?> This means that because the performance of the gender role is repeated it becomes a recognizable behaviour of that particular gender as part of a wider societal discourse. Gender is determined biologically and not an assigned role of identity and sexuality is normative and natural if it fits into the framework of heterosexuality.Judith Butler presents her fundamental theories of gender as performative in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, with the arguments that drag is performative and in its destabilization of the performative iterations of gender, drag performances can be construed as a political escape from the structures of gender binary oppositions. This gender performance means that people become tied in to a static or ‘normalized’ gender role which is culturally and socially defined as being a ‘normal ‘male or female. Paul Michel is described as ‘beautiful’ in his younger days and as a homosexual man he is reluctant to take on the mantle of the ‘establishment of the gay movement’ and “he cherished the role of the sexual outlaw, monster, pervert” (Duncker 1996 p28). The act of gay liberation may be signified in the ‘coming out of the closet’, but questions arise in that ‘coming out’ means that you’re ‘in’ at some point, and further more what are you coming out of, and what are you going into? Jones believes the performative power to act out gender is extremely useful as a framework, offering new ways to consider images as enactments with embodied subjects rather than inanimate objects for men's viewing pleasure.Butler suggests that "the critical promise of drag does not have to do with the proliferation of genders…but rather with the exposure of the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals", though such remarks fail to indicate how the inadequacies of heterosexual regimes might be explicitly exposed. Butler insists that :“The reading of ‘performativity’ as wilful and arbitrary choice misses the point that the historicity of discourse and, in particular, the historicity of norms (the ‘chains’ of iteration invoked and dissimulated in the imperative utterance) constitute the power of discourse to enact what it names” (Butler 1990 187)Gender performance is learned both consciously and ingrained unconsciously on the psyche of the individual, who is unaware that they are performing a gender role, but accept the gender identity assigned to them by their own behaviour or performance and which is again interpreted and repeated within the discourse of gender relations in a cultural and social context. This effect produces what we can consider to be 'true gender', a narrative that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them." Butler’s key ideas are therefore based on the notion that gender is not a simplified ‘role’ but a deep seated psyche playing out of identity and behaviour, there is also not casual link between sex, gender and sexuality. Initially as in Winterson’s novel we are unsure of the gender of the narrator, as he/she is only signified as ‘the narrator’ or the ‘reader’ throughout the novel. Gender identity is therefore constructed as a fluid performance and not an essential essence of being. The second wave of feminism and the precursor for modern feminist literary theory occurred between the late 1960s and 1980s and asserted that gender roles and questions of sexuality needed to be examined in relation to both the personal and political spheres. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy? Here Butler argues that there is an iterability and repetition involved in gender performativity, which results in immense difficulty in trying to escape the constructions of naturalized restrictions of sex and gender through making conscious daily performative choices.The question of gender performance is related to ideas of gender identity in society, whereby certain codes of behaviour are assigned according to gender.
?> This means that because the performance of the gender role is repeated it becomes a recognizable behaviour of that particular gender as part of a wider societal discourse. Gender is determined biologically and not an assigned role of identity and sexuality is normative and natural if it fits into the framework of heterosexuality.Judith Butler presents her fundamental theories of gender as performative in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, with the arguments that drag is performative and in its destabilization of the performative iterations of gender, drag performances can be construed as a political escape from the structures of gender binary oppositions. This gender performance means that people become tied in to a static or ‘normalized’ gender role which is culturally and socially defined as being a ‘normal ‘male or female. Paul Michel is described as ‘beautiful’ in his younger days and as a homosexual man he is reluctant to take on the mantle of the ‘establishment of the gay movement’ and “he cherished the role of the sexual outlaw, monster, pervert” (Duncker 1996 p28). The act of gay liberation may be signified in the ‘coming out of the closet’, but questions arise in that ‘coming out’ means that you’re ‘in’ at some point, and further more what are you coming out of, and what are you going into? Jones believes the performative power to act out gender is extremely useful as a framework, offering new ways to consider images as enactments with embodied subjects rather than inanimate objects for men's viewing pleasure.Butler suggests that "the critical promise of drag does not have to do with the proliferation of genders…but rather with the exposure of the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals", though such remarks fail to indicate how the inadequacies of heterosexual regimes might be explicitly exposed. Butler insists that :“The reading of ‘performativity’ as wilful and arbitrary choice misses the point that the historicity of discourse and, in particular, the historicity of norms (the ‘chains’ of iteration invoked and dissimulated in the imperative utterance) constitute the power of discourse to enact what it names” (Butler 1990 187)Gender performance is learned both consciously and ingrained unconsciously on the psyche of the individual, who is unaware that they are performing a gender role, but accept the gender identity assigned to them by their own behaviour or performance and which is again interpreted and repeated within the discourse of gender relations in a cultural and social context. This effect produces what we can consider to be 'true gender', a narrative that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them." Butler’s key ideas are therefore based on the notion that gender is not a simplified ‘role’ but a deep seated psyche playing out of identity and behaviour, there is also not casual link between sex, gender and sexuality. Initially as in Winterson’s novel we are unsure of the gender of the narrator, as he/she is only signified as ‘the narrator’ or the ‘reader’ throughout the novel. Gender identity is therefore constructed as a fluid performance and not an essential essence of being. The second wave of feminism and the precursor for modern feminist literary theory occurred between the late 1960s and 1980s and asserted that gender roles and questions of sexuality needed to be examined in relation to both the personal and political spheres. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy? Here Butler argues that there is an iterability and repetition involved in gender performativity, which results in immense difficulty in trying to escape the constructions of naturalized restrictions of sex and gender through making conscious daily performative choices.The question of gender performance is related to ideas of gender identity in society, whereby certain codes of behaviour are assigned according to gender.