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1. (''[[Critical theory]]'') Characterised by the performance of a social or cultural role: ''the contextual and performative aspects of [[gender]]''.  
1. (''[[Critical theory]]'') Characterised by the performance of a social or cultural role: ''the contextual and performative aspects of [[gender]]''.  


This is the intellectual origin of Judith Butler’s insistence that gender is a mutable social construct, characterised by repeated actions, language and dispositions that shape (and are shaped by) the physical environment. These performance repetitions are not always conscious, nor voluntary nor a product of free choice. If gender is “performative” in this way — and this encapsulation seems a distance from what was traditionally meant by “biological sex” — then it stands to reason that where one can choose one’s performance, then one’s gender can be whatever one chooses it to be. All the world’s a stage. Fair enough, as far as that goes: but the [[JC]] will deftly duck out of further extrapolations of what this might mean in practice, since they run fairly quickly into fear & loathing and a highly petulant version of ''grand guignol''. But it is an interesting starting point, deserving serious attention.
This usage has its origin in {{plainlink|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler|Judith Butler}}’s view that gender is a mutable social construct, characterised by repeated actions, language and dispositions that shape (and are shaped by) the physical environment.  
 
{{quote|When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role; we’re acting in some way... To say that gender is performative is a little different, because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman ... We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that’s simply true about us, a fact about us. Actually, it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.}}
 
If gender is “performative” in this way — and this encapsulation seems a distance from what was traditionally meant by “biological sex”, though the two have since become conflated — then it stands to reason that where one can choose one’s performance, then one’s gender can be whatever one chooses it to be. All the world’s a stage.  
 
Fair enough, as far as that goes: but we will duck out of further extrapolations of what this might mean in practice, since they run fairly quickly into a kind of political ''grand guignol'' that does no-one any favours. But it is an interesting starting point, deserving serious attention.


2. (''Media relations'') Describing an action that resembling a dramatic or artistic ''performance'', being one in whose acquiescence one must suspend disbelief willingly — if on a stage of some kind — or gullibly, if in a political or commercial context. A magician’s misdirection.  
2. (''Media relations'') Describing an action that resembling a dramatic or artistic ''performance'', being one in whose acquiescence one must suspend disbelief willingly — if on a stage of some kind — or gullibly, if in a political or commercial context. A magician’s misdirection.  
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