"(Big Think). Now take a man getting ready for work at the bank. He showers, shaves (face/neck), brushes his hair, and puts on a suit or slacks with a nice collared shirt. Both situations are normal and we can easily see ourselves doing these actions. But why? When was it decided that men shave their face and women their legs. Or women wearing make-up instead of none and men being bare faced. Each of these acts are a performance. Women shaving their underarms and les bare is a relatively new. In fact the first campaign began in 1915 in Harper's Bazaar read "'Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.'"(Hope). Men commonly wore cosmetics easily up to the mid 1850's. Of course now society is changing once again, men can wear "guyliner". "It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which "sexed nature" or a "natural sex" is produced and established as "prediscursive", prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts"(Butler). The point is to show how what we think is "acceptable" or "normal" is fluid and subject to change.
Gender identity is not performed just through various acts but is constituted throughout time. Simone de Beauvoir "claim(s) that "woman," and by extension, any gender, is an historical situation rather than a natural fact" (Butler). During the Roman Empire men and women's preferences either sexual or otherwise are vastly different from what todays' standards are. People were in same sex relationships and did not have to be concerned about harm happening to them. Men were still very much the warrior class in that time and they wore their hair down their backs. Merleau-Ponty claims that a body "is an historical idea" which "means that it gains its meaning through a concrete and historically mediated expression in the world.
