Exploring Gender Performativity
Gender performativity is the interpretation that gender is the product of “internalized” societal values that have accumulated into hetero-normative and essentialist sets of ideals throughout history. Therefore, it is debated that gender is merely a performance of these internalized cultural standards and hence not something that is naturally assigned to a biological entity (Butler). From a psychoanalytic point of view, the conception that women are inferior to men simply because of the absence of the penis creates a certain value for the phallus (Mulvey, 1975). This is understood as the dominant aspect of the implication of a natural patriarchal order. Prominent directors in the avant-garde cinema industry, such as Pedro Almodovar (Matador, All about my mother, Law of desire), are known to tackle these traditional ideas of essentialism through the use of narratives, effectively blurring distinctions between male and female and challenging this ontological theory.
In feminist ontology, the Performance and Performativity of Gender are concepts that were first formulated by the feminist theorist Judith Butler in 1990 in her book “Gender Trouble”(Butler). She discusses these concepts in the interest of deconstructing gender. Gender is to be naturally assigned according to whether the subject has an absence or presence of certain genitalia; Butler argues that this is, in fact, reductive. To…
