Judith Butler (1956-  ) has written extensively on sex and gender, for example, in her book Bodies that Matter (1993).

JUDITH BUTLER: On Gender and Sex

JUDITH BUTLER questions the belief that certain male/female behaviours are natural, illustrating the ways that our learned performance of gendered behaviour (what we commonly associate with femininity and masculinity) is an act of sorts, a performance, one that is imposed upon us by normative heterosexuality.

Butler thus offers what she herself calls “a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts” (“Performative” 270). In other words, Butler questions the extent to which we can assume that a given individual can be said to constitute him- or herself; she wonders to what extent our acts are determined for us, rather, by our place within language and convention.

She follows postmodernist and poststructuralist practice in using the term “subject” (rather than “individual” or “person”) in order to underline the linguistic nature of our position within what Jacques Lacan terms the symbolic order, the system of signs and conventions that determines our perception of what we see as reality. Unlike theatrical acting, Butler argues that we cannot even assume a stable view of self that goes about performing various gender roles; rather, it is the very act of performing gender that constitutes who we are (see the next module on performativity).