From the time of their births, people are immediately put into a category by society: boy or girl. Since this beginning, people are raised to learn society’s norms of what femininity and masculinity “truly are”. Society teaches these views on masculinity and femininity through a variety of ways but a very common way is through advertisements. These advertisements are presented to people every day through magazines, billboards, and the internet. The poses in these advertisements represent different
questions the body and its fabrication, which leads her argument into a parody of cross-dressers in drag. Butler’s ideas of cross-dressing are exemplified in director Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film, Boys Don’t Cry, starring Hilary Swank as Brandon, a female-to-male transgender. Chronologically filmed, Peirce captures the true story of Brandon Teena’s transgendered life as he goes through the transformation of becoming a male, only to revert back to femininity. Boys
statement such as ‘Harriet is a woman’ or ‘Stephen is a man’ tells us nothing about their gender beyond a basic grammatical assignment or identification of their accepted sex. Such a usage of gender is of limited utility except as a ‘variable’ in social analysis” (Bradley, 2013). Her work provided an interesting approach towards the concept of gender and explained different theoretical explanations which have further developed gender studies. The internalized belief that men and women are essentially different