Butlers Theory of Identity Performance: a Feminist Theory - Research Paper Example

Gendered identity is something that Butler has negated in all of her works. She campaigned against traditional feminists in their assertion and assumption that women can be placed within a category in that they possess common qualities, features and interests by stating that this form of categorisation is “an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations” (Butler, 1999, p. 9). Does she pose the questions: “And is not such a reification precisely contrary to feminist aims?

To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?” to highlight the fact that traditional feminists have contradicted themselves and nullified their goals of vindicating the status of women by grouping society into two distinct sets—the men and the women (Butler, 1999, p. 9). Instead of providing more—and ideally, unlimited—avenues for women, they just narrowed down their options for creating an identity into two.

Sex and gender are deemed to be related in that it is commonly believed that sex denotes the physical characteristics of a woman that differentiates her from a man—a woman’s sex is inevitably connected to her material body—while gender is the historical and cultural delineations erected by society that distinguish what is feminine behaviour from the masculine—how sex is interpreted by society (Gauntlett, 1998a; Felluga, 2002; Butler, 1999, p. 12). Gender, on the other hand, should be viewed as “a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times”.