Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble has had a dramatic impact on the way that literary critics approach gender in media, but how did Butler reach her conclusions? Within Gender Trouble she mentions that gender as we understand it today is the result of centuries, if not millennia, of repetition. This repetition is what ultimately created gender roles as we see them now.
As Butler stated, the repetition of gender performances goes way back, so much so that it is almost inextricably ingrained in our societies, to the point where some believe beauty standards to be a biological, evolutionary response. In the years following the popularization of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and theory of natural selection, the consensus among the people of Western Europe was that “among humans, female beauty was a powerful evolutionary agent” and associated female attractiveness with other biological markers, such as fertility (Hamlin 964-965). By equating female beauty with evolutionary success without accounting much for the fact that attraction is subjective, Western Europe was able to not only cement their beauty standards into their own society, but force it onto other societies as well.
The belief that there is a biological basis for gender performance doesn’t stop there. Even today we expect certain people to act a certain way based on their biological sex and/or identified gender. This enforcement of gender roles often starts before a person is even born. Modern society places such great emphasis on biological sex and the assumed behavior that will come with it. This is believed to be so essential that the sex is the “central means of humanizing the fetus” (Larkin 277), as if this is the exact point where the fetus becomes the child. Following the revelation that a fetus falls into either the ‘male’ or ‘female’ biological categories, gender performance is almost always immediately enacted upon them in the form of gender reveal parties, buying blue or pink clothing, or picking a gendered name.
When the repetition of gender performance gained a presumed biological foothold, it was able to reassert itself. In doing so, it regained a sense of authority that allowed people to continue repeating the same gender roles they’d been repeating for thousands of years before that. This belief that sex is essential to gender and that the performance of that sex/gender must logically (even ‘scientifically’, depending on how one interprets the theory of natural selection) follow it has led to the modern understanding of gender that Judith Butler discusses in Gender Trouble.
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Works Cited
Hamlin, Kimberly A. “The ‘Case of a Bearded Woman’: Hypertrichosis and the Construction of Gender in the Age of Darwin.” American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 4, Dec. 2011, pp. 955–81, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2011.0051.
Larkin, Lesley. “Authentic Mothers, Authentic Daughters and Sons: Ultrasound Imaging and the Construction of Fetal Sex and Gender.” Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2006, pp. 273–91, https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-s036-03-03.
