Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender | Big Think

Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender
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Nobody is born one gender or the other, says the philosopher. "We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman."
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Judith Butler is a post-structuralist philosopher and queer theorist. She is most famous for her notion of gender performativity, but her work ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war.

She has received countless awards for her teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller fellowship, Yale's Brudner Prize, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.

Her books include "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex," "Undoing Gender," and "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?"
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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What does it mean that gender is performative?

Judith Butler: It’s one thing to say that gender is performed and that is a little different from saying gender is performative. When we say gender is performed we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world. To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

I was walking down the street in Berkeley when I first arrived several years ago and a young woman who was I think in high school leaned out of her window and she yelled, “Are you a lesbian?”, and she was looking to harass me or maybe she was just freaked out or she thought I looked like I probably was one or wanted to know and I thought to myself well I could feel harassed or stigmatized, but instead I just turned around and I said yes I am and that really shocked her.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a women is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start. I know it’s controversial, but that's my claim.

Question: How should this notion of gender performativity change the way we look at gender?

Judith Butler: Think about how difficult it is for sissy boys or how difficult it is for tomboys to function socially without being bullied or without being teased or without sometimes suffering threats of violence or without their parents intervening to say maybe you need a psychiatrist or why can’t you be normal. So there are institutional powers like psychiatric normalization and there are informal kinds of practices like bullying which try to keep us in our gendered place.

I think there is a real question for me about how such gender norms get established and policed and what the best way is to disrupt them and to overcome the police function. It’s my view that gender is culturally formed, but it’s also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

[joyce]

If Butler can talk normally, why can't she write normally?! This is actually comprehensible.

[sunshizzleyou]

Anybody else here because they couldn't get past the (first sentence) of one of Judith's writings so they were hoping YouTube could help.... yeah, that'd be me... :(

[bravetherainbow]

Lol the way she says "I know it's controversial, but that's my claim" in the weathered way of someone who's been making the same claim for like 20 years

[carinaochoa]

It seems that most of the comments already got confused at the first step of differentiating sex and gender. Which I guess is understandable because 3 min is too little to explain her theory fully.
To make it more understandable I will try to make a resume of my understanding of her theory, sorry for my english.

First of all one should give a look into two concepts of Saussure...
one, that no matter what we do we are always thinking within a system. For example, we cant imagine a new colour without distancing ourselves from all the other colours first, that means that we are not assuming a position outside of the "system of colours", we are still within the system. So, every type of "protest/alternative thinking" only finds meaning because of the conscious contrast and meaning of the other parts of the system.
two, the triangle of reference....which means that when we see an object we perceive it as a whole but one needs to make oneself clear that there are different processes going on here:
(1) the physical existence of the object.(2) the name we give to it.
(3) the meanings and assumptions that we related to it.

so, for example, "chair" ...chairs exist outside of language, the physical existence of what we call them has its own reason of existence in which the chair doesnt care what humans think of it, it just exists (1) . Then there is the name, in this example "chair", language is a system of symbols, so we need expressions to refer to things (2). And then there are all those assumptions we relate to "chair", that can be our knowledge about its potential materials that its made of, or also the knowledge that we use it to sit, that it can be usually found in dining rooms and so on,
many many things.
So, Judith Butler makes use of the thought line in which we need to be aware of (1), the human physical body, (2) the name we give to divide its genitalia = "sex" and (3) gender as all the ideology and assumptions we relate to it.

One should also take into consideration the concepts of Pierre Bordieu of
Habitus and Praxis, in which Habitus is like the knowledge we got "programmed" with since we were little, and Praxis daily actions we do to replicate such "Program"...that can mean a lot of things, and its divided into many different categories and environments, for example food taste, based on what type of food habits your family had you are likely to replicate those in your further life and with your children, it is not a must obviously but life is full of those details. It also includes table manners, religion, or basic things like how to use a phone, how to react when we face stress, the way we express love or perceive love and so on. All that can be highly personal and individual but also goes further, it is a part on how society divides into poor and rich, or intelectual or not, or also how we create our perception of "foreigners" "nationalism" and also things like racism or sexism. We are born into a structure and based on how we are molded by that structure we then later replicate it with Praxis. Because a society is an alive thing that has the ability to adapt. We tend to think that society is something big and powerful and often ignore that its made of individuals like you and me. Also our identity tends to be formed based on differences...so, the white racist does discriminate against black people for example, not because of those persons inferiority but because of his attempt to try to establish him/herself as superior, so, by telling ourselves that "I am not x" one establishes that "I belong to this other category = I am this" (Stuart Hall)

