Materialist feminism, gender is seen as a social construct, and society forces gender roles, such as bearing children, onto women. Materialist feminism’s ideal vision is a society in which women are treated socially and economically the same as men. materialist feminism argues that material conditions of all sorts play a vital role in the social production of gender and assays the different ways in which women collaborate and participate in these productions. Material feminism also considers how women and men of various races and ethnicities are kept in their lower economic status due to an imbalance of power that privileges those who already have privilege, thereby protecting the status quo. Something extraordinary it offers is that Materialist feminists ask whether people have access to free education, if they can pursue careers, have access or opportunity to become wealthy, and if not, what economic or social constraints are preventing them from doing so, and how this can be changed. Therefore, these are some sort of ways they could stay left behind but still they get to see ways on how they can get their right opportunities.

“It is important for me to concede, however, that the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sexual practice. Gender can be rendered ambiguous without disturbing or reorienting normative sexuality at all. Sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to contain or deflect non-normative sexual practice and thereby work to keep normative sexuality intact.”-

Judith Butler proposes that gender is performative. Butler distinguishes between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation. Butler argues that gender is best perceived as performative, which suggests that it has a social audience. It also suggests that performances of woman are compelled and enforced by historical social practice. According Butler’s theory, sexual orientation is basically a performative repetition of acts related with male or female. Consistently with her acknowledgment of the body as a historical idea, she proposes that our idea of sex is viewed as characteristic or natural in light of the fact that the body turns into its sex through a progression of acts which are reestablished, and merged through time. Personally, I can think of one example could be ‘women smoke’ and which considered as the gender performance.

Butler describes gender as an quality of a person, but as “performed” as acting in accordance to customs. Gender is how we identify ourselves and how we self-concept ourselves. Butler also believes that language/culture make up how we perceive and contextualize the world. We have created how a gender must act. She goes into detail about the notion of gender and how it plays a role into feminism. Her claim is that no one is a gender from the start, but that it deals with how we interact, behave that determine the gender. From experience, growing up I’ve been told how I should interact, dress, behave because if I don’t act like a girl then people will begin to think otherwise and that’s where bullying also comes into effect. I believe that one should behave and do what they want, for the simple matter that gender shouldn’t weigh us down and keep us secluded from doing things that doesn’t correspond with our “gender”.

Culture Wars were cultural conflict between social groups and a struggle for power about their beliefs and what was of value to them. Culture wars are very similar to feminism because their are still movements and protests to gain equal rights amongst women. Fauldi in his article states that there has been a sort of progression for their rights. However, many unjust situations keep occurring such as pay. Culture wars rely heavily on the belief that there is progression vs. that there isn’t.