Judith Butler Sex And Disability

2333 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Judith butler besides oneself summary

Sex and Disability
Judith Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Construction: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” explains and explores the performativity of gender, and problematizes Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of “What is a Woman?” Riva Leher, artist and author, reflects on the intersections between sex and disability in a personal essay, “Golem Girl Gets Lucky.” Both texts aid us in exploring how we must examine disability as a feminist issue, since oppressive forces faced by women are part of the same social construction as the forces which oppressed disabled people.
Butler states that “gender...is an identity tenuously constituted in time--an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts,” and she makes specific reference to these …show more content…

Beauvoir’s definition reinforces the construction of gender by proposing that one must, and should, “become” a woman, that one must purposefully acquire and the skill sets connected to female identity. Although both Butler and de Beauvoir understand that gender is not innate, but rather something to be acquired, Butler further problematizes this social phenomenon. As Butler explains, “social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic sign” (Butler 519).While de Beauvoir’s supports the aim of acquiring gender, and becoming a woman, Butler’s argument aims to point out the social construction of gender, and deconstruct that

Show More
Related

  • Simone De Beauvoir

    685 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout history, women have been portrayed as the passive, subdued creatures whose opinions, thoughts, and goals were never as equal as those of her male counterparts. Although women have ascended the ladder of equality to some degree, today it is evident that total equalization has not been achieved. Simone De Beauvoir, feminist and existential theorist, recognized and discussed the role of women in society today. To Beauvoir, women react and behave through the scrutiny of male opinion, not able to differentiate between their true character and that which is imposed upon them. In this dangerous cycle women continue to live up to the hackneyed images society has created, and in doing so women feel it is necessary to reshape their ideas to meet the expectations of men. Women are still compelled to please men in order to acquire a higher place in society - however, in doing this they fall further behind in the pursuit of equality.

    Read More

  • Traumatic Experiences In Judith Butler's Narrative

    1108 Words  | 3 Pages

    Judith Butler’s concept of gender being performative focuses on how it creates a sequence of effect or impression. Human have a consistent way of talking about their gender as if it were something that is simply a fact. People go about their lives following patterns that are interconnected with their male or female appearance. They get very settled in the expected behaviors and common attributes of male or female, without recognizing that gender is a social construction. It is difficult to wrap your head around the idea that gender is always changing and being reproduced because it is conversation that often goes unnoticed. Butler realizes that it will be a struggle to get people to grasp the idea that nobody actually is their gender and that

    Read More

  • Linton's Journey To Become A Disabled Woman

    405 Words  | 1 Pages

    Although Linton describes instances in which she attempts to distance herself from the passivity her condition seems to require by demanding her newly disabled body be taken seriously (especially by an “unassuming” salesman trying to take advantage of fitting her for a prosthesis), it is not until one hundred pages in that readers might begin to get the feeling Linton is finally approaching the real crux of her story. This is not to say that the text before this point is trite or inconsequential; on the contrary, as after her hospital stay she writes about exposing herself to a new world where she is a curious entity, moving to California to attend college only to find they have already discovered “the disability movement” and she does not quite fit into their image of it just yet, and situating the disabled body against “normative” notions such as travel, dance, sex, intimacy, and celebrity. It is precisely in this section’s substantiality that Linton is at last able to reach a crucial narrative point, revealing a poignant and pivotal moment in her life’s bumpy journey.

    Read More

  • Stereotypes In Judith Butler's Besides Oneself?

    1456 Words  | 3 Pages

    Stereotypes have become a socially accepted phenomena in today’s society. So socially acceptable, in fact, they have made it onto advertising billboards and into our daily language. We do not think twice as they pass our tongues, and we do tilt our heads in concern or questioning as they pass into our ears. In Judith Butler’s essay “Besides Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy”, stereotypes are exposed and explored. Especially stereotypes pertaining to sexual orientation. Butler explains how stereotypes are unacceptable. She does this in a way which allows her to concurrently explore what it means to be human, and also what humans do or need to make Earth a livable place for ourselves. When examining Butler’s essay, one could say, and

    Read More

  • Nancy Mairs, Andre Dubus, Harriet McBryde Johnson: Disability

    1916 Words  | 4 Pages

    Nancy Mairs, born in 1943, described herself as a radical feminist, pacifist, and cripple. She is crippled because she has multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a chronic disease involving damage to the nerve cells and spinal cord. In her essay Disability, Mairs’ focus is on how disabled people are portrayed, or rather un-portrayed in the media. There is more than one audience that Mairs could have been trying to reach out to with this piece. The less-obvious audience would be disabled people who can connect to her writing because they can relate to it. The more obvious audience would be physically-able people who have yet to notice the lack of disabled people being portrayed by the media. Her purpose is to persuade the audience that disabled people should be shown in the media more often, to help society better cope with and realize the presence of handicapped people. Mairs starts off by saying “For months now I’ve been consciously searching for representation of myself in the media, especially television. I know I’d recognize this self becaus...

    Read More

  • Judith Butler’s Trouble in Gender

    1772 Words  | 4 Pages

    In cJudith Butler’s essay Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, she examines the restrictions placed on men and women by the process of socialization. She makes an important distinction between sex and gender and argues that both sex and gender are culturally constructed. A vital term Butler fashions is Gender Performativity. She says that no identity exists behind the show that we put on. We are taught to wear a mask that supposedly expresses the gender society has prearranged for us. Those people who alter their masks or try on the opposite gender’s mask are socially outcast or at the very least frowned upon. These masks establish the roles we are to play rather than convey the illusion of the unwavering, traditi...

