Judith Butler and Identity Performance

Introduction

Judith Butler is one of the most influential — and sometimes most misunderstood — theorists on the AQA A-Level Media Studies specification. Their book Gender Trouble (1990) transformed how feminists and media scholars think about gender, identity, and representation. For this lesson we examine Butler's core concept of performativity, its distinction from "performance", its implications for gender representation in the media, and its application to contemporary phenomena including social media self-presentation.

Important attribution note: Butler's theory is performativity, not the male gaze. The male gaze is Laura Mulvey (Lesson 3). Butler focuses on how gender is produced through repeated acts, not primarily on how it is looked at in cinema. Mixing these theorists is one of the most common errors in AQA exam responses.

Who Is Judith Butler?

Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Their key works include:

• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
• Bodies That Matter (1993)
• Undoing Gender (2004)

Butler's work draws on poststructuralist philosophy (Foucault, Derrida), psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. Their arguments have been widely influential in feminism, queer theory, and Media Studies.

The Central Claim: Gender Is Performative

Butler's foundational argument is that gender is performative — that is, it is produced and sustained through repeated stylised acts rather than expressing a pre-existing inner essence.

This is not the same as saying gender is "just a performance" you can put on and take off at will. Butler carefully distinguishes:

Performance	Performativity
A conscious act by an existing agent	The very production of the agent through repeated acts
Could be stopped	Is the ongoing condition of gendered existence
Presupposes a real self underneath	There is no pre-social gendered self underneath

For Butler, there is no "girl" or "boy" prior to the acts that constitute girlhood or boyhood. Gender is an ongoing doing, not a being. We become gendered through countless repeated acts: how we walk, speak, dress, sit, laugh, take up space, address others.

Repetition and Citation

Crucial to Butler's account is citation: gendered acts work by citing or repeating previous acts. A woman who crosses her legs while sitting is citing a cultural script of "how women sit"; her act gains intelligibility by being a repetition.

Because gender is cited, it is:

• Historically contingent — the scripts change over time
• Culturally variable — different cultures cite different scripts
• Open to resignification — repetition can be subverted

flowchart LR
    A[Cultural Scripts] --> B[Repeated Acts]
    B --> C[Appearance of Stable Gender]
    C --> D[Reinforces Scripts]
    D --> A

The Heterosexual Matrix

Butler coined the term "heterosexual matrix" to describe the cultural framework within which bodies, genders, and desires are made coherent. In Western societies, the heterosexual matrix links:

• A female body
• To "feminine" gender expression
• To desire for men

And correspondingly for men. This matrix is not natural but deeply institutionalised — through law, family, religion, and media representation.

Media texts often reproduce the heterosexual matrix by presenting its linkages as natural and desirable:

• Women performing femininity to attract men
• Men performing masculinity to pursue women
• Same-sex desire as deviation, exception, or comic relief

Representations that disrupt these linkages — gender-non-conforming characters, queer narratives, trans visibility — can denaturalise the matrix.

Drag and Subversion

Butler's famous discussion of drag in Gender Trouble illustrates performativity in action. Drag, Butler argues, does not imitate a "real" gender; it reveals that all gender is imitative — a repetition of cultural scripts without an original.

This is often misread. Butler is not saying drag is more authentic than other genders, nor that all gender is drag. The point is that drag makes the constructedness of gender visible, exposing that the "originals" (masculinity, femininity) are themselves citations.

Drag and other subversive performances can:

• Denaturalise gender norms
• Reveal the labour involved in all gendered performance
• Open space for new identities

Identity Categories: Both Necessary and Problematic

Butler's position on identity categories ("women", "men", "gay", "straight") is nuanced:

• Identity categories are politically necessary — we cannot mobilise against sexism without naming "women".
• Identity categories are exclusionary — "women" has often meant white, cis, middle-class women, excluding others.
• The goal is to use categories strategically while remaining alert to their exclusions.

This insight has been important for intersectional feminist media analysis.

Media Examples of Performativity

Butler's framework applies widely to media texts:

Media Example	Butlerian Reading
Disney princesses	Hyper-feminine acts that construct girl identity
Action heroes	Repeated violence-as-masculinity citations
Rom-coms	Heterosexual matrix enforced through narrative
Pose (FX)	Drag/ballroom culture foregrounding performativity
Fleabag	Fourth-wall breaks expose the performance of femininity
Social media selfies	Daily citation of gendered appearance norms