The concept of gender performativity for filmic discourse analysis

Abstract

The concept of gender performativity developed and created by Judith Butler has been adopted by a lot of postmodern feminist scholars, making it a common “filler” that is present in texts about identity and agency. Taking as a starting point the film Rashômon, by Akira Kurosawa (1950), this paper debates the gender performativity as a conceptual tool with huge analytical power in four dimensions: (1) the discursivity, (2) the identity, (3) the social context, (4) the materiality. We stress specially the link between performativity and performance, to elucidate its validity and to shape the boundaries in the performativity’s application in gender studies.