Judith Butler, born 1956, is a prominent American philosopher and a figure in third-wave feminism. Butler's work on gender is an exploration of how gender is formed or exists. Is gender a pre-existing entity that we have a natural instinctive understanding of from birth? Is it performative, resulting from the repetition of “acts”? A simulacrum, not born from the biological differences between male and female. This seems to lead to the conclusion that gender is not something one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a name, a “do” rather than a “being”. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay To determine whether Judith Butler's idea of ​​gender performativity is considered anti-essentialist, one must understand what essentialism in gender is. Gender essentialism is the theory that a person's "essence" is not created or influenced by external circumstances related to culture and social background, but rather by a pre-existing consciousness resulting from biological differences or neurological differences between men and women, thus affirming the idea that gender is internally fixed. Anti-essentialism examines an alternative to the origins of gender. In their article “Gender and Society,” West and Zimmerman argue that gender is not something we are but something we “do.” Butler expresses that our society has restrictive "norms" regarding gender identity, which leaves people who do not conform to be ostracized by society and its need for categorization. Everything in our society has been built around this girl-boy binary that resides in this biological essentialist perspective “...Women and men possess distinct chromosomal and hormonal variations that impact their specific social roles – the “essence” of masculinity and femininity”. Being categorized as “girl” leaves little to no room for someone who does not exclusively associate to fit into this prohibitive group. “A girl who is not a girl is called a tomboy teaches us how restricted girls can be as an emerging category of girls. personality ". Butler reiterates that it is inaccurate and unethical to assume a person's gender based on their biological characteristics. Phenomenology proves to be one of Butler's main influences; The Oxford English Dictionary defines phenomenology as "a method or procedure, originally developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), which involves setting aside presumptions about a phenomenon as an object empirical and on the mental acts connected with its experience in order to arrive at an intuition of its pure essence…” (Oxford English Dictionary) Butler explores the theory of phenomenology, in particular, what it means to experience gender. To support her argument, Butler analyzes the work of Luce Irigaray and how she perceives Simone de Beauvoir's views on "the one" and "the other." De Beauvoir suggests that there is a choice that women must make, because women are not something you are, they are something. you become. she says you can choose between the body and freedom “For Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The body in its sexual being”, in The Phenomenology of Perception, the body is understood as an active process of incarnation of certain cultural and historical possibilities.”.