Judith Butler's Queer Theory

Queer Theory is a set of ideas about gender, and the subversion of gender identities. There are two ideas that are usually associated with it:

1) Gender is performative. This means that many people prefer to present themselves as a specific gender. For example, many feminine-presenting people may like to have their hair long. On the flipside, many masculine-presenting people may like to grow facial hair.

and 2) That the divide between gender identities is a construction from society based on the divide between men and women.

There are a couple of media products that reinforce gender norms and gender roles.

One of these is, predictably, advertisements.

Some adverts like to intentionally subvert gender norms and roles, but instead bring even more attention to the roles being subverted. One of the adverts I found that does this is an advertisement that is selling a mop that has the tagline 'Man Up, Clean Up'. It depicts a man comedically giving a tutorial of sorts on how to clean a kitchen floor. There are comments in there about how the wife 'works just as many hours as you do', you referring to the viewer, assuming that you are also a man in your middle-ages, who also has a wife. This brings attention to the gender roles of the woman in a family always having to take on domestic roles and having to clean and take care of the house.

On the other hand, some adverts like to, either intentionally or not, like to use the stereotypes and norms themselves in their advertising. A perfect example of this would be the famously iconic Old Spice advert, entitled on YouTube 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like'. That title alone already gives you an impression of what the advert is going to be selling, what the tone is going to be, and how it's going to sell it to you. The advert starts out with a man saying 'Hello ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me.' Aside from this introduction being funny, it also reinforces a lot of stereotypes, and it assumes a lot of things. One, it assumes that you, a woman, have a partner, a man, and it two, also assumes that your partner does not look like the man on the screen. As well as this, it reinforces the gender norms that the perfect man is built like an athlete, or at least has some muscle.

There are, however, some media that present some alternative ideologies as opposed to those that we are used to, and the ones that get stereotyped all the time. One medium that I find does this particularly well in a lot of cases is video games.

Lately, especially within the year, video games have been relied upon to entertain us while we're all stuck inside. Whether they are games that people can play separately but together, or singleplayer games that offer more of a story than a game, video games have been keeping us sane in the lockdowns that we've been in.

There are many characters within video games that subvert gender roles and norms. The female protagonist of the Metroid franchise, Samus Aran, is a good example of video game characters that don't fall into the gender norms of most other characters. For one, she's the protagonist of her series. She isn't a princess that needs to be saved, and she isn't exactly 'girlish' either. She's the one that's doing the saving, which is strange for female characters in games, since they're usually depicted as the characters that need to be saved.

So, those are a couple of examples of the types of media that relate to Judith Butler's Queer Theory.