Gender Trouble
Judith Butler · 1990
"Gender is not an inner essence that behavior expresses — it's performative, constituted by the repeated, stylized acts, speech, dress, movement, behavior, that produce the appearance of an underlying gendered nature, meaning what looks like a stable identity is actually an ongoing, socially maintained performance."
Butler's starting question is why gender feels so natural and fixed if it's supposedly a social construction — her answer is that it feels stable precisely because it's constantly, repeatedly performed and re-performed, through countless small acts, how someone talks, moves, dresses, is addressed by others, that are so continuous and consistent they create the illusion of a fixed inner essence underneath, when the acts themselves are actually doing all the work.
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Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
"Race, as commonly understood, a set of discrete, biologically fixed categories that determine intelligence, character, or worth, has no basis in human genetics; the boundaries we draw between racial groups are social and historical constructions, not natural biological divisions."