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Critical Topics and Their Significance for the UPSC CSE Examination on October 01, 2024

Daily Insights and Initiatives for UPSC Exam Notes: Comprehensive explanations and high-quality material provided regularly for students

On gender performativity: how it challenges the gender binary

For Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance

For Mains Examination: GS II & IV Governance, Ethics

Context:

A concept that has significantly influenced gender theory, gender performativity enables a more fluid understanding of gender by challenging fixed notions of identity. Poststructuralist scholar Judith Butler introduced this idea in her 1990 work, Gender Trouble. Butler critiques the essentialist view, which associates sex to the binary of the masculine and the feminine

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Key takeaways:

• Gender performativity, a concept pivotal to gender theory, offers a more flexible view of gender by challenging rigid notions of identity. Introduced by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), this idea critiques the essentialist view that links sex with a binary understanding of masculinity and femininity.
• Instead, Butler asserts that gender is socially constructed, created and maintained through repeated actions, behaviors, and language. As a result, gender is never a stable identity, even though it may seem consistent over time.
• Butler argues that societal norms around gender are so ingrained in everyday life that they appear natural, confining people to strict gender roles. However, these norms are not fixed and can be disrupted because they rely on continual repetition.
• Acts of resistance can lead to shifts in how gender is understood. Butler’s work has been a milestone in both third-wave feminism and queer theory, challenging traditional gender constructs.
• Two major gender theories stand out: gender essentialism and social constructivism. Gender essentialism argues that biology determines gender, with sex chromosomes and DNA defining one’s gender identity. According to this view, the characteristics, roles, and behaviors linked to masculinity or femininity are biologically predetermined.
• Conversely, social constructivism sees gender as shaped by social discourse, encompassing verbal and non-verbal actions. Gender norms become internalized to the point where they seem natural.
• For instance, children are often assigned gender roles based on their sex, and deviations from these norms can lead to social repercussions, like bullying or criticism. An example from Indian schools highlights how even in supposedly uniform environments, boys and girls are held to different standards, such as boys being discouraged from growing long hair.
• Iris Marion Young's 1980 essay "Throwing Like a Girl" explores how gender norms influence even physical movements, showing how girls are socialized to use less space and energy compared to boys. These behaviors, however, are not fixed and can vary across time and culture, exemplified by the historical shift in gendered color associations.
• Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” emphasizes that gender identity is constructed through societal norms. This notion ties into Butler’s critique of second-wave feminism’s separation of sex and gender, where she challenges the idea that sex is purely biological. Butler argues that both sex and gender are socially constructed, and the idea that a person’s body predetermines their gender is a product of social discourse.
• Butler’s key argument is that gender is not something one is but something one does. She conceptualizes gender as a verb, a set of repeated actions that reinforce societal expectations, much like how language operates through repeated usage over time.

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