Gender Performativity

About the Topic

A persistent question in discussions of gender and equality is whether gender is as fixed and natural as we tend to assume.

Beginning with Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity, I will consider how gender is repeatedly produced through social norms, culture, power, and discourse, and how this challenges the gender binary and heterosexual norms. Drawing also on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality, I will discuss experiences obscured when overlapping social conditions are considered separately.

The talk focuses on three areas:

· Gender behind feminism: beginning with Beauvoir and Wittig, what is gender performativity, and can it move beyond a Western framework to support more general claims?

· Intersectionality and voices at the margins: attending to more of the conditions that shape experience can question theoretical dominance and extend the explanatory power of gender performativity.

· Possibilities beyond the binary: how might including transgender lives and rights change our understanding of a more inclusive future?

These questions concern lived circumstances as well as philosophy and theory.
We therefore need to keep asking:

Can gender equality move beyond a binary framework? Would a society beyond the gender binary be utopian, or a possible future?

The views expressed are the speaker’s own.