Thinking about how much damage the idea that "gender is performative" did to trans people.
@noelle honestly it's just a miscommunication due to a term of art being taken out of context—nobody has seriously argued that gender is performative in the vernacular sense of the word
(performative here is intended with the meaning“performs a function”; gender, as a concept, is (a) performative because it performs itself in a certain way [can provide details on request]. it isn’t performative in the sense that we might call political posturing “performative”.)
@noelle sure but they aren't gender studies majors :P
the term “gender performativity” comes from judith butler [who, at the time, was a butch lesbian writing theory about their experience of gender as a butch lesbian—definitely not a “women should be womanly” kind of thing]
so i feel comfortable using judith butler’s intended meaning for it and not like, contrapoints or whoever
@Lady Sure, but when I'm talking about the damage the concept that gets called "performative gender" has done, in particular on the internet, I'm not talking about the way gender studies majors or Judith Butler use the term :P I understand why you'd want to correct the misapprehension, though.
@Lady I mean, I get what you're saying, but at the same time, there are definitely people out there saying that gender is performative and that if you're not performing the gender then you're not really the gender.