Gender In Judith Butler's Performative Acts And Gender Constitution

Simone de Beauvoir brought about the idea that one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Other thinkers of phenomenology such as Merleau-Ponty frame the body as an historical idea rather than a natural species. In viewing the conception of the body body as different from its physiological form, the social construction of gender can be understood. This social construction is what Judith Butler discusses in her essay: “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”

Through discourses in theatrical, anthropological and philosophical discussions, Butler portrays gender identity as being performative rather than expressive. Gender, rather than being drawn from a particular essence, is inscribed and repeated by bodies through the use of taboos and social

Here, the distinction is made between the physiological aspect of sex and the meanings inscribed in it. In this discussion, Merleau-Ponty is referenced in explaining that the body continually realizes a set of possibilities. In framing the body in such a manner, one does not merely have or one is not merely a body – one “does” one’s body. However, there is a constraint to these possibilities made by historical conventions. What this means is that when Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir claim that the body is a historical situation, the body does three things with that historical situation: it does it, dramatizes it, and reproduces it. These can be seen as the elementary structures of embodiment. This embodiment can then be viewed specifically from the perspective of the act of gender. Gender can then be understood differently from the biological sex as gender has a cultural interpretation that is used as a strategy for cultural survival. In its deep entrenchment, gender seems almost natural in the punishments that arise from deviating from acting in a way that creates the very idea of

One important thing to understand is that these acts of gender are not done in isolation or done on an individualistic level – this cannot be targeted merely by changing actions on that level. Acts are a shared experience and a collective action – and since gender is understood as an act, gender is never one’s alone. While every single individual acts out gender in their own one, but it is still done in reference to certain sanctions and prescriptions that it is never fully one’s own. Acts are in themselves public, as the choice to ‘perform’ such acts means to render implicit social conditions explicit. The “play” of gender requires both the ‘script’ of gender, and the personal interpretation of acting out such a