Why do they call it gender when they want to say sex? An approximation of Judith Butler performativity theory

Abstract

This text pretends to be an approach from Social Psychology to Butler's theory on the performativity of gender. In contemporary feminist thinking "sex" is usually associated with "nature", and "gender" with "culture" and social dimensions o sex categories; so sex and gender are presented like opposite concepts. Judith Butler proposes in her writings a deconstruction of this dichotomy: she explains that sex is also a social construction and, in consequence, sex would have been gender all the time. This text also studies possible contributions from the theory on performativity to a theory on the subjectivity in Social Psychology; in this sense it's fundamental her defence of the "paradoxical" possibility of social transformation starting from the social categories that constitute us and, at the same time, subordinate us too.