Undoing Gender

Norms are difficult to locate and define in Butler’s work as they use the term in multiple contexts. Norms are commonly understood as rules of social etiquette or behavior, but they take on a broader and more abstract meaning when applied to gender and sexuality. Butler often uses the terms “legibility” or “intelligibility” to discuss norms, as they are the formative basis on which any discourse can occur. For example, terms like “masculine,” “feminine,” “man,” and “woman” all rely on binary norms of gender and sex. Butler acknowledges the difficulty of entering a discussion in which one tries to discuss a gender performance other than “masculine” or “feminine,” resulting in the need to discuss “combinations” of the two. This semantic reliance on norms highlights the challenges inherent in analyzing normalization, which is the process by which something is either enforced as a norm or becomes introduced as a norm.

The Oedipal conflict is an idea proposed by Sigmund Freud based on Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE), in which Oedipus murders his father and marries his mother. Freud proposed that the Oedipal conflict—the desire to supplant the father and have sex with the mother—is formative in children’s development, allowing them to see themselves in the role of one parent while seeking a replacement for the other. This dynamic is specific to boys, while girls are assumed to undergo the same process in wanting to become their mothers and sleep with their fathers. Butler questions the Oedipal conflict throughout the collection, noting how it relies on the assumption of sexual difference, binary/complementary gender, and incest to achieve an aim that is rarely met. The Oedipal conflict is a major source of discourse in psychoanalysis, and it has been criticized through the lenses of queer, gender, and feminist theory, largely in the rigid way it proposes childhood development.

Performativity is often viewed in a derogatory light, meaning “not real” or “pretend.” However, in gender and sexuality, performativity is a means by which ideas and patterns of behavior are repeated and recreated by individual actors. For example, a common performance of masculinity is restraining one’s emotions. When a man restrains his emotions, he is performing masculinity, but this performance is itself a repetition of the masculinity he has seen and internalized from social norms. As such, the norm is not the repetition or the internalization, but a broader regulation that maintains and enforces the need for the performance. Performativity is the real expression of an individual’s identity, and it is the primary way for theorists to identify how norms operate across a society.