Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

Feminism is a blanket term for movements (intellectual, political, and social) that seek to attain equal rights and respect for women. It is also the term used to refer to the historic and continuing movement to eradicate institutional, social, and cultural oppression of women. In Butler’s article, both feminist activism and feminist theory play distinct roles. Feminist activism is the political effort to sway minds, votes, and policies toward creating a more equal society, while feminist theory is the philosophical effort to understand the causes and components of women’s oppression and to conceptualize what a world might look like without it.

Gender refers to the set of psycho-social and cultural categories that distinguish between men and women. Although sex and gender are often conflated in casual speech, in scientific and theoretical work gender is distinct from biological sex. Biologically, humans fall into the categories of male, female, and intersex (people born with a combination of male and biological traits). Culturally, people are often divided into the categories of men and women, with each label carrying a set of gender expectations—regarding speech, preferences, clothing style, behavior, and so on. The distinction between sex and gender is essential to understanding Butler’s theory of gender performance. While sex is given by nature, gender is created (in part) by and through cultural practices of performance.

A performative act is a social, ritual, or linguistic behavior that applies a constitutive force to our experience of reality. In the philosophy of language, utterances can be descriptive, where the words endeavor to fit the world, or performative, where the world alters to fit the words. Making promises, giving orders, taking bets and other forms of performative speech create a new phenomenon (the promise, the order, the bet) that did not exist before the utterance. In anthropology and performance studies, social rituals are also considered performative acts—by performing the ritual the participants create and reinforce a social world, its institutions, and its interpretations.