GSFS 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Gender Role, Performativity

• School: McGill University
• Department: Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies
• Course: GSFS 200
• Professor: Mary Bunch

Document Summary

Sorry for not posting notes for the guest speaker"s lecture on nov 24th for i was really sick and couldn"t make it to class! Performative speech act: a way of doing things with words, like making a vow, or promise, we usually think of language merely as saying something but it is actually doing something. Performativity is different from performance: unlike a performance in a play, when i dress and act as a woman, i am constituted as a woman. In theatre, an actor merely plays a role: a performative gender role is naturalized through repetition and belief, the very act of performing gender constitutes who we are as gendered beings. Copies with no original: the sex binary seems natural to us, anything else seems like of a copy of the original.