This time I am going to take Linden's advice, and use direct quotes from Butler's work, and see whether I can use them in my essay, correctly attributed as quotes.
P402/3 Simone de Beauvoir claims "one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman", through a stylised repetition of acts. Gender is instituted through the stylisation of the body, … and must be understood as the mundane way … bodily gestures, movements and enactments … constitute the … abiding gendered self. The appearance of substance is … a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors … come to believe and to perform. Gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts …, a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of style.
Such acts constitute the identity of the actor, as a compelling illusion, an act of belief. Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status.
P403/4 Embodied existence assumes meanings in the context of lived experience. The existence ... of the material dimensions of the body are not denied but reconvened as distinct from … cultural meanings. The body is … a continual and incessant materialisation of possibilities. Gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. … Those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. Gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender and without those acts there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tact collective agreement to perform and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fiction is obscured by the credibility of its own production.
P405 Phenomenology shares with feminist analysis a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience. Feminist theory has sought to understand how systemic, pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts, and how the analysis of ostensibly personal situations is clarified through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context. Feminism delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me.
P406 Latent in the personal is political formulation of feminist theory, a supposition that the life-world of gender relations is constituted … through the … acts of individuals. … The body becomes its gender through a series of acts which … are consolidated through time. The gendered body is the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined … fact. This sedimentation … has produced a set of corporeal styles which, … appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist and a binary relation to one another.
P409 There are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender. … One does it in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions. Gender is an act which has been rehearsed (by society). The complex components that go into an at must be distinguished in order to understand the kind of acting , which acting one's gender invariably is. ... The repeated performance is a re-enactment … of a set of meanings already socially established … the mundane and ritualised form of their legitimation. This "action is immediately public as well. … The performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. The gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretationswithin the confines of already existing directives.
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