In a study called Gender Trouble: '"'Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" by Judith Butler, the concept of “doing gender” was used to gain insights into how young people understand porn. In this context, people regularly express their gender by acting it out and create gender performativity by making regulatory discourses come to life, which means living the gender norms that are common in society. The differences between preformance and proformativity is that performativity assumes there's a pre-existing subject, while performativity challenges the very idea of that subject's existence.
Butler's study pointed out that gender is performative, meaning it's shaped and understood through the repetition of certain actions, rather than being something that's just marked on our bodies or something we are born with. These actions are like improvisation within a scene filled with societal, family, and legal pressures, making them seem like a "natural kind of being." So, gender is really a learned behavior within a strict framework of heteronormativity, expressed through language, discourse, and repetition. For Butler, no gender identity exists outside of performance; people don’t just have gender, they create it through their performances, which is a never-ending process, and it needs to be constantly reaffirmed and shown publicly by acting in ways that align with cultural norms of masculinity and femininity. This would mean gender is dynamic and fluid; it’s performed based on many contexts and social roles, and it’s culturally monitored and enforced by strict rules. Femininity and masculinity are not what we are, but the effects we produce due to specific things we do.