Introduction to Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”

Introduction to Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993

Agenda: how power imprints itself into people’s bodies with a focus on performativity of gender and construction of sex: how sexual norms are made to materialize the body’s sex in order to ensure the hegemony of heterosexual narrative. Argues that the form (performativity) constitutes the content (subjectivity): “the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking ‘I’ is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex” (3). Cultural formation of not only identities to which one belongs, but also “uninhabitable” zones of social life against which “the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.” (3) She then adds her own political agenda: to challenge these operations of exclusion (by virtue of their own power).

Challenges the notion of ‘construction’ as implicitly masculine and, hence, biased – suggested to speak of ‘materialization’, because the nature is never passive. Argues that a usual argument of construction presupposes an “I” or a “we” who enact the construction – which is not true, since “I” appears only in the process of construction: “Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves.” (7)

Operations of exclusion, which are very important in the construction of gender, leads Butler to an argument that the idea of ‘construction’ doesn’t work here: it is not really a ‘construction’ (neither it is essential). Argues that even ‘sex’, a seemingly biological category, is artificial: its differences become the ‘law’ only inasmuch as the norms of this ‘law’ are reiterated again and again.

“Hence, it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary ‘outside,’ if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter.” (16)