And then there is also Michel Focault with his Discourse. For him power is not a matter of hierarchy...instead its that what those complex social systems produce constantly in interaction to each other. So, power is omnipresent and not understandable directed by an individual. It also means that we are all below it. For example one might say that a president is above power because he owns it, but he was too below the structure of power that forced him to adapt to the "rules" of elections, or that he is below the social rules for a president of being for example extrovert (usually), or that he is expected to be smart and have good table manners, to be an excellent public speaker and so on...That whole combination of rules and concepts has many divisions and segments in which one reaction causes another one and so on. They are like chains of Discourse in which they give meaning to each other.
And those Discourses do not follow some sort of strict Superior logic, they vary based on culture and also based on time. Different factors create different reactions and a society adapts to those changes of costums. One just needs to be aware how deep that goes, even things like for example punctuality, some cultures pay more attention to it than others. But that is also based on a combination of many small factors and one of them is a different individual/ cultural understanding of time that varies. That also leads to body perception...there were times in which being overweight was considered to be a sign of Beauty, tattoos and their social acceptance also vary. Based on how the outside demands are put on us by society we have a different perception of everything. And institutions for example create the effect of believing that the way we think is objective, that there is some sort of thought line that exists outside of subjective perception.

So, now we come to Judith Butler...she is aware of all those and a lot more. She thinks based that, that when we think about gender (which is NOT the same as sex) we talk as if the body was like a chair in which whether it rains or snows the object does not get affected...But that is not true. Because there is not such thing as a human form before the formation of body, like, we cant freeze our brains. Because one essential side of human beings is their capacity to learn, to create an Habitus and we are what we learned to think.
Based on that gender is a type of Habitus and we perform it daily and through that we create our identity through differentiating ourselves from each other by trying to create stereotypes or social rules that fit within that whole Discourse complex in which we live in.

Now, gender is Performance and a social construct...again, we are not talking about sex here, and as we live within a system in which we cant fully escape it one might say that, sex is gender because as we are all anyway formed and created around it since we are born, it might be artificial but its still valid because its part of what we are or turned our minds into.
And yes, that is true to some extent but our identity is based on many things more than that...the way of being "male/female" in one culture differs to the way of being "male/female" in another culture, your age also plays a factor, your grandmother has a different concept of "woman/man" than you do. Whether you are born as rich or poor, your skin colour also marks somehow how you are perceived by society and therefore how you perceive yourself, it marks your life and your identity.
A person from the opposite sex than you who was born in the same social environment as you, who looks similar to you, same religion, Ideology and so on is more similar to you, your way of talking and everything than someone from your same sex who was born in another position of a social structure.
So, we are born in a body and then turned into what we are through many many factors and sex is only one of them, a minimal fragment in a combination of thousands of details that we are constituted of.

But for some reason we keep talking and thinking as if that one difference defines everything we are. We have incorporated in our mind that there are two type of subjects, male and female, and that everything else are atributes, like race, social class, hobbies, nationality and so on.
Butler tries to bring up the concept about that we should perceive sex as an atribute as well, That there is only one human subject with many different atributes and not some sort of core that depends on your sex.
Based on that we also wouldnt try to discriminate people for not fitting into their "gender" standard for example.
More liberty to try to understand ourselves as complex creatures and not a mix of boxes.

I am just a cultural anthropology student and we didnt study this subject thaaat well either so I am sorry if I mixed up some of the details around the terms or intentions of the respective philosophers.

