Judith Butler's account of gender aims to call into question the pre-existence of a group of individuals (i.e., women, females) prior to the enforcement of gender role.
Instead, in Butler's view, biological sex is culturally instituted. Prima facie this view seems counter-intuitive. One way to motivate it is to recognize that contrary to the natural attitude about sex human beings cannot always be neatly divided into male and female.
Indeed, once we recognize various features which go into sex determination (chromosomal sex, gonadal sex, genital sex, etc.) we see that sex is not a single, unitary, easily-determined feature. Insofar as the natural attitude prevails, however, individuals act as if the natural attitude were true. Sex is now understood in terms of a particular attitude which shapes everyday social practices.
And to the extent that such an attitude helps ground medical practices designed to surgically assign intersex infants to one sex or the other, it appears that sexual dimorphism (occurring in or representing two distinct forms.in this sexually dimorphic species only the males have wings) is medically instituted.
Insofar as bodies are made to conform to a particular cultural ideology about sex—an ideology which governs social practice—it makes some sense to say that biological sex itself is, to this degree, “culturally instituted
In Butler's view, whenever we discuss the body, we are also always representing it in culturally specific ways. To speak of the biologically sexed body as somehow prior to particular discourses about it is to, in so doing, nonetheless ironically speak about it within some particular discourse and hence to represent in some way. According to Butler, sex is culturally instituted by representing the body as the natural container of some inner, gendered self. Sex is understood as the bodily indication that concealed within it is the essence of either a woman or a man.
For Butler, this view is false. However, just as the natural attitude may be treated as if it were true even though it is not, so, too, bodies can be falsely treated as containers of gendered selves. To the extent that this view is pervasive and regulative of human conduct, one can in this sense say that sex is socially constructed.
For Butler, behavioral manifestations of gender are often taken to express a prior gender identity that is contained within a naturally sexed body. Thus, feminine behavior is seen as expressive of an inner feminine core (contained within the body sexed female). On the contrary, in her view, such performances simply serve to generate the fiction of a pre-existing gender identity as well as the fiction of the sexed body qua natural container of this identity (1990, 178–9). This is to say: Behavioral manifestations are prior to gender identity and sexed body (rather than the other way around). The illusion of a stably sexed body, core gender identity, and (hetero) sexual orientation is perpetuated through repeated, stylized bodily performances that are performative in the sense that they are productive of the fiction of a stable identity, orientation, and sexed body as prior to the gendered behavior In Butler's viewv all gender behavior is imitative in nature. Heterosexual gender identity involves an instability that it attempts to cover over: While it purports to be grounded in a naturally gendered core, it amounts to nothing more than repeated attempts to imitate past instances of gendered behavior (1990, 185). Thus, there is also a subversive potential of queer drag and camp gender performance, in her view, insofar as it can parody and thereby expose this concealed imitative quality (1990, 174–6). As a consequence, Butler welcomes the proliferation of queer gender behaviors that re-signify, parody, and expose the mechanisms by which the fiction of normative heterosexist gender is created (1990, 184–190).
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