Gender Performativity

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Gender Performativity is a term created by post- structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person's gender act. This effect produces what we can consider to be 'true gender', a narrative that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions - and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them." The performative acts which Butler is discussing she names to be performative and within the larger social, unseen world, they exist within performativity.