9/3/2023 0 Comments Judith butler birthday![]() ![]() I think it matters a great deal how we understand that “centrality”. As someone who is sceptical of stable identity categories, what do you make of that? Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.Īrguments around identity have become central to much of our politics these days. ![]() Perhaps we should think of gender as something that is imposed at birth, through sex assignment and all the cultural assumptions that usually go along with that. The powers that do that are part of an apparatus of gender that assigns and reassigns norms to bodies, organises them socially, but also animates them in directions contrary to those norms. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us. Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. But your meaning here seems pretty different? ![]() Today’s queers often talk about gender being ‘assigned at birth’. But that social reality can, and does, change. When we are “girled”, we are entered into a realm of girldom that has been built up over a long time – a series of conventions, sometimes conflicting, that establish girlness within society. Gender then becomes a negotiation, a struggle, a way of dealing with historical constraints and making new realities. It seemed to me that none of us totally escape cultural norms.Īt the same time, none of us are totally determined by cultural norms. I suggested more than 30 years ago that people are, consciously or not, citing conventions of gender when they claim to be expressing their own interior reality or even when they say they are creating themselves anew. Their act becomes a citation – they repeat an established protocol. But do we say that the judge is all-powerful? Or is the judge citing a set of conventions, following a set of procedures? If it is the latter, then the judge is invoking a power that does not belong to them as a person, but as a designated authority. When a judge declares a sentence, for instance, they produce a new reality, and they usually have the authority to make that happen. “Performative” speech acts are the kind that make something happen or seek to create a new reality. This remains a controversial view of how gender works, so what did you have in mind?Īt the time I was interested in a set of debates in the academy about speech acts. Let’s talk about Gender Trouble’s central idea of ‘performativity’. And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of “men”. So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women. ![]()
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