Performative Acts And Gender Constitution, By Judith Butler

Throughout Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, Judith Butler uses many techniques to convey her different theories and ideas. It is these techniques that make her points come across so easily. Although the piece has many strengths, it is also very important to consider its weaknesses. The overall idea that is conveyed throughout, is that of gender being thought of as a social contract or cultural fiction. Although this idea is played out very well throughout the piece, it is still very important to question if this idea even really matters. Inside this idea of performance, there are many different topics that intertwine and mingle together. To start with a more simple idea, we can look at the actors. The actors can represent different

The first, does the idea that gender does not exist matter, and the second, what does Butler mean by fiction. Both of these ideas coincide with each other. One can say that gender isn’t real, and that we are not men and women, but simply just humans, but does that matter? Do ideas matter if they are not put into action? The idea of ‘fiction,’ is that of a story or concept that is not actually real or existing, but if gender roles and norms are something that people live with and suffer from every day, would that not make them real? “Genders, then, can be `neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. And yet, one is compelled to live in a world in which genders can constitute univocal signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered discrete and intractable” (Butler, 528). To further this idea of the fiction of gender not actually being so dismissible, lets look at what else actually makes it a reality. Concepts are concepts until they are physically and emotionally represented. “Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. This reassurance is so easily displaced by anxiety, that the culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender…” (Butler, 528). These physical and emotional consequences that

For instance, throughout her entire essay, there is no single reference to race. Does this mean she believes that sexism and gender roles affect all women the same? Some might say that this lack acknowledgment would make her ideas coincide with ‘white feminism.’ “My situation does not cease to be mine just because it is the situation of someone else, and my acts, individual as they are, nevertheless reproduce the situation of my gender, and do that in various ways” (Butler, 523). Although it may not be intended, Butler here, groups all women together. Her essay focuses on gender and what that means and how that affects people, and to do this she takes race out of the equation. Rather than displaying her ideas using intersectionality, she tends to look at it through more of an additive lens, which could be considered very problematic. “As women, we have been taught to either ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist” (Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, 112). Here, Audre Lorde touches