[CatharticCreation]

as a lifelong masculine woman that regularly dances between dressing feminine and masculine (like most women), i seriously do not believe this. even in my most masculine energy, i have always felt like a woman. it wasn’t learned, it was innate. and if it was learned, that’s like saying cats only know how to be cats because they take example from other cats. have them be raised by another animal and they’d behave like that animal. okay, true….they’re still a cat though, with mostly catlike characteristics! does this make sense?

[caramelunicorn]

Thing with bullying is not that they keep you in your gendered place. They make you feel like you'll never fit in with that ideal. Pretty messed up

[Scott-twhm]

Can behaviour also create a person's ethnicity? Their date of birth? Their species? Their nationality? Why not?

[jamiedorsey]

I was a little surprised by the video. I'd heard Judith Butler's name in relation to current gender thinking. But here she actually moves in a different direction and says gender is socially created and reinforced rather than being something internal that one inherently understands.

[GoPats]

Im still confused about the difference between gender being "performed" versus gender being "performative"

[themechanism]

One thing I've acquired over time from listening to most intellectual speakers or philosophers is that it is crucial that you don't sprint to your conclusion, as you may be surprised at what you learn, even if you think you have all the facts. I neither agree or disagree, but interesting to hear.

[georgenagy]

For a while I felt like I was a man trapped inside a woman's body ....and then I was born

[yarpenzigrin]

This is pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual babbling that's completely detached from reality.

[jonno.alexander]

This poor woman's legitimate questions have been so distorted by the very people who support it (intersecrionalists and their kin). The whole point of questioning gender expression was simply to avoid, as she stated, the "policing" of variance in expression, like manliness/femininity in one culture is different from another, and the social repercussions in straying from those gendered expressions should not be punished or socially persecuted and ostracized. A noble critique in my view.

The IRONY is now is its modern, liberal educated supporters are now the police of anyone who resides on the ends of the spectrum: if you are too feminine, you are oppressed by the patriarchy, conversely, if you are too gendered in masculinity and Heaven-forbid, heterosexual, you ARE the patriarchy (and deserve the historical comeuppance due!!)

And now supporters of the theory have gona as far as publicly shaming and bullying anyone outside of the minority expressions, poetically eating themselves from within. Shame that the pushback end result might be the discarding of gender performativity theory altogether.

It was supposed to offer the student a mental exercise in creating awareness in variance of expression, not make them the judge and jury of it! It was a noble step in accepting variety in expression (in this case the expression of one's gender based on their sex) and the freedom one has of it, but it may have overstepped now...

[sarahmouncher]

Isn't she just doing the same thing as the bully though? Just in a progressive sounding way.
The bully says: "You're a girl, so act in a girly way"
Butler says: "You're acting in a girly way, so you must be a girl"
Shouldn't we stop putting people into boxes based on their behaviour or their gender expression? You can be a woman, and act as masculine or as feminine as you want. And same for men and non-binary people.
In my view, your gender is an inner sense. I know that makes it hard to define and conceptualise, but not everything needs a concrete definition. The colour red, for instance. You could say something about light waves, perhaps. But you couldn't make a blind person truly understand what it means for something to be red. I think the same applies to gender. You can't explain what it is to be a woman, but if you are a woman then you 'just know' that you are one.

[FreeTicketsX]

She comes across like she is smart, but doesn’t get the simplest things it’s crazy

[relaxingsounds]

The idea that gender is a socio-linguistic construct comes from humanities departments. The assertion that nornative gender behaviors are deeply rooted in biological sex comes from science departments.

As a humanities major, I'll go with the science departments.

[celestialnubian]

Many problems in the world started with this "woman" and her ridiculous assertions.

[Birthdaycakesmom]

I’ve also thought that gender was a kind of re-enactment, where we pick up images and ideas of gender and we use those to inform our own gender manifestations. This means we take what we’ve witnessed and apply it to ourselves to provide or potentiate our gender.

[chaun]

Judith Butler in line with Big Think values:
“There are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the consciousness of social shame that they produce.”
Judith Butler

[Ian-kyhf]

To say a women is sex biased stereotypes and sex roles instead of an adult human female is very misogynistic. Especially when you claim a man can be a woman if you follows the stereotypes and roles associated with women.