In her essay, Imitation and Gender Insubordination, Judith Butler writes about the origins of gender, how is it produced, and reinforced. She argues that gender is built around a sort of heterosexuality from which it cannot escape. It is this innate drive for heterosexuality that causes individuals to engage in the performance of gender. She talks about those individuals who attempt to break away from the norm, through homosexuality as sexual preference, despite their performance they cannot escape the heterosexual system. Butler argues that gender and sexual preference operate jointly from which there appears to be no break.
Although gender is defined culturally and socially defined as traits, outside of the scientific, that are particular to the sex of an individual as Butler find this perverse. Butler states, and many others would agree that gender is socially constructed. Butler goes on to say that the “naturalness” a woman is based on is the moment that she recognizes herself within the heterosexual society.
Butler argues that “heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic”. What we are experiencing in our understanding of gender is the hegemony of heterosexuality. Butler does not want to expel notions of gender completely, but to address what happens when the gender norms are questioned. In order to do so, Butler examines gender in relation to homosexual relations and argues that the hegemony of heterosexuality is always present.
We perform our gender in order to define what it means to be “I”. The “I” is created through repetitions which produce an air of coherence. Therefore, in order for the “I” to exist, the individual must be involved in continual performance of gender. It is not simply enough to be female or male, but rather an individual must engage in the constant performance of a given gender. She goes on to talk about how drag demonstrates that gender is always a performance that attempts a representation. It shows that there is no true and original gender as it is always an imitation and never a “true” form.Butler argues that performance of drag breaks down “natural” understanding of sex as the origin of gender. When this argument is pushed further, what becomes clear is that even without a dependence on the “natural” ideas of sex, gender is still based on the heterosexual. If a man can perform as a female (in drag), it is no longer the “natural” ideas of female (the feminine) that they are emulated but rather the sexual preferences defined by heterosexuality. A man performs as a woman in order to demonstrate that he identifies with the sexual preference of woman—that he desires man. The homosexual individual must emulate heterosexual sex preference in order for their own sexuality to be understood and recognized by others. Identity has become a performance of what is “other” to itself. In order to demonstrate homosexuality as one’s sexual preference, the individual is forced to imitate heterosexual norms. Butler relies on theorists Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Ruth Leys for a discussion of self identity. In the end. Bulter offers only as a solution that, “it may be a matter of working sexuality against identity, even against gender, and of letting that which cannot fully appear in any performance persist in its disruptive promise”
In this next essay, "The Uncle" I found it very interesting how Jake was so curious about the penis. He actually enjoyed when his brother rubbed his penis all over his face and enjoyed looking at it and watching it grow. I think this essay makes an interesting statement about little kids and their curiosity and desire for intimacy. More than the fact tht Jake liked penis, I think he enjoyed the intimacy associated with the penis.