In excerpts from her book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses “gender performativity” and the relationship between performativity and sexuality. She also implies that gender should not be seen as binary, but rather as fluid. She states that genitals need not apply when speaking about gender and sexuality as one should not, and do not, have anything to do with one another. The dominant ideology, or heterosexual illusion, is that someone with a penis, will cause one to sexually identify as a man and will cause one to be sexually attracted to women.

Butler questions this assertion, asking if this really is the “natural” structure of our environment, or whether sexual identity is socially constructed based upon our genitalia as a way of classification and restriction. To her, our sex and sexual desires are not linked, and do not comprise our identity. The falsity of this link can be seen when we examine other cultures and historical eras, when sex and sexuality were not inevitably interrelated (like Roman, Greeks, etc.) like they are in today’s western society.

Butler essentially undermines the distinction between gender and sexuality, arguing that gender is not an “inner truth” or a core part of our identity. Rather gender is a construction borne out of a “stylish repetition of actions,” or in other words, a performance. This performance includes acting out our everyday behaviors: the way we walk, talk, move, dress, and act both publicly and privately. This behavior “congeals” over time, making us think that the gender effect is an inner-truth or part of our identity, when it is in fact a by-product of social construction. Gender is not inevitable, then. It is fluid and free-flowing, and we can change the way we perceive it by “reclassification.”