In Undoing Gender, Butler responds to Braidotti’s theories and finds that they raise useful questions about the material experiences of gender and desire. She writes, “Sexual difference is not a given, not a premise, not a basis on which to build a feminism; it is not that which we have already encountered and come to know; rather, as a question that prompts a feminist inquiry, it is something that cannot quite be stated, that troubles the grammar of the statement, and that remains, more or less permanently, to interrogate.” For Butler, interrogation is necessary for feminist thinking to thrive.
While challenging any claim to “innate” gender, Butler has clarified that she believes “every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives” (per this interview) regardless of how they internally experience gender.
Judith Butler, Pronoun Use & Gendered Language
Butler’s theories reject a stable gender binary, inviting us to see how gender is and can be performed in a multitude of ways. These ideas have contributed to the growing movement to recognize gender experiences and identities beyond binary notions of “man” and “woman.” For example, some people use terms like genderfluid, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and non-binary to describe themselves and their experiences of gender. The growing use of pronouns other than he/him and she/her—like they/them—is one way that people indicate an experience of gender beyond the binary. The concept of a gender spectrum, rather than binary, has become a popular way of discussing gender, but it is important to avoid envisioning this spectrum with stable end points. According to Butler’s theories, no gender is stable; no one can perform perfect masculinity and femininity, which we are trained to envision as opposites. Butler’s theories ask us to recognize our failure to perform binary gender, despite our societal compulsion to attempt it, and instead embrace a “radical proliferation of gender,” a vast array of gender expressions.
Judith Butler Quotes on Gender Performativity
“Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions — and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and naturalness.” (Gender Trouble)
“As in other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation.” (Gender Trouble)
“Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Gender Trouble)
“If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity that they are said to express or reveal.” (Gender Trouble)
“Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived.” (Gender Trouble)
“The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate.” (Bodies That Matter)
“If gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not ‘do’ one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary.” (Undoing Gender)
External Resources on Sex & Gender Theory
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvlHKNvb6rI – Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler. A conference keynote speech that formed part of the ‘Doing Global Gender | Perspectives on Gender and Re-Globalization’ conference 2-6 May 2022, University of California, Berkeley, USA.
- https://rosibraidotti.com/2019/11/21/posthuman-feminism/ – Posthuman Feminism, Rosi Braidotti. A keynote speech given at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, Columbia University, NYC, USA.
- https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101889927/judith-butler-and-roxane-gay-on-gender-inclusive-language – a podcast featuring Judith Butler & Roxane Gay, wherein they discuss the use of gender-inclusive language.
- https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/events/podcasts/2012/rosi-braidotti-feminist-theory/ – a podcast featuring Rosi Braidotti entitled Nomadic Feminist Theory in a Global Era.