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Essay On Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

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Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993) works are fundamental texts of study for this thesis. Both works are deeply influenced specially by French structuralism and post-structuralism schools of thought. In Gender Trouble, Butler deconstructs the established, normative, Western construction of the Gay/Straight and hetero/homosexual binaries to discuss the lack of perspective regarding the heterogeneity of sexual identity and diversity as it is present in twentieth century society. Her arguments focus not only on the production of binaries and their rigidity from a sociological standpoint, but also on how the use of these binary structures can affect us in processes of sexual identity construction because of interpretations and constraints coming from various fields such as: the …show more content…

This gesture production that the performativity criterion entails, is what we shall see and analyse as a process of identity construction in Osman’s stories. It will be clear how the construction of one’s sexual identity, which is my contention, is a fluid process of construction and not a rigid one as we have been instructed to understand by Patriarchal indoctrination. I how Butler’s arguments have some bearing with what Sedgwick proposes in her deconstruction of Western thought which is extensively addressed and complicated in her book Epistemology of the Closet, by introducing a more complex view of the possibilities of understanding sexuality as an elaborated process that includes several aspects to consider. I shall briefly outline Sedgwick’s position regarding sexual identity construction in the next section paying special attention to the key elements that she

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Thus, in doing gender, one does not move beyond this context, but instead gender identity is “performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its result” (55). Gender, for Butler, is “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame,” it is something fluid that congeals over time “to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (63). In this sense, one can never become woman because there is no ontological ‘woman’; it is a “substantive appearance” (64). Butler uses the example of drag to illustrate how it disrupts the “very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates” (27). Drag is not an imitation of true gender, but an act that exposes foundational categories that create the notion of gender as an effect of a “specific formation of power” (27).

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