Judith Butler, (born February 24, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) is anAmerican academic whose theories of the performative nature of gender and sex were influential with French philosophy, cultural theory, queer theory, and some schools of philosophical feminism from the late 20th century.
In her books, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Butler expressed the familiar cultural-theoretic presumption that gender is socially constructed (the result of socialization, broadly conceived) rather than innate and that conventional notions of gender and sexuality serve to preserve the traditional domination of women by men and to justify the oppression of homosexuals and transgender persons.
One of her revolutions was to show that gender is constituted by behaviour such as action and speech in which gendered traits and dispositions are exhibited or acted out. gender is not an underlying essence or nature of which gendered behaviour is the product, it is a series of acts whose constant repetition creates the illusion that an underlying nature exists.
"Gender is not biological, but rather is something assumed and performed, as well as cast upon bodies by norms and conventions that are larger than any given individual. Our notions of what a human being is, problematically depend on there being two coherent genders. And if someone doesn’t comply with either the masculine norm or the feminine norm, their very humanness is called into question." (Butler, 2003)
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