ABSTRACT
Judith Butler’s writing on performativity and undoing is developed across a number of her ‘core’ texts, in particular, Gender Trouble and its anniversary edition. To put it simply, ‘gender performativity’ describes Butler’s view that ‘gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body’. For Butler, gender performativity and its materialization in the form of ‘bodies that matter’ are driven largely by the desire for recognition of ourselves as viable, intelligible subjects. The chapter examines Butler’s performative ontology of gender, initially through a discussion of her 1988 paper ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’. It focuses on her most widely cited book Gender Trouble, arguably Butler’s most ground-breaking and influential work to date, albeit one that, for a range of reasons, might be considered to be outdated. Research on the gendered norms associated with other professions or workplace settings and sectors further illustrates how particular subjectivities are brought into being through performative citations.
