Chapter 5 Gender, Sexuality and Identity:
Performance, power and context in the production of sex and gender
p121:
‘Butler has a performative theory of gender, which is to say that gender is understood as nothing more or less than the performance of actions, behaviours, and gestures that have gendered characteristics’
‘there is no essence of male or female at the heart of our own selves which is expressed in these performances. It is the performance itself that creates the illusion that each one of us has a natural sex’
C - gender is a social constructed showcased through our actions. Our actions / performance identifies our gender rather than our gender determining our actions
‘normative regulations that compel the bosses to signify in terms of the discourse on gender’ butler
‘Butler’s overall aim is to use the concept of discourse to tie the performance of gender to power, showing sex… is produced as discursively regulated performances’
‘gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalisation of masculine and feminine take place’
p122
‘As an ironic commentary, drag can be subversive as it not only illustrated the performative nature of gender, it also hints at its instability by showing the possible slippage between the supposedly bounded categories of male and female, straight and gay’
‘like Kessler and McKenna, and also Goffman, Butler is saying that the performance creates the sense of male and female as natural facts, using a Foucauldian analysis she is arguing that performances are compelled by regulatory norms and the overlapping networks of knowledge and power’
‘it is this normative regulation that actually produces gender performances, which are both iterative and improvisational’
‘In performing as women or men in everyday life we do exactly the same thing, by quoting the gender norms that are standard in society, or ‘gender-bending’ in some way by mixing together male and female signifiers’
‘she recognised that we do not simply conform to a set of normative regulations in a self-conscious or cynical way, but are somehow deeply inscribed by these norms, which animate our bodies in their performances, creating our own sense of identification’
‘in my terms, Butler wants to understand how we in-habit gender and sexuality with our bodies’
‘in being compelled to identify within a framework of norms that say you must identify either as male or female, gay or straight, this identification involves a repudiation of its opposite’
‘men will often fee ashamed of their more feminine inclinations and feelings, thinking that they make them less masculine, while women may feel their more masculine aspects will be frowned on because they make them less feminine’
‘gender, sex and sexuality are all interlinked, produced by the regulatory apparatus that keeps in place the heterosexual order’
p124
‘social categories signify subordination and existence at once’
p127
‘Butler’s theory fail to capture; that alongside the difficulties, struggles and conflicts that can occur in expressing gender and sexuality, there are also to be found the pleasures of bodily fantasies and desires, involving joy and abandon with others’
p128
Goffmans
‘in his view it is not so much the overall character of the gendered power structure… but certain context-specific features relevant to an audience’
p129
‘context and alignment, then, are hugely important in the meaning and style of performances, as well as in the selection and mixing of ideal or iconic images of masculinity and femininity used in gender displays in certain settings’
p130
‘Freud did not seem to refer to gender or sex as being an identity, but saw masculine and feminine as ‘attitudes’ that could be adopted by both boys and girls’
p131
‘Freud’s concept of identification was rather indistinct, yet he made clear that identification does not have to be with a whole person but could be with a treat, an act, with speech, an organ, or with the whole world’
‘to survive in this world, a person’s sex has to be in some way readable and intelligible to others otherwise they are liable to be cast into a non-existence or non-recognition by others’
‘the major problem in Butler’s work,… are to do with the lack of a historical and context specific understanding of sex and gender’
Comments:
Throughout this subsection Burkitt discusses gender and performance in relation to Butler, in which he discusses the idea that gender is a social construct established through performance. He discusses how a persons performance/actions determine their gender rather than a persons actions being pre-determined by gender. He also discusses Butler in relation to Freud in order to establish issues within Butlers theory.
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