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When you think about academic theories that have made their way into popular culture, Judith Butler’s name is very likely to come up. Butler is one of the most recognized scholars in the fields of gender and queer theory, and their 1990 book Gender Trouble has been extremely influential. In the book, they propose the notion of gender performativity, an idea cited far and wide both within academia and throughout popular culture. If you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, there’s a very good chance you saw Judith Butler quotes floating around from time to time.

Butler’s ideas are not the first scholarly theories to have achieved popularity on social media or to have become part of the popular lexicon. I’ve previously written about both compulsory heterosexuality and the female gaze, two popular theories that circulate frequently online (though are at times misrepresented). It is especially interesting that Butler’s writing has become so popular because they are often thought of as a scholar whose work is prohibitively dense or esoteric. In fact, Butler was actually awarded a prize (if you can call it that) in 1999 for producing inordinately “bad” writing. 

As a former Gender Studies major and, consequently, something of a Butler devotee, I am compelled both to defend the quality of Butler’s writing and to suggest some strategies we might take to better understand their work. Certainly, Butler’s writing can’t be that incomprehensible if they’re frequently quoted out-of-context on social media, right?

Indeed, though Butler’s ideas about gender have now trickled down into mainstream discourse, it’s important to note that this sort of broad familiarity with such concepts wasn’t always the case. While Butler was far from the first scholar to discuss gender or sex, they were one of the first people to discuss gender using these terms. Consequently, it tracks that Butler’s language might seem convoluted at times, considering they were quite literally inventing the language with which we discuss gender today. The reason a 17-year-old can discuss gender performativity on Tik Tok with ease and confidence is that Butler endeavored to untangle such a knotty subject over three decades ago.

Now that I’ve shaken off that sense of defensiveness, let’s get into the weighty business of gender performativity. There are two things I want to do here. First, briefly go over some of Butler’s reference points, and second, break down an especially meaty sentence of Butler’s that will tell us everything we need to know about gender.

Gender performativity is rightly described as Butler’s original idea, but nothing in academia (or in any creative realm) is ever totally original. The concept of performativity that Butler cites comes from language philosopher John L. Austin, who is best known for developing the theory of performative speech. To simplify, performative speech refers to the ability of language to make something happen in an active, material sense. Think, for example, of a minister marrying a pair of spouses (“I now pronounce you husband and wife”), an umpire calling a strike, or a judge proclaiming a verdict. These speech acts make something very “real” occur simply by virtue of the fact that we have given these individuals and their language performative power.

In regards to gender performativity, Butler suggests that an individual performing gender appears to “make it so” much like these speech acts. But rather than these performative utterances or acts reflecting the reality of gender, they are actually the actions that constitute it. Butler describes gender as performative not because it’s something that occurs on stage (though it certainly can), but because gendered performance constructs reality in the same way that performative speech does. Indeed, the fact that the performance of gender tends to occur “off-stage,” as it were, further suggests that it is not a performance at all and instead a natural phenomenon. This, Butler suggests, is all part of the illusion. This performativity (which again, is distinct from a theatrical performance), remains hidden.

The second reference we should discuss is one anyone with even a passing familiarity with feminist theory will probably recognize: the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, first published in French in 1949 and translated into English in 1953, is known as a groundbreaking feminist text and is often said to have directly inspired second-wave feminism. The most famous quote from the book, which Butler reproduces in Gender Trouble, is “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Beauvoir is primarily concerned with what a woman really is, both ontologically and biologically speaking.

Butler’s work diverges significantly from Beauvoir's. While Beauvoir aims to parse out the meaning of woman, Butler explores the artificial construction of gender itself. This “becoming” that Beauvoir speaks of is the much-discussed act that Butler hones in on, as Butler suggests that gender identity is not something you are but instead something you perform. That performance actually constitutes the being (or the becoming) of an individual, rather than the other way around. To put it even more existentially, Butler begins the book with another famous quote, Julie Kristeva’s proclamation that “Strictly speaking, 'women' cannot be said to exist.”

If this is all becoming a bit too abstract to process, that’s understandable. I want to return to Butler’s text and give you an example of how I first learned how to interpret their linguistic density. There is a single sentence in Gender Trouble that reveals everything you need to know about gender performativity. The sentence is as follows:

“In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meaning subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction.”

Whew! It’s a complex sentence, but that’s because it contains within it the key of the entire book. So I’m going to break it down for you, clause by clause, just like my beloved Gender Studies professor taught me to do as an undergraduate. Let’s start with the first clause: “In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause…” To put it simply, gender is not inherent in a person. It is not something that you are born with that then determines your actions and behaviors. While identity is often understood as something that defines how you act, Butler argues that behaviors and actions are actually the thing that form identity in the first place. It’s sort of a chicken-or-the-egg situation.

Let’s move on to the second clause: “gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meaning subject to a set of imitative practices…” We’ve established that gender is not inherent. Instead, Butler proposes, a person’s individual gender identity is composed of various messages they have received and interpreted over the course of their lives. On the macro level – society, culture – to the micro level – family, friends. Rather than coming from the inside out, gender moves from the outside in, ie. it is taken in and internalized among subjects. Gender becomes metabolized and embodied not because of a biological imperative, but literally through practice.

The third clause is the most important. These practices “refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanisms of that construction.” The first word we need to unpack is “laterally.” What Butler notes here is the idea that there is not a single origin of the practices and beliefs we call gender. There is no primary “received meaning” that constitutes gendered performance. Instead, all of these messages are in conversation with one another in a horizontal, rather than a vertical, dialogue. Think of it like the citations in an academic paper, except in this case, there is no ‘original’ citation. These citations (messages, cultural norms), produce the “text” of gender that is then enacted, embodied, and as Butler puts it, performed by individuals.

The second half of this clause suggests that what these citations do is make it seem like gender does have a precise origin. The repeated enactment of these norms by individuals produces the appearance of gender as an inherent state. These gendered references have become so entrenched in society that they seem innate within us, rather than a cultural force we have all metabolized in various ways.

If that all seems terribly dark, Butler also sees ways to disrupt this system by highlighting this performativity. They discuss the possibility of “parody[ing] the mechanisms of that construction,” by which they mean artistic feats like drag performance. Butler has long upheld drag as an extremely powerful form of art that illustrates the exact cultural systems they have described. By performing hyperbolic iterations of gender on stage, drag queens and kings point to the fact that all forms of gender are defined by performativity. Watching a drag performance illuminates the performative nature of gender just as clearly as reading a Judith Butler essay does.

Certainly, Butler was not the first person to think about gender this way – entertainers were performing drag in America and Europe long before Butler’s time –  but their ideas about gender performativity have expanded outside of academia and made a huge impact on popular culture writ large. I find it especially interesting that Butler’s ideas have become so popular while their writing is still sometimes seen as impenetrable. To be fair, not everyone has the time to sit with a text for as long as it might take to fully delve into a book like Gender Trouble. But I hope what I’ve illustrated here is that nothing is truly impenetrable if you break it down. Moreover, it’s useful to return to the origins of popular (and sometimes misunderstood) ideas, especially since our collective critical thinking skills seem to be more lacking than ever. It feels good to use those big brains of ours, doesn’t it?