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| - Gender Performativity is a term created by feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person's gender act. This effect produces what we can consider to be 'true gender', a narrative that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them" ,. The performative acts with which Butler is discussing she names to be performative and within the larger social, unseen world, they exist within
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| abstract
| - Gender Performativity is a term created by feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person's gender act. This effect produces what we can consider to be 'true gender', a narrative that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them" ,. The performative acts with which Butler is discussing she names to be performative and within the larger social, unseen world, they exist within performativity. The socially constructed aspect of gender performativity is perhaps most obvious in drag performance, which offers the potential for a revision of gender categories in its emphasis on the discursive contingency of each gender performance. Butler believes that drag cannot be regarded as an instance of free play, where "there is a ‘one’ who is prior to gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender decides with deliberation which gender it will be today". Subsequently, drag should not be considered the honest expression of its performer’s intent. Rather, she suggests that what is performed "can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility". Butler suggests in both "Critically Queer" and "Melancholy Gender", that the child/subject's ability to grieve the loss of the same-sex parent as a viable love object is barred. Following from Freud’s notion of melancholia, such a repudiation results in a heightened identification with the Other that cannot be loved, resulting in gender performances which allegorize and internalize the lost love that the subject is subsequently unable to acknowledge or grieve. Butler explains that "a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed (taken on, assumed) through the incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love, an exclusion never grieved, but ‘preserved’ through the heightening of feminine identification itself". Curiously, Butler does not appear to problematize Freud's heteronormative assumption that the child necessarily has two parents and/or both a mother and a father.
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