Walter Benjamin uses Marxist theory to detail the concept of myth in art and literature, and the author’s need to side with the proletariat as a moralistic fight between capitalism and the proletariat in the context of Russian journalism. Benjamin concludes that the main demand is the writer’s demand to think with respect to the production process. Benjamin argued that ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. The essay deals with the change of aesthetic values that supposedly occurred as a result of the emergence of means of mechanical reproduction. According to Benjamin, the fact that works of art can be reproduced in large quantities devaluates their artistic standards. He introduces the concept of aura. Aura is subtle and has an elusive vibe attained by a work of art as a result of its creation and serving as a basis for the feelings of awe and divine inspiration experienced upon exposure to a masterpiece. Since the primary artistic value of the works of art throughout history was cultic in origin – serving to sustain the belief  and being in fear of the supernatural, aura can be considered the essence of any artwork. However, once an object is duplicated, the aura is not transferred to the copy, stripping it of its artistic and/or ritual merits. Benjamin provides several arguments that confirm the recognition and the reaction to the phenomenon in modern times. Specifically, he argues that the tendency of the modern art movements to distance themselves from the mundane and their goal of becoming detached from the society can be considered a form of self-preservation that aims at the same outcome as the early religious organizations.

Butler is interested in this idea of a performative utterance, and uses it to explain how gender works.
What Butler wants to explain about gender is not that it is a performance, but that gender is something that is made by doing. Butlers idea is that gender comes to exist as it exist because it is done a certain way. For example when a women wears a skirt, the skirt is made feminine. This feminization doesn’t happen because women are naturally made to wear skirts or because male anatomy is more conspicuous when a skirt is worn, but because according to Butler the female body already belongs to a specific social category, which gives it the power to assign its prescribed meaning to the things that it does. So when a women wears a skirt, she marks it as feminine, or when a women allows a man to open the door for her that is also a feminine act. These behaviors marked in that way are then actualized as components or symbols to a larger category of femininity, but these things are made symbols of that category but not because of some appointed meaning given to them. But through a body which passes on its larger categorical meaning to the thing that it does. So when a man wears a skirt he does not automatically
make it feminine, as the skirt is still associated with the female body. But he also isn’t denied the power to make the skirt masculine, or to expand the boundary of what is allowed under the label masculinity. His body, just like the female body, has the power to inscribe and can change what the object means. But the object, carrying
a label, also has the ability to affect what his body
means, and here in lies the trouble. The supposedly
solid categories of masculine and feminine are not solid categories which never touch one another. These categories are always being expanded by the way in which people perform, or do their gender. Gender is not a solid state, or an inflexible category, but instead a category that expands and contracts, and runs into other categories. It is not a category that can be made stable and specific. But on the other hand how most people do the category matters a great deal as this determines how much a category can change. So even though some
men might wear skirts, and challenge the supposedly stable categories of masculinity and femininity the fact that mostly women wear skirts prevents the establishment of a new normalized understanding of skirts. To elaborate even further from the book, “the performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender etc. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggest a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance .” (p. 2549-2550)