Doing Gender and Acting Woman: Thoughts on Butler’s Gender Performativity or Your Life as a Stage: Rome-who and Julie-what?
Butler proposes, in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, that gender does not precede the social expression of one’s gender identity, but that it is, rather, through those social performances and historic contexts that gender is constituted. Butler adopts de Beauvoir’s concept of the body as a historical situation, and rejects the idea of a precursory agent who “…direct[s] an embodied exterior” (521)—as is implied by the subject-verb nature of our language—claiming that “[a]s an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical
Butler proposes, in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, that gender does not precede the social expression of one’s gender identity, but that it is, rather, through those social performances and historic contexts that gender is constituted. Butler adopts de Beauvoir’s concept of the body as a historical situation, and rejects the idea of a precursory agent who “…direct[s] an embodied exterior” (521)—as is implied by the subject-verb nature of our language—claiming that “[a]s an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical