Gender, Sexuality and Performativity
The feminist and queer rethinking of gender and sexuality as cultural constructions — performed, represented, and open to subversion rather than fixed by nature.
Definition
Performativity is Butler's claim that gender is not the expression of a prior inner essence but is constituted by the stylised repetition of acts; queer theory is the related body of work that contests the naturalness and fixity of sexual and gender identities.
Scope
This topic covers feminist and queer cultural theory: Butler's account of gender as performative, feminist analysis of the gaze in visual culture, and queer theory's destabilising of fixed sexual identities. It does not cover the empirical study of gender inequality or the biology of sex.
Core questions
- Is gender something one is, or something one does?
- How does visual culture position the spectator through gender?
- Why does queer theory resist stable identity categories?
Key theories
- Gender performativity
- Butler argued that gender is performatively produced through repeated acts within regulatory norms, so identity is an effect rather than a cause, opening space for subversion.
- The male gaze
- Mulvey analysed how classical cinema structures looking around male desire, positioning women as objects of a gendered gaze.
History
Feminist cultural theory from the 1970s, including Mulvey's influential account of the cinematic gaze, treated gender as culturally produced. Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and Sedgwick's work crystallised this into the theory of performativity and the field of queer theory, which destabilised the binaries of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Debates
- Construction versus the reality of embodied difference
- Performative and queer accounts of gender as constructed are challenged by those who insist on the material reality of bodies and the political need for stable identity categories.
Key figures
- Judith Butler
- Laura Mulvey
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Related topics
Seminal works
- butler1990
- mulvey1975
- sedgwick1990
Frequently asked questions
- Does performativity mean gender is just a choice?
- No. Butler stresses that performativity is the compelled repetition of norms, not a free choice of costume; subversion is possible but constrained by powerful regulatory pressures.