Gendered/ Sexed Bodies
Judith Pamela Butler is an American gender theorist and philosopher. Her work has had significant impacts on both the queer theory and the third wave feminist. In her work “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” she opines that gender is performative. While she defines sex as referring to a biological facticity, she describes gender as a signification or interpretation of that facticity. By arguing that gender is performative, she implies that it equally has a social audience. Social practices and structures thus dictate one’s gender. The established meanings are passed from one generation to another through the set social structures.
Judith’s explanation means that different gendered sexual behaviors are imposed by normative heterosexuality. Based on this explanation, Judith takes social agents as objects as opposed to constitutive acts. Therefore, gender does not exist as an objective thing. Gender can thus only be said to be real based on the performance levels. Gender is not tied or restricted to the material body. On the contrary, it is wholly a social construction that is influenced by cultural factors. According to Butler, gender is open to both contestations and change. The argument rests on the fact that there is no particular objective ideal it aspires or seeks to externalize.
Without performance/ social acts, gender would thus not exist. Likewise, its genesis cannot be said to be corporeal as it is performative. Nonetheless, actions that define gender are renewed at regular intervals based on social trends. The position held by Butler is an opposition to the legal, family, and punitive social rules that restrict the definition of gender. Judith critiques these attempts to compel people to conform to both the heterosexual and hegemonic standards of gender and identity. Understanding the position held by Judith calls for the questioning of the differences between sex and gender. There is the acknowledgment that there are some anatomical variations between women and men.
As such, social gender is not based on one’s biological sex. While gender falls under the historical category, sex is placed in the biological group. Butler offers a variation to the conventional definitions by feminists. She asserts that gender acts can distort the view and interpretation of corporeal sexes. Sex is, therefore, not restricted to just the biological material. On the contrary, it is influenced by social conventions. It is possible to construct sex over some time. Her idea is that sex is not a static condition, but it changes over time. Social norms and values facilitate the changes. Sex is a norm that varies between societies. However, there is a tendency to restrict the definitions of social and legal definitions of gender.
In my life, there are different activities that I regard as being either male or female-oriented. I tend to associate masculine tasks with men and easy tasks with women. My view is based on social norms that regard man as both the protector and the breadwinner. However, there are also incidences the roles/ actions are distorted by command performance. An example that women, in most cases, refuse to be restricted to domestic chores. They exhibit the desire to be employed or engage in other masculine tasks. In school, there are instances where the school’s rules and regulations require us to perfume some activities regardless of being a man or woman. These are social values, commands, and norms that determine the definition of both sex and gender.