Gender theory explains performative menfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

We're always performing gender, then why do we only call it this performance when it challenges the dominant script? Fasten your carabiners and hold onto your wired earbuds because we're gonna talk about Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity tier how this relates to why the Internet hates performative men. In 1990, feminist scholar Judith Butler published Gender Trouble and gave us their theory of gender performativity. Essentially, Butler explained gender no as something that we are, but something that we do. It's a set of repeated acts, expressions, choices that, over time, start to feel natural. So tier argument goes that gender is a kind of performance. Not in like a faking it kind of way, but in the sense that it's through the very performance of gender that gender becomes legible in itself. Butler writes, To say that I play at being a lesbian is not to say that I am not one really. How and where I play at being one is the way that being gets established. Okay. So I know that sounds kinda confusing, but don't worse. I pulled out my second year theory notes to help explain this. We can think of it kind of like a play. We watch how other people do gender and we pick up on the script, we rehearse the lines, and eventually we step into the role. But in this performance, you're not pretending to be the character of men. You're reproducing the norms that you associate with being a man. And simultaneously, it's through this repeated performance that the very concert of man itself is created. And so there's no true man or true woman underneath these performances of gender. There's only social scripts and how convincingly we can play them. And so rank to the performative men. Like I said in my last video, we perform all the time through our clothes, our playlist, and yes, our gender expression. But here's the thing I'm getting at with all of this. We only call men performative when their performance subverts hegemonic notions of masculinity. We drag performative men for reading Jane Austen and liking Hello Kitty because that performance is coded as feminine. Like, we're the same energy when it comes to gym bros or possessive Korean oppas who are also performing better. It's just in a way that aligns with our expectations of men. The social scripts of masculinity, like lifting weights and paying for dinner and suppressing your emotions, are all as much a performance as your Japanese archive denim. Like, I know guys who are not even that into sports, but they just keep up with it because all their friends do. But, like, we don't call these guys performative LeBron fans. But because it aligns with dominant norms, it gets read as natural. So it seems that what's convincing isn't just what's authentic, but rather what matches the narrative. Anyway, it just reminds me of how women were treated in like, the mid two thousand tens for wearing band tier, and random guys would come up to them being, like, name three songs to prove your authentic interest in this underground indie band. Like, good forbid, a sexy woman love Radiohead two. Anyway, here are my top three songs. Bye.