Judith Butler is an American gender theorist and philosopher, and her theories on gender performativity and sex are influential in the fields of queer and feminist theory.¹

Her best known works: (1988), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), among many others.²

Butler’s works challenge conventional assumptions about gender and sex and has prompted much debate on the topic.

Butler is the Hannah Arendt Chair of the European Graduate School and the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.³

GENDER IS PERFORMED.

Gender as an objective natural thing, does not exist: Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.⁴

Gender identity is an illusion that is retroactively created by our performance of it.⁵ That is to say that gender is not a biological fact based on sex assignment at birth, but is rather a "script" of gender performance that is is effortlessly transmitted generation to generation in the form of socially established "meanings."⁶

Example/s:

1. 1. 1. Skirts and dresses signify femininity and are inappropriate to be worn by males.

      2. We perform our gender by choosing how we are addressed through pronouns. Use of she/her, he/him, and they/them can now be used fluidly.

GENDER IS PERFORMATIVE.

What is important in performativity is not in the first place the act that is performed, but mostly the fact that the gender act is being done repeatedly--constituting gender as a stable identity in what may be called normative heterosexuality.⁷

“Gender is a phenomenon [rather than an intrinsic quality of humans] that is produced and reproduced all the time. To say that Gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start…”⁸

The performance of gender itself creates gender.

Example/s:

• Duterte won the support of Filipino people in the 2016 presidential elections by presenting a macho, aggressive stance that was needed in the Philippines, amidst the territorial dispute with China. When asked what he would do, in the case China attacked the Philippines, he took no time sticking to the script of his masculine performativity, saying that he would jet-ski to disputed territories and plant the Philippine flag.⁹

• Drag is an example of how gender is performed, and is a matter of performance, demonstrating the notion how gender is fluid and is not caged within the binaries of heterosexuality. (However, we should not assume that clothing genders a person, and should not be the sole way of understanding homosexuality).

Queer challenges the rigidity of gender binaries. The existence of queer is a testament that identity is free, flexible, and is not caged within box of heteronormative constructs.

GENDER AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCT.

That belief (in stable identities and gender differences) is, in fact, compelled "by social sanction and taboo"¹⁰, so that our belief in "natural" behavior is really the result of both subtle and blatant coercions.¹¹

It is also impossible to separate the construction of gender from the “cultural intersections” in which it is “produced and maintained”.¹² This includes but is not limited to race, religion, and social class.

Example:

The conventional preference for colors in gender reveal parties for babies, whereby the color blue signifies that the baby is a boy, and the color pink means that the baby is a girl.