Judith Butler

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Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender theorist who played an influential role in shaping modern feminism, in 1990 she published her famous book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, in which she develops the theory of Gender Performativity. Gender is believed to be a set of expectations that society defines for us; that we are expected to act, walk, talk, and dress in a specific way. The society assumes that girls should have makeup, dolls, drink wine, to be romantic, and to nurture. However, for boys, they should be aggressive, play tough sports, wear suits, and drink beer. The society determines your gender roles based on your biological and physical appearance, so, if you are born a female with a vagina then you will be a woman. …show more content…

“Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler33). Judith Butler, argues that gender roles are constructed by the society that women are passive, sensitive, graceful, and nurturer, while, a man has to be aggressive, stronger, confident, independent, competitive, and winner. She further underlines that masculinity and femininity are not inherent. Butler believes that from the moment a newborn is declared a girl she is expected and compelled act like its gender, meaning that she starts wearing pink. Gender is the cultural meaning that we attach to our biological sex, which isn’t always true. Nowadays, there is ample evidence of boys liking makeup and modeling, it is just that culture coerces us to conduct that gender performance. According to Butler, gender is performative, we are not just acting it like in a performance, but rather dynamically constructing it as we act it out. If we refuse to perform our gender script, then gender will cease to

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