The basic (and simplified) idea is that gender--what we think of as masculine and/or feminine--is performed in the ways we act, speak, dress, move, etc. and doesn't really exist outside of that performance. We learn how to perform this way from dominant culture and conventions--what someone might (incorrectly) call "normal male" or "normal female" behavior. But these "normal" qualities (and genders themselves) don't actually exist--rather, we are all repeatedly mimicking them and are rewarded for doing so (or punished for not doing so). We merely impersonate the qualities we've been taught match the gender we've been told we possess (like females being demure or males being aggressive) until those impersonations (and gender itself) become belief and seen as something natural and assumed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dddcq/eli5butlers_gender_performativity/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

So, in a nutshell, the assertion is that gender is entirely nurture and not nature.

Yeah, sorry, that is an extraordinary assertion and I'm going to need extraordinary proof.

Are there people for whom gender and sex don't neatly match up, or even those for whom it is purely performative, sure.

But they are statistical outliers, and not representative of the majority experience.

People can be different then the statistical norm, and that's ok, but to assert that this norm is entirely cultural is over the top self serving.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Gender is definitionally cultural. A person's sex is nature, but the bundle of signifiers that denote gender (as well as which categories exist at all) are largely arbitrary and divorced from that, and vary greatly across time and place. Women wearing pants was unheard of a century or so ago, and would 100% be perceived as queer, nowadays it's completely normal. There were times when dueling was a virtually mandatory rite of passage to being considered a man. There are also historical cultures with more than two genders, and it's not as if people in those cultures were biologically different from others.

There's nothing "extraordinary" about this claim.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Pants could also be exclusively feminine clothing, depending on the region and time period. Also, the colour pink used to be considered masculine (as we're all shades of red).

What I'm saying is, you're absolutely correct, and gender expectations are completely reliant on the culture factor.

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