Judith's Nightmare

Halloween is a time where all the little boys and girls get dressed up and, for once a year, get to be someone else. The key here is "once a year". But what if, perhaps, these children put on this "performance" every day? Would one continue to consider this a performance? Good 'ol Judith Butler would most likely answer "hell no" to this question. If we made ghost costumes and "sexy cop" attire our everyday wear, if we continually applied scary makeup and ran around yelling "boo!" to senior citizens, these acts would eventually become naturalized and thought of as "normal". After all, we do this exact thing every day. Butler argues that this is precisely how (binary) gender is produced--through regulative discourses and performativity; the sexed body is culturally constructed. It is not a natural occurance that boys act, dress and perform "as boys" and girls do the same. We are constantly exposed to these binary ideologies and thus they become "natural" and "true" to us. After all, it makes interpellation sooo much simpler. And we can easily form subjects and make assumptions about sexual preference this way. It may prove slightly difficult to form sexual binaries between sexy cops and ghouls, though.