Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

Basically a riposte to the critics of Butler's earlier Gender Trouble (of which I was one), this text is a much clearer and more rigorous articulation of the logic behind performativity. The theory remains problematic in places (which, to her credit, Butler acknowledges for the most part), but there is no question that this text is a major contribution to the canon of poststructuralist theory.

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler builds upon her previous work, Gender Trouble, and argues, “The category of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault called a ‘regulatory ideals’” (pg. xi). Practice, specifically regulated practice, materializes these ideals. In a lengthy passage, Butler discusses the role of gender, writing,
If gender consists of the social meanings that sex assumes, then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties but, rather, is replaced by the social meanings it takes on; sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs and displaces “sex,” the mark show more of its full substantiation into gender or what, from a materialists point of view, might constitute a full desubstantiation (pg. xv).
In order to achieve her analytical framework, Butler proposes “in place of these conceptions of constructions is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (pg. xviii). Butler’s examination draws upon a wide array of sources, including Plato’s Timeus, Freud, Jacques Lacan, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, and more. Butler’s purpose in writing was “to understand how what has been foreclosed or banished from the proper domain of ‘sex’…might at once be produced as a troubling return, not only as an imaginary contestation that effects a failure in the workings of the inevitable law, but as an enabling disruption, the occasion for a radical rearticulation of the symbolic horizon in which bodies come to matter at all” (pg. xxx). These run-on sentences pervade Butler’s writing and often obscure her meaning and argument.
Butler separates gender from sex. For Butler, sex is a person’s physical, biological sex, while gender is an identity both the individual and society construct that is not necessarily based on their physical sex. Butler’s use of film and novels as sources works since these media reach a wide audience and shape ideas, though I doubt the average audience reads Plato’s Timaeus. Unfortunately, Butler buries many of her main concepts in her prose. Butler’s hypotheses evoke Duden’s discussion of the fluid nature of gender in eighteenth century Germany, especially when Duden wrote “Many of the manifestations that we clearly perceive as sex characteristics, were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not unequivocal signs for the difference between man and woman…The eye of culture sees in the order of nature what it expects to see” (Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], 113). show less

I have just read this book. I think it shows any reader of Butler just how demanding her texts can be, but if you maintain a certain 'discipline' the rewards are certainly well worth it. This book represents for Butler her re-working of some of her arguments in her earlier book Gender Trouble. In particular she moves towards an idea of the "materialization of sex". She also has some chapters on Nella Larson's Passing, and of course her continuing conversation with Lacan and Zizek. Overall if you are in any way a theory head, this book is over the top in its absolutely greatness.

In Bodies That Matter (1993), Judith Butler further explains her theory of performativity, "always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms" (12) that works through citation. Not much here I'll probably be working with in comps

I.... don't get it.