'Tis the season for the sexy Halloween costume. Girls, need a costume. Well, you can choose from: sexy nurse, sexy maid, sexy cop, and sexy raccoon...Girls, you can be anything for Halloween--as long as it is sexy!!!
As any body knows, these sexy costumes do work. They are sexy; and they encase and infiltrate any body wearing them with all the signs and signifiers of sexiness in our culture. And as such, they provide the perfect example of gender performativity in a heteronormative society.
If you have never been able to figure out what Judith Butler meant by gender performativity, just look at this image. It oozes gender performativity. We have a sexy costume for the gal and an asexual one for the guy. Everything you need to know about gender is summed up here. The woman's role is to be sexy; the man's to be the insouciant arm to the arm candy all the while pretending like a bottom in a play relationship that he is not in total control of the scene the girl thinks she is choreographing.
Women are supposed to be liberated. Women are supposed to be free. Women are supposed to be...sexy because woman is sex as much as she ever was in the Middle Ages and throughout history.
You can see then how sex is repressive. Women are declared more sexually free than ever before; and their sexuality is turned on them as it always has been. The sexy Halloween costume is just one tool in the regime of female sexuality our culture uses to discipline women. Women wear their chains and claim they're liberating. The sexy Halloween costume is the new corset. A la mode! A la mort!
So this Halloween, women will don their sexy costumes and pretend to celebrate their 'inner slut' all the while creating her; and in the repetition bolstering female slavery to heteronormative expectations. Woman is sex. Woman exists to arouse man. Whatever else she does--that is her ultimate purpose.
Girls, get your freak on! That is not an option! That is a commandment!
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