K. Scherff Assignment #3
" To do, to dramatize, to reproduce, these seem to be some of the elementary structures of embodiment. This doing of gender is not merely a way in which embodied agents are exterior, surfaced, open to the perception of others. Embodiment clearly manifests a set of strategies or what Sartre would perhaps have called a style of being or Foucault, "a stylistics of existence." This style is never fully self-styled, for living styles have a history, and that history conditions and limits possibilities. Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ itself carries the double-meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential.’ "
- Judith Butler “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” approx 521
This quote comes under the headline of “I. Sex/Gender: Feminist and Phenomenological Views”. This section is one of three which supports Butler’s overall thesis, which is arguing that gender is learned and differs from our personal physiology. It is in this section of the essay that she grapples with femaleness. This particular passage is between an argument of the embodiment of woman in the exterior and interior and the ultimate performative process. She defends her argument by citing Foucault and his “stylistics of existence”, defining style as an act or learned behavior, that in this case, is performed by the “woman” in accordance to cultural direction. She then employees Beauvoir’s theories of “historical ideas” to distinguish the biological from the learned. To become “female” has no meaning but to become “woman” has implicit cultural significances.
