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Essays on gender identity
Judith butlers conception of gender is post modern
Judith butler on gender
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Judith Butler’s piece “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” focuses on the relationship between body and gender, and how the two influence one another. The “various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and assumed” (Butler 525) serve as the foundation upon which we can start to dissect the reality behind how “bodies get crafted into genders” (Butler 525). Butler believes that “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (Butler 523) because she compares gender to “an act which has been rehearsed” (Butler 526), one that has been performed “invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure” (Butler 531). …show more content…
Correctly showcasing one’s gender fuels the belief that gender is not meant to be fluid. According to Butler, gender is the “cultural significance that the sexed body assumes” (Butler 524), and by choosing to transition from an individual’s expected gender, or even an individual’s expected sexuality, it is unfavorable for society in terms of reproduction and the profits that may follow. When members of society follow the status quo, they “guarantee the production, exchange, and consumption of material goods,…[as well as] the channeling of sexuality into various modes of heterosexual marriage” (Butler 524). I don’t agree with any of this, and I don’t think Butler does, either. Butler is providing a discourse on a shitty reality: gender roles are “enforced though…modes of punishment and reward” (Butler 526). Historically, humanity has always resisted change, and deterring from social norms is a part of
In early nineteen centuries, Women helped shape the course of the American Revolution in numerous ways. However, national and state constitutions included little mention of women. Under the constitution, women did not have right to vote and were not allowed hold office. Judith Sargent Murray, a feminist writer, was one of the most prominent women of the Revolutionary era. She strived for the right and recognition of women from the society of her period. In the feminist essay, “On the Equality of Sexes,” Murray posed the argument of spiritual and intellectual equality between men and women.
The way I view gender is a way to express yourself. ...Gender is just a doorway, and so is sexuality, race and age.
While the issue of women’s suffrage has roots based in every country in the world, most think that the initial inroads were painfully carved through the efforts of early women pioneers in America. This perception is easily formed due to the early publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Right’s of Women in 1792. However, the movement gained national attention in New Zealand in 1893 and in Australia in 1902, eclipsing the suffrage movement in Britain, Canada and America by at least 25 years. The struggle for women’s rights has been ponderous and slow moving throughout the years and not without internal divisions.
It is simply not enough to just state your sexuality without constantly trying to prove it to people. The Egan V Canada case shares the story of inequality between gender and heteronormativity. The case brings to our attention that the gender we choose to identify ourselves by should be accepted by people and the law. We are born to believe that sexuality and gender was bred in us biologically, therefore being anything but normal is unnatural and wrong. In reference to the article, ‘Girls Wear Pink and Boys Wear Blue, the authors, reminds us that “oppression emerges from the concept of gender and the process of gendering” (Newman & White, 2012). The two authors argue that there is nothing in nature that distinctively determines a single colour that should represent one gender. The colours pink and blue have separated the female and male gender for decades because it became a socially and cultural acceptance. I argue that there is nothing in our society that proves that heterosexuality is normal. If we strip gender down straight to the core and ignore religion and class, it is easy to see that society has normalized gender to fit in with the trends of
Gender Trouble published in 1990 by Judith Butler, argues that feminism was and still relaying on the presumption that ‘women’ a...
Butler, Judith. "Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion." Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. 121-140.
In 1850 society the new republic altered the role of women by making the differences of men and women in society more noticeable, by giving them a higher status, and allowing them to demand more rights and think for freely.
Gender is a performance according to Judith Butler . All bodies, she claims, are gendered from birth; sometimes even earlier now we can determine sex in the womb . For Butler society dictates ones gender and the individual reinforces that gender through performance . “The deeds make the doer” in Butler’s words; there is no subject prior to performance. Butler’s concept of gender, however, leads us to question: what of those who are incapable of performing the gender ascribed to them? If one is unable to perform are they left genderless, lacking subjectivity and social identity? If no human is without gender , as Butler claims, then where does this leave her theory? Either gender is more than simply performance or one can exist without gender.
...Bodies 10). The very act of saying something about sex ends up imposing cultural or ideological norms, according to Butler. As she puts it, "'sex' becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct access" (Bodies 5). Nonetheless, that fiction is central to the establishment of subjectivity and human society, which is to say that, even so, it has material effects: "the 'I' neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves" (Bodies 7). Overall, I really liked butlers voice and articulation of certain dilemmas and her theme and reiteration of important facts. I leave you with a quote in which i like from her because you can interpret it in so many ways. It read “more lives are grievable than others” (Butler).
In this article, Shaw and Lee describe how the action of labels on being “feminine” or “masculine” affect society. Shaw and Lee describe how gender is, “the social organization of sexual difference” (124). In biology gender is what sex a person is and in culture gender is how a person should act and portray themselves. They mention how gender is what we were taught to do in our daily lives from a young age so that it can become natural(Shaw, Lee 126). They speak on the process of gender socialization that teaches us how to act and think in accordance to what sex a person is. Shaw and Lee state that many people identify themselves as being transgendered, which involves a person, “resisting the social construction of gender into two distinct, categories, masculinity and femininity and working to break down these constraining and polarized categories” ( 129). They write about how in mainstream America masculinity and femininity are described with the masculine trait being the more dominant of the two. They define how this contributes to putting a higher value of one gender over the other gender called gender ranking (Shaw, Lee 137). They also speak about how in order for femininity to be viewed that other systems of inequality also need to be looked at first(Shaw,Lee 139).
perspective on the concept, arguing that gender is a cultural performance. Her careful reading of
Bailey, Carol. "Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid's "girl" and Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton Spice." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. 10.2 (2011): 106-123. Print.
Lorber uses a very effective example of “doing gender” of a man who carried a female child in a stroller dressing the child in boyish clothes. The man was stared at and people around him found it really shocking that he was performing the role of a woman (because g...
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
Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge.