Читать книгу The New Gender Paradox - Judith Lorber - Страница 10

If “doing gender” has been the touchstone of gender construction in the social sciences, Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, from Gender Trouble (1990), has been the prevailing concept in the humanities. Conceptually based in philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Butler’s concept of performativity encompasses the unconscious process of making gendered selves that reiterate social norms of femininity and masculinity and inscribe femaleness and maleness on the body and heterosexuality on the psyche. Performance and identity are one and the same; one does not precede or exist without the other. And there lies the possibility for “gender trouble.” Gendering has to be done over and over, almost ritualistically, to reproduce the gendered social norms. But different ways of gendering produce differently gendered people. So, with conscious deliberation, one might create oneself differently gendered, and indeed, transgender people do just that. By 1993, Butler was rethinking aspects of gender performativity. In Bodies That Matter (1993), she took up the materiality or bodiedness of gender performativity and analyzed the ways that it encompassed sex and sexuality as well.

Butler ended Gender Trouble by arguing for the subversive political possibilities inherent in gender performativity. She said, “The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: “man” and “woman”’ (1990: 146).