ABSTRACT

Nobody is born masculine or feminine; we all learn our gender roles as children and they are reinforced by society over time. Men do not have to be masculine nor women feminine; not because sex is biological and gender cultural but because both are constructed and ‘the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.’ This invites the question: ‘If gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently . . . ?’ (Butler 2006: 10). Judith Butler’s influential conception of gender as performative, as a set of repetitive acts that we all perform on a daily basis was, and still is, radical because this performance is so well integrated into our lives; in my opinion, this makes its exposition even more important. Gender performativity is best exposed by the people who ‘fail to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility’ (Butler 2006: 24), such as cross-dressers or drag artists; drag is ‘not an aberration from the norm; it shows us how the norm actually functions, how the norm is instituted through our bodies’ (Butler 2004c: 344).1