominant discourse of an Other(s), so as to restrict the transgressive potential of performance to the inscription of simply another dominant discourse. Michel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: ; English-speakers pronunciation varies) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. ...

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