Gender reveal parties have been all the rage in American culture in recent years. These parties usually consist of a cisgender heterosexual couple inviting friends and family over to celebrate the announcement of the sex of their baby that is on the way. If this kind overly dramatic and narcissistic celebration for a person who has not even seen the outside of a womb does not make you cringe as much as it makes me, there are questions that still remain. Are we assigned our gender at birth, or do we perform one based on the values that we have learned? In this essay, I argue that gender is performative and is influenced and enforced by cultural norms. I am able to do this by analyzing a series of academic articles pertaining to the topic and …show more content…
In her article, Critically Queer, Judith Buttler explores these questions. Even though Butler was an author that was only assigned once to read in the duration of this course, I believe no one explains performing gender and gender performance better. According to Butler, gender is not based off of our biological sex at all; rather gender is “performative” (Pg. 21, Par. 4, 1993). It is important to recognize that there is a difference between gender being performed and gender being performative. Saying gender is a performance makes it sound like it is artificial or a role we play, when in reality gender is much more than that. Butler declares, “Performativity is a matter of reiterating or repeating the norms by which one is constituted… It is a compulsory repetition of prior and subjectivating norms, ones which cannot be thrown off at will, but which work, animate, and constrain the gendered subject, and which are also the resources from which resistance, subversion, displacement are to be forged” (Pg. 21, Par. 5, 1993). My interpretation of Butler’s definition is that gender is a collection of everything a person does, taught by what history has told them is “normal”. Suggesting that our definitions of masculinity and femininity are socially and culturally constructed, rather than inherent from within
Gender role conflicts constantly place a role in our everyday life. For many years we have been living in a society where depending on our sexuality, we are judged and expected to behave and act certain way to fulfill the society’s gender stereotypes. The day we are born we are labeled as either a girl or boy and society identifies kids by what color they wear, pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Frequently, we heard the nurses in the Maternity facility saying things like, “Oh is a strong boy or is beautiful fragile princess.” Yet, not only in hospitals we heard this types of comments but we also see it on the media…
In “performative acts” Judith Butler argues gender identity a success induced by social sanction, she argues that we are not born into gender, gender is created by your performance. She always believes gender is a topic that should not be binary, the fact that gender is binary makes people think they only have two choices and thinking they don’t have their own choice to make. When the author says performance he means performance by acts of the body. Butler reflects gender as a coming from and spirit within the inside of you
Fresh from the womb we enter the world as tiny, blank slates with an eagerness to learn and blossom. Oblivious to the dark influences of culture, pre-adult life is filled with a misconception about freedom of choice. The most primitive and predominant concept that suppresses this idea of free choice involve sex and gender; specifically, the correlation between internal and external sex anatomy with gender identity. Meaning, those with male organs possess masculine identities, which involve personality traits, behavior, etcetera, and the opposite for females. Manipulating individuals to adopt and conform to gender identities, and those respective roles, has a damaging, life-long, effect on their development and reflection of self through prolonged suppression. This essay will attempt to exploit the problems associated with forced gender conformity through an exploration of personal experiences.
This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...
Gender tends to be one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives” (Lorber 2). Throughout the article Judith Lorber talked about how gender construction starts right at birth and we decide how the infant should dress based on their genitalia. The authors ideas relates to my life because my friend is about to have a baby girl in a couple of weeks from now and when she is born we are buying her all girly stuff so that everyone else knows she is a girl. My family has already bought her bows for her hair, dresses, and everything was pink and girly. Since society tells us that infants should wear pink and boys should wear blue we went with it. I never thought about this until reading this article and I noticed that gender construction does in fact start right at birth.
In pursuit of uncovering an ethic with regards to nomenclature of gender identity and sexual orientation, two very personal axes of identity interwoven and yet distinct, I looked towards the texts of Butler and Lorde. Specifically, I found that Judith Butler’s “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Trannsexuality” and Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” reveal a key tension in this question. That is, in discussing these matters, will our final goal be moving towards a society without these constrictive labels or will our end goal be more that we create new, more inclusive and personalized labels? Does the burden of these historical legacies on our language regarding sex and gender hinder our ways
What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? According to Judith Butler, there is no innate or biological predisposition from which gender originates. Rather, gender is a “performance…with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame…through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 191). Thus, because gender is unrelated to sex, gender performance is not natural, but rather performed in accordance to compulsory heterosexuality. This essay will use Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender celebrity, to prove the inevitability of gender performance, as her transition to womanhood was a conversion from a performance of masculinity to an enactment of femininity.
