F eminist and g ender t heories

Feminist and Gender Theories  
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The view that gender is performative show[s] that what we 
take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured 
through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered 
stylization of the body. In this way, it show[s] that what we 
take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we 
anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an 
extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures.
So, too, the “culturally sustained” (rather than essentialist) 
nature of gender performances is evident in Butler’s discussion 
of performative acts, which she conceptualizes as “forms of 
authoritative speech . . . [or] statements that, “in utter-
ing . . . exercise a binding power” (Butler 1993:224; emphasis 
added). As Butler maintains,
Implicated in a network of authorization and punishment, per-
formatives tend to include legal sentences, baptisms, inaugura-
tions, declarations of ownership, statements which not only 
perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action 
performed. If the power of discourse to produce that which it 
names is linked with the question of performativity, then the 
performative is one domain in which power acts as discourse. 
(ibid.:224; emphasis added)
In other words, for Butler, “what we take to be an internal 
essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of 
acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body” (1990/2006.:xv). “Gender is a 
kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real” (ibid.:xxxi). Just as in Kafka’s 
“Before the Law,” where one sits before the door of the law awaiting that authority to be 
distributed, so, too, gender is “an expectation that ends up producing the very phenome-
non that it anticipates” (ibid.:xiv).
This brings us to the issue of queer theory. In addition to being a leading feminist theorist, 
Butler is one of the most important figures in queer theory. Queer theory emerged from gay/
lesbian studies, which in turn emerged from gender studies, in the 1980s. Until the 1980s, the 
term “queer” had a derogatory connotation, meaning “odd” or “peculiar” or “out of the ordi-
nary.” However, queer theorists, including Butler, appropriated this term, insisting that all 
sexual behaviors, all concepts linking sexual behaviors to sexual identities, and all categories 
of normative and deviant sexualities are social constructs, which create certain types of social 
meaning. In short, “sex is a norm” (Osborne and Segal 1993, interview with Judith Butler).
Thus, the undergirding emphasis in all these projects (gay/lesbian, queer, feminist) is that 
the categories of normative and deviant sexual behavior are not biologically but rather 
socially constructed. In contrast to those who see sexuality as biological and gender as a 
social construction, Butler sees sex as no more a natural category than gender. She concep-
tualizes gender norms as structuring biology and not the reverse, which informs the more 
conventional view.
Butler does not deny certain kinds of biological differences, but she seeks to explain the
discursive and institutional conditions under which certain arbitrary biological differences 
become salient characteristics of sex (ibid.). She emphasizes that sexuality is a complex 
array of individual activity and institutional power, of social codes and forces, which inter-
act to shape the ideas of what is normative and what is deviant at any particular moment, 
and which then result in categories as to “natural,” “essential,” “biological,” or “god-given.” 
Photo 7.4 Divine
Harris Glenn Milstead (1945–1988), 
better known by his drag persona, 
Divine, who starred in several of John 
Waters’s films, including Hairspray, 
exemplifies performativity.

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