hello and welcome to my easy-to-understand guide to Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity this is quite a hard theory for a lot of people to understand particularly because there are so many misunderstandings about the word gender so I'm gonna try and explain this in as easy-to-understand a way as possible so the first thing we need to know is what gender actually means there is a difference between the words gender biological sex and sexuality so it's important to make sure that you understand the difference so biological sex is to do with things like your reproductive organs your DNA and your genitals so for example if you have an X X chromosome and you have female external genitalia and female reproductive organs then you could be considered biologically to be female and the difference between that and gender is that gender people often use gender to mean biological sex and when they talk about it they confuse those two terms when actually what they when they're talking about gender they often mean biological sex gender is a different term which is a social construct gender is is almost like how you feel inside or how you behave do you behave in a more feminine way do you behave in a more masculine way do you consider yourself to be female or male in your brain you know your chemistry in your brain does that feel more female or masculine so that that is what gender means but like I say people confuse those two terms so when Judith Butler talks about her theory she talks particularly about gender the way people feel and what she basically says is that gender and the way we feel in terms of feeling male or feeling female is is a construct based on what we do so that we can we can perform certain actions or behaviors that construct our feelings of gender so she thinks for example that the particular behaviors for females might things like putting on makeup wearing high heels or dresses things that we would consider to be female in terms of a gender these are behaviors and if you repeat these behaviors if you perform these tasks every day it creates your idea of what it is to be female and it is about doing these tasks on a daily basis or on a regular basis if you just do them once that doesn't construct your gender but if if you are performing these things as rituals if you're performing them more regularly perhaps that is going to affect your ideas about gender so if for example you are somebody that was brought up in a typical masculine way in terms of gender and behaviors if you were playing football if you were seeing men drink beer if you were hearing swearing or aggressive behavior if you heard people heard other men talking about women in perhaps quite sexist ways then perhaps you might grow up believing that those are male performances that you have to put on to be masculine and so gender in her view is all about a performance rituals that you perform on a reasonably regular basis that effect your views of what it is to be female or male in terms of gender now the way this applies to your media products and this is where it kind of is hard for students sometimes to understand is to have a look at your media products let's take zoella for example for online media and see whether or not you think her behavior her repeated rituals construct a certain idea about what it is to be female so in her vlogs we see her repeatedly putting on makeup discussing makeup talking about shoes about clothes about spa days she talks about very traditional feminine behaviors and she repeats these as rituals over and over again in her videos and so perhaps her vlogs and her online site and her YouTube channel are constructing those ideas about gender identity in particular for women they are teaching girls about these behaviors that you have to repeat and ritualize in order to beam feminine have a think about hukka magazine if you're studying that four-component t for the magazine section in the beyond binary section for example where they interview Arabia Felix and Jacob Tobia consider the ways in which those two particular people that they've interviewed are constructing their own gender identities by performing certain rituals so Arabia Felix talks about vlogging talks about putting on makeup talks about dressing in he turns drag and he talks about those things constructing his identity those the performance of those rituals that are typically associated with being female Arabia Felix has adopted to construct their own identity to make them feel more or less female or masculine and and similar with Jacob Tobia Jacob Tamia in the article describes himself as sort of gender non-binary or genderqueer and in the article it refers to Jacob Tobia as they usually they pronoun and Jacob Tobia dresses in quite typically female clothing they wear makeup you know jewelry so perhaps Jacob Tobia is using these performances these rituals to construct their identity and to sort of maybe take away their traditional masculinity and construct themselves as being something kind of almost in-between that doesn't conform to these two binary stereotypes of gender so this is quite a complicated theory but it's worth just having a look at any of your set texts or practicing with unseen products and working out whether or not you think gender has been constructed through a performance of feminine or masculine behaviors are they kind of implying that you must do these particular rituals these particular behaviors in order to feel more female or masculine in terms of your gender identity and so that's something that perhaps you might be able to apply but