Judith butler gender performative12/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() “To censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education – a topic so important for young people to discuss. In place of trying to define ‘woman’ or ‘womanhood’, true awareness can come from focusing on understanding “ how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement“. Other than that, it has also catalysed newer revisions within feminism because no longer can the movement reinforce within its doctrines the binary view of gender relations or make the category of ‘woman’ a historical group with common characteristics. This idea concerning gender identity has been one of the foundations of queer theory. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.” And so, gender is something that is perpetually being enacted by all human beings, it is “ flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors”. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of “women” to include those new possibilities. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. ![]() In an interview with the Guardian, Butler explained that her theory is “ Meant to be a critique of heterosexual assumptions within feminism…For instance, what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. There is an inherent linguistic instability then, in the terms ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’, because such identities are far from being fixed, universal definitions that are mostly stereotypes, are contingent upon differences in class, race, nationality, and historical situations and more. ![]() This is in opposition to the notion that there are some pre-existing essential features that make a woman, woman. Judith Butler, an American academician and gender theorist, whose theories have had significant impact upon queer theory, third wave feminism and women’s and literary studies, puts forward, in their 1990 book ‘ Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity’, the radical idea that ‘gender’ instead of being an essential natural thing, is ‘performative’, that is, it is a social construct dependent upon pre-established patterns of behaviour that are widely accepted and considered the “norm”. This is my postructuralist feminist positions have challenged the legitimacy of the uinversally understood category of ‘woman’ as propounded by the founding concepts of feminism. Postmodernism has also opened up questions regarding the problematic consequences of labeling something to fix its definition, because it immediately excludes certain things and creates an opposite binary narrative. Since inception then, there has been a revisioning of the definition of ‘woman’ or what can be considered as ‘women’s writing’. It manifests…a great variety of critical vantage points and procedures, including adaptations of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and diverse poststructuralist theories…the various feminisms, however, share certain assumptions and concepts that underlie the diverse ways that individual critics explore the factors of sexual difference and privilege.“ Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham write, “ Current feminist criticism…is not a unitary theory or practice. Since the 1980s, the world has been waking up to more and more poststructuralist and postmodern notions of life and everything around us, decentralising and deconstructing, in a continuous evolving process, years of accumulated ideas and basic understandings.įeminism and feminist criticism, too, has undergone numerous possible changes and evolution with time, to have a wider base and become more inclusive and intersectional. ![]()
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