In Doing Gender authors West and Zimmerman argue the concept of gender being an outcome of daily life rather than an outcome from a physician with an ultrasound with only two permanent results. The meaning behind the term gender invokes different connotations of either masculine or feminine qualities that lay the groundwork for societies preexisting roles. Society today views gender as being either of masculine or feminine form however the controversy with this is how this is determined in our society today as well as in the past. Both authors fall upon the idea that sex is a disposition of birth whereas gender is a disposition of your actions after your birth. “It is necessary to move beyond the notion of gender display to consider what
Before the day a baby is born in society it is subjected to being policed and “doing gender.” Whether it’s painting a room blue when parents find out that their child is male or buying dolls and kitchen utensils for their future girl, “doing gender” and gender policing is a norm in most societies. Most of these norms are based off institutions that create social structures in society, for example “back to school shopping” is considered a norm because it affirms the institution of education. However, because gender and “doing gender” is important in, there has been a creation of gendered institutions, which channels boys/men and girls/women into separate and often differently valued activities (Wade & Ferree, p. 167).
The most exciting part of a pregnancy is finding out the sex of the baby. Most people say that it does not matter if their baby is a boy or a girl, they will still love them the same. However, what if their baby was neither boy or girl? In the articles “The Five sexes: Why Male and Female are not Enough” and “Duelling Dualisms”, Anne Fausto-Sterling makes readers question about the so called “genders” we know in society today. The Key concept that Anne Fausto-Sterling argues in “The Five sexes: Why Male and Female are not Enough” is that the three mixed sexes, herm, merm, and ferm, should each be considered it’s own sex. She continues on to say that sex is influenced, gradually changing, and cannot be restricted to just 5 categories. In her second article “Duelling Dualisms”, the key concept Fausto-Sterling argues is that
Butler’s theories from this book, which include gender performativity, have connections with the Techniques of Pleasure, which is seemingly unrelated to Gender Trouble, because it is an in depth writing about intersectionality in BDSM. Butler’s Gender Trouble is quite frankly a feminist philosophical or queer theory piece. Techniques of Pleasure focuses on social aspects that make up personal identities and their relations with both the actors of scenes and their audiences. Judith
The masculine man is seen on stage dressed as a woman singing he then starts screaming and crying when he realises that the younger man has been watching him perform all this time. While analysing this video I have seen that the fact he is singing on stage dressed as a woman emphasises that gender is a performance, it is also a sense of tragedy that he has to hide away and sing in a van to do something he loves and that he thinks he has to be a woman to sing because perhaps it’s not masculine. Judith Butler suggests that gender is a construction of society and that there is no real gender and if there is no real gender then how can impersonation be an authentic expression of
West and Zimmerman see everyone as an actor ‘doing’ or preforming their gender, which is similar to the ideas of Judith Butler. West and Zimmerman differentiate sex as the socially agreed on criteria for fitting into being male or female, typically this being genitalia or chromosomes, at birth. Then there is their definition of gender that is to west and Zimmerman, the degree in which an actor is masculine or feminie, in regard to what the social expectation is for each ‘sex category’ (West & Zimmerman, 1991). The sex category is a system in which the assumed sex of an actor is placed based on their body and behaviours. Another strong point that is made by west and Zimmerman is that as humans there is a large need for us socially to categorise things wether and make an assumption on if that category is positive, negative or neutral. We categorise people in ways of gender, race, age, and sexuality or by social class. Because of this need to categorise, there is also an expectation that one will conform to that category, and not act out on it and if you do then, it would be deemed socially unacceptable (West &
Society today suggest that revealing the “gender” or “sex” of a child from the moment of conception forward is a necessity. But, in all actuality to some this is an invasion of their privacy and beliefs. Many believe that raising a child gender specific is not important to their upbringing or to their growth and development. Gender is defined with several different meanings such as the behavioral, cultural or psychological traits typically associated with the one sex. The sex of an individual, male or female, based on reproductive anatomy (the category to which an individual is assigned on the basis of sex) and the personal traits or personality that we attach to being male or female. Sex is defined as the biological distinctions determined by our genitalia.
Therefore, gender brings is the action through which what it names is brought into being; masculinity or feminism. It is the language that constitutes and construct gender identities meaning gender comes after language. The extent to which a person performs the gender determine how much real a gender is. An outside gendered self or a self-preceding isn’t there; gender identity is not necessarily constructed by “I “or “we”. Social conventions enactments which is due to our retrospective reality results in subjectivity characterised by self-willingness and independence as contended by Butler. From this we learn the prerogative nature of gender identity, is determined by the situation in which one is in like society, contact etc. therefore certain social positions can potentially produce a privileged