Judith Butler And Gender Analysis

Throughout the course of history, society uses gender as an organizational tool to classify humans into two basic categories: male and female. This creates a gender binary with socially constructed norms that design a rigid guide as to how each gender must act and perform in their daily lives. Gender is a social construct and not inherent in our genes. As gender theorist Judith Butler claims, “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance.” In other words, society is performing a role of gender every day that gives off an impression of male or female through our own repetitive performance of gender. Gender performance roles create and uphold societal norms, discourse, and the foundation upon which children are being raised in the patriarchy.

In Butler’s claim, gender

The language spoken today enhance the rigid regulatory frame in which gender is displayed. In culture “language maintains sexism and racism, for instance, by shaping our understandings and limiting options for self-definition” (Shaw and Lee, 61). Words influence how we interpret and perceive gender because sexist diction are the words learned to describe what we see and feel. For example, there are many negative words in language to describe women in a position of power, but there are only words of positive connotations to describe men in authoritative positions. The discourse and language picked by institutional powers are what keeps civilization in our place. Institutions are organizations that establish patterns of behavior, function through social norms, and assign women and men to gendered roles in the workplace (Shaw and Lee, 63). All institutions function on the basis that they were built: separation and sexism of