1. Gender and identity is represented in many ways in which are communicated by us subconsciously all the time. Depending on your gender and how you wish to be represented, we undertake specific actions physically, verbally and non-verbally to communicate our gender and identity automatically.
2. For example, as a male you could represent your gender by dressing in a more masculine way, having facial hair or even by the way you smell.
3. By doing these different actions, society puts you into these constructed identity groups.
4. Judith counter-types these ideas that of gender representation. She doesn’t believe that certain actions should factor into how your gender is represented, such as why is body building regarded as a male thing to do? She thinks that these stereotypes and identifications are not fixed or definite states.
5. However Judith is implying that there is no “repetitive” acts that can depict who you are, its all a false idea created by humanity because that’s what is normal, however as we move and and as me mature we realise everyone does what they want and people don’t live by what others think or depict of them. Some people are born a gender but then change because they feel that isn’t who they are, and as the days go on, that is more and more publicly accepted by humanity and people will not need to put on a particular front to be a certain way in order to fit in.

Judith at home notes

Judith illustrates and creates the idea that there arennot specific aspects or qualities that make you your supposed gender, gender is a title and has nothing to do with the how you behave. You can choose and change your gender, be yourself and choose what person you want to be and whatever you do will not change who you are and who you identify yourself as. Judith Butler writes to identify and break the idea that genders have stereotypes and specific acts they carry out like football for men, netball for woman, pints for men and wine for women.

Judith Butler: ‘gender as performance’

identity can be a site of contest and revision‘

Butler (2004:19)

In many ways Judith Butler counterpoints earlier ideas of gender representation, for example, some of the ideas presented by Laura Mulvey seem to suggest that gender is fixed – male/female – that it is structured by institutions and those powerful individuals who are able to exert power and control – Weinstein et al. While still recognising those argments presented by Mulvey, Jean Kilbourne, Sut Jhally and others, Butler suggests that gender is fluid, changeable, plural a set of categories to be played out and performed by individual subjects in individual moments in time and space.

Put another, it suggests that we have multiple identities that are performed to different people, in different social settings, under different social conditions. For example, look at categories such as lipstick lesbian, butch and femme, girly girl and so on, which illustrate the multiple, plural nature of identity, representation and performance with feminist critical thinking. Which can be explored and mapped out into similar studies on male identity (again see work by Sinfield, Dollimore and others).

The idea of identity performance is explored further in another post: Representation, Identity & Self. However, to understand the approach of gender as performative is to recognises a ‘phenomenon that is being reproduced all the time‘, which perhaps suggests that ‘nobody is a gender from the start.’ The question for Butler (and for students of media and cultural studies) is therefore: how does gender get established and policed? Which, of course, is why we look at her ideas in subjects like Media Studies.