Performativity

Feminist theorist and philosopher Judith Butler described performativity as "that relative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains." She applies this to her study of gender development. Butler sees gender as something being rehearsed and that people come to perform in the mode of belief, and believes that the key to performativity is repetition. An example of this would be a father teaching his son to play football, and through repetition, the son would learn to love football.
                                          
Whilst this isn't exclusively a male thing to do, most of the time it is a male figure who introduces you to the sport, whether it be your father or a sports personality, like the character Jess Bhamra from "Bend it like Beckham" (Gurinder Chadha, 2002).
                                                 
                                                   
Judith Butler also believes that performativity also applies to sexual orientation, with heterosexuality and homosexuality acting not as fixed categories, but as a conditioning through repetition.

                   
In Butler's definition, performativity is seen as an authoritative voice, enforced by laws or views of social norms, and that our most personal acts are being scripted by society, with the difference between private and public being a fiction designed by an "oppressive status quo".