Undoing Gender

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses violence, anti-gay bias, and transphobia.

In the Introduction, Butler comments that gender “is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing” (1). However, this performance of gender is neither “automatic or mechanical,” and Butler grounds the “terms that make up one’s gender” in a “sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself)” (1). In short, they suggest that gender defies the idea of “creation” or origin, existing as a perpetually reenacted set of norms. Gender, as part of identity, is socially constructed in the sense that society represents and idealizes gender; people then internalize and adopt gender as performative ways of living. A major theme in Butler’s text is both how gender is performed and how sexuality, sex, race, and culture are performed as and through identity.

Butler probes the implications of identity as governed by social norms in their critique of Agacinski’s perspective. Butler acknowledges both the perceived rigidity of norms, by which thinkers like Agacinski speculate what is or is not allowed in human behavior but also the inevitability of challenges to these norms.