Gender
I have thought about gender a lot but haven't read any books or anything. I keep seeing people talk about "gender as performance" and I really don't get what it means. Intuitively I'd think it means that gender is just like a role in a play that you perform, so you can "do" gender by doing certain behaviours.
However that definition seems wrong. I am not "performing" my gender in any way, I am not performing any gender. I'm just doing what I like doing, and those things are unrelated to my gender. If that's what it meant, I would have to identify as some other gender or change my behaviour. I don't want to do either of those things.
So yeah lol I think I just don't really get what that means and I get really confused every time people talk about it.
Gender
@sangv oh yeah, another thing is that might be a bit weird for nonbinary people is that there's no way to "perform" a gender necessarily if it is very vague or doesn't have any gender roles assigned to it by society.
Gender
@Some_Person @sangv The most famous book exploring this this premise is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. It's from 1990 so it might not hold up that well today.
I wouldn't say it really proposes "gender as performance" but rather something like "gender is often performed"
Gender
Have a read of this summary and let me know if there's any bits you might want explained in a different way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Trouble
TLDR: Gender is ours to play with
Gender
@kawaiipunk @sangv thank you for the link :) Hopefully it helps me understand it, the way I've heard it be explained seemed to imply that gender *is* performance so it was very confusing!
Gender
@Some_Person @sangv yeh that is clearly reductive nonsense.
I wonder if anyone has made a simple intro on queer theory. I think maybe Philosophy Tube did or something.
Gender
@kawaiipunk In fact, here's a video of Judith Butler explaining the difference between what her academic field means by performance and performativity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc
@Some_Person She's explaining the difference because a ton of people outside of her academic field use those terms differently. In my experience outside of academia people generally just equate the two and teach that meaning to other people, even though it's not the original context.
/ @sangv
Sunbeam City is a Libertarian Socialist solarpunk instance. It is ran democratically by a cooperative of like-minded individuals.
Gender
@Some_Person there's something else about the "gender as a performance" thing that really bothers me but I'm unsure of how to put it into words
I do know that it's at least partially because the vast majority of the people I see bringing it up are binary trans people, though