Judith Butler,
“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” excerpts from PSR
"social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign." p.187
"gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylised repetition of acts." p.187
"gender is instituted through the stylisation of the body and hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kind constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self." p.187
"the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style." p.188
"what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status." p.188
"the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body are not denied, but reconceived as distinct from the process by which the body comes to bear cultural meanings." p.188
"the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materialising of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one' embodied predecessors and successors as well." p.189
"As an intentionally organised materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention." p.189
"to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of "woman," to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialise oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project." p.189
"because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts there would be no gender at all." p.190
"Feminist theory has sought to understand the way in which systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices" p.190
"one way in which this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with "natural" appearances and "natural" heterosexual dispositions." p.192
"gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualised and reproduced as reality once again." p.193
"The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies." p.193
"social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign." p.187
"gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylised repetition of acts." p.187
"gender is instituted through the stylisation of the body and hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kind constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self." p.187
"the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style." p.188
"what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status." p.188
"the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body are not denied, but reconceived as distinct from the process by which the body comes to bear cultural meanings." p.188
"the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materialising of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one' embodied predecessors and successors as well." p.189
"As an intentionally organised materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention." p.189
"to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of "woman," to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialise oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project." p.189
"because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts there would be no gender at all." p.190
"Feminist theory has sought to understand the way in which systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices" p.190
"one way in which this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with "natural" appearances and "natural" heterosexual dispositions." p.192
"gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualised and reproduced as reality once again." p.193
"The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies." p.193
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