Gender performativity

1. Gender performativity Gender Performativity is a term created by feministphilosopherJudith 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.

2. Gender performativity 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".

3. Gender performativity The performative acts with which Butler is discussing she names to be performative and within the larger social, unseen world, they exist within performativity.

4. Gender 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.

5. Gender performativity 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".

6. Gender performativity 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".

7. Gender performativity 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.

8. Gender performativity 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.

9. Gender performativity 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".

10. Gender performativity 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.

11. Gender performativity genderperformativity性別操演 :美國酷兒論者芭特勒（Judith Butler）指出「性」（sex）與「性別」（gender）本來就是一場沒有「原本」（original）、只有「摹本」（copy）的操演（performance），是社會人為的文化建構。

12. Gender performativity 打從出生開始，我們便被賦予特定的性別身分，通過教育和學習，不斷重複操練合乎性別類型要求的意識與行為，這是一種模擬、生產和再現的過程，猶如「扮裝者」（drag），窮其一生努力演好一個特定性別的角色。

13. Gender performativity 換句話說，是我們先預設了性別的界分，然後才付諸實行，以反覆的演繹強化性別的模式，逐漸使之牢不可破，根深蒂固，成為社會規律。芭特勒的論述無疑帶有濃重的解構觀念，意圖拆解性與性別被界定為天然與社會文化的二元公式，同時也破除了性別屬性的定見。

14. Gender performativity 我們一旦發現性與性別皆由社會約定俗成、經過歷史沉積的排練而來，性別的規範便能易於打破。既然性別不過是一場模擬的操演，當中充滿流動性、變幻感與創造力，同時又具有破毀常規、顛覆主流的力量，那麼每次操演都可以是對性別身分的內容和形式重新的肯定、改變、再造和宣示。