    Read More

  • Role of Women

    889 Words  | 2 Pages

    Another way of looking at the roles we assume in society is that they are “socially constructed”. Holly Devor brings this view to our attention in an essay. Being a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, she is an expert in the field. She uses a more scientific approach, as compared to De Tocquville, to the argument about the role of men and women in society. She believes that we learn how to live our lives according to our gender at a very young age. According to research, by the age of five years old, children may be able to accurately recognize their own gender and the genders of the people around them; however, they will often do that on the basis of role information, such as hairstyle and clothing, rather than physical attributes such as genitals.

    Read More

  • Disability Summary

    537 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the Disability Studies Reader, I read the article “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability” by Susan Wendell. The author discussed how depressing it was for her to become disable where she struggled to accept a new body image that she has to get used to. I think Susan’s main point was that there are an increasing amount of women who are disable, they are oppressed and they face numerous restrictions in their daily lives .Susan argued that there is a major similarity between feminism and disability, feminism can contributes to a very positive psychobiological and social approaches toward the disablement of people. According to Susan, people with disabilities face a large struggle for equality and they are discriminated against based on their disabilities and that women with disabilities face a further discrimination based on the combination of gender and disabilities.

    Read More

  • Women With Disabilities In Good Kings Bad Kings By Susan Nussbaum

    1245 Words  | 3 Pages

    Women with disabilities are seldom represented in popular culture. Movies, television shows ,and novels that attempt to represent people within the disability community fall short because people that are not disabled are writing the stories. Susan Nussbaum has a disability. She advocates for people with disabilities and writes stories about characters with disabilities . She works to debunk some of the stereotypes about women with disabilities in popular culture. Women with disabilities are stereotyped as being sexually undesirable individuals , that are not capable of living normal lives, that can only be burdens to mainstream society, and often sacrifice themselves.Through examining different female characters with disabilities, Nussbaum 's novel Good Kings Bad Kings illustrates how the stereotypes in popular culture about women with disabilities are not true.

    Read More

  • Butler And Foucault's Relationship To Sexuality And Gender

    1162 Words  | 3 Pages

    Both Butler and Foucault believe that there is no interior truth to the self, and for Butler, gender identity. Gender is instead, “inscribed on the surface of bodies” through the repeated and ongoing performance of words and acts (Butler, 136), and discourses on power and culture. Butler explicates Foucault’s arguments and concludes that he takes for granted his assumption that the body is a stable entity before culture imposes on it. Foucault’s philosophies inadvertently surmise the existence of a body before discourses on power and performativity; that the body is its own entity, and culture acts upon that. If bodies are constituted within a specific network of cultural influencers (which Foucault argues that they are), this presupposes that there is a materiality -or ontological independence- of the body outside of those specific regimes. While the body is shaped and determined by cultural influencers, it maintains its concrete substance (a man’s penis, a woman’s vagina, etc) before, and outside of, that relationship. Foucault is supposed to assert that the body is a cultural construction, though his philosophies force him to commit to the denial of that claim, inadvertently “maintaining [that there is] a body prior to its cultural inscription” (Butler,

    Read More

  • The Second Sex By Simone De Beauvoir Analysis

    1205 Words  | 3 Pages

    Historically, power has been manifested hierarchically within the social training of genders. Simone De Beauvoir’s concept of ‘otherness’ has theorized how individuals’ personal manifestations of self are influenced deeply by their social position and the available power to them within these circumstances (2000:145). She remains one of the first to develop a feminist philosophy of women. In her book The Second Sex (1950), Beauvoir provides “a philosophical account of the development of patriarchal society and the condition of women within it” (Oliver, 1997:160). Beauvoir’s fundamental initial analysis begins by asking, “what is woman” and concludes woman is “other” and always defined in relation to man (Beauvoir, 2000:145).

    Read More

  • Reconfiguration of Social Relation: The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir

    902 Words  | 2 Pages

    There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.

    Read More

  • Judith Butler Gender Essay

    1036 Words  | 3 Pages

    Judith Butler believes that gender should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times theory.org. Gender is something that should describe you as a person it shouldn’t be something that we aim to fit into. If you don't like manly things like “football”, “fighting”, and “hunting” you’re not any less of a man you just have different opinions towards things. If you don’t like wearing dresses and cleaning the house you’re no less womanly it’s just how you feel about it and that is something that we shouldn’t use in society to define people stereotyping people into enjoying and being better in certain tasks can lead to many harmful things for society. For over hundreds of years we lived with the idea that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or even have regular jobs and now today women are still only making 73 cents to every dollar a man makes aauw.org. That can be attributed to the many years of believing women shouldn’t even go to school and have a proper education that’s something that set our whole nation back hundreds of years think about how much progress could be obtained if the smart women of our time were allowed to work with great men and share their ideas there’s no way to tell but we could be far ahead in the research we have

    Read More

  • The Social Construction Of Sex And Gender In Sociology

    1685 Words  | 4 Pages

    The work of Simone de Beauvoir’s that says, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” ,distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually

    Read More

  • Judith Butler's Theory Of Queer Gender

    1081 Words  | 3 Pages

    The word “Queer” means “strange, unusual”, the same with word “odd”. The theory of queer gender is not a specific theory, but a comprehensive interdisciplinary discourse that come from multiple subjects such as history, society and literature. The theory of queer gender established outside of the mainstream culture: these people and their theory cannot find their position in the mainstream culture, and they do not have intention to do so. “Queer” is a appellation for a social group including people who are not conform with the mainstream society about sexual preference and gender identity, like homosexual and bisexual.

    Read More

More about Judith Butler Sex And Disability

Open Document