Gender Performativity - Research Paper Example

continually tend to stylize the body with certain appearance, as in the first chapter of “Gender Trouble” Butler says, “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (43). Butler suggests that the deconstruction of gender from a political-genealogical perspective will necessarily reveal it as more of a social appearance of gender than of a natural attribute to sexual dichotomy, as she says, A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender. (44) Butler’s Gender Performativity is rigid in the sense that it does not allow one to choose any particular gender to act upon.

Her concept of Performativity is a process of constructing gender through repeated actions that a society assigns to a human being of particular sex. Indeed this process is “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame” (43). Obviously the reiteration of the gendered activities occurs “within a highly rigid regulatory frame” that the society sets for its members. In this regulatory frame of the society, “the script” of performance allow the members to assumes a constrained and predefined role assigned to a particular sex and he or she “has a limited number of “costumes” from which to make a constrained choice of gender style” (Salih 56).

Again elaborating the process of developing gender through the reiterated action, Butler says that “gender proves to be performance— that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.” (33) This constitution of