Females: Judith Butler's Gender is a Construction

Gender is: Constitution of Identity culturally and socially instituted through repetition of stylised acts throughout time.

 Acts are bodily gestures, styles, movements (language aswell).

 Judith Butler

Gender Norms build social cultural subjects as women and men. Our ideas what men and women are reflected nothing that exist in nature: Our derive from customs that embeded social relations of power.  The reality of being a woman (or a man) is not an empirical fact, but rather a preformative effect of the language and the constitution acts that define her (or him).

"Butler suggested that feminists rejected the idea that biology is destiny, and our culture which assumed that masculine and feminine genders would inevitably be built, by culture, upon 'male' and 'female' bodies, making the same destiny just as inescapable. That argument allows no room for choice, difference or resistance. She prefers; rather than being a fixed attribute in a person, gender should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times. She argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler's approach is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors. Butler suggests that certain cultural configurations and expectations have come to seem natural in our culture as it presently is. but, she suggests, it doesn't have to be that way. She also argues that we all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take. By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity.This idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an 'essence', but instead a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory. Seen in this way, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic inner self but are the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of our performances. It's not (necessarily) just a view on sexuality, or gender. It also suggests that the confines of any identity can potentially be reinvented by its owner..." Credits to: zlorhenley