Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" by Judith Butler

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" Reviews

• 
  Amber

  I feel like it's socially irresponsible to conduct a conversation about such an important topic using language that makes that conversation inaccessible to so much of the population. We get it. You're a smarty pants. But you fail to move the pegs when you're only talking to other academics.
• 
  Avital

  In Bodies that Matter Judith Butler replies to the criticism of her earlier book Gender Trouble. She argues with the feminist thinkers who see the body as matter--a material body with a sexual specification. According to her the body does not exist beyond a cultural construction. It serves as a site for the feminist theory independently of such a pre-discursive definition. In her introduction she explains:
  For surely bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these “facts,” one might skeptically proclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere construction. […] But their irrefutability in no way implies what it might mean to affirm them and through what discursive means. Moreover, why is it that what is constructed is understood as an artificial and dispensable character? (xi).
  
  The construction of bodies is a constitutive constraint, and bodies are understood through it. She states again that both body and gender are parts of discourse. The only way to reach the matter beyond discourse is through discourse itself. After all, it is the discourse that defines the body as a matter existing beyond it.
  Inspired by Foucault, she contends that discourse is based on power relations and manipulated by those who control the sources of knowledge. The definition of what is natural is manipulated as well. Henceforth, the materiality of the body is discursive. The material body, its boundaries and its sexuality, materialize through the repetition of policing norms. The norms attribute meaning to it. Even the body limits are the product of social codes according to which certain practices are allowed and others are not.
  Butler goes back to the concept of performativity and confirms that repeatedly performed acts normalize an attributed gender, as well as marks of race, class and sexuality. Discourse defines certain bodies as natural, thus marginalizing others. This alludes to the fact that the accepted body does not owe it to its biological characteristics but to cultural signs.
  Based on Luce Iragaray’s Lacanian analysis, Butler also investigates the political coherence for which certain bodies are not legitimized. Through her own and Iragaray’s analysis of Platos’ work Timaeus, she reaches the conclusion that the marginalized bodies are related to homosexuality. She concludes that deconstruction cannot be based on already constituted references. Only a truly open debate can bring change.
  
• 
  Rachel Lu

  Finished this a couple weeks ago but wanted to write a review so I didn't update anything. Yet, here I am, reviewless (needed to take better notes while reading this). Since I'm going to skim through this again anyway, I'm just going to post this for now. My current thoughts:
  
  1. Butler has some really interesting concepts and phrases (gender is a performance/gender performativity/the performativity of gender) that has been adopted into the mainstream dialogue and misinterpreted. When Butler says gender is performative, she doesn't mean that an individual necessarily has the agency to act and perform gender. But she is also not deterministic. More on this later.
  
  2. HOWEVER, her language (the language she uses to explain her concepts and thinking) is abysmal. Butler herself acknowledges this while conceding the difficulty of her predecessor's writings as well (Lacan, Freud, etc). Her spiel is that her concepts are pushing against the other hegemonic, discursive materialities that structure the matrix of relations among people, so she needs to write AGAINST the grain. I get it. But then, a couple days ago, I read an essay of hers from 1988 on performative acts and gender constitution, which related similar concepts in a much more direct, clear manner, and it didn't change or simplify those concepts in any way. So I don't see a point in her later convoluted syntax and diction. Someone in the reviews section said that he/she thinks it's irresponsible that Butler makes it so inaccessible to read about such important concepts. I would have to agree.
  
  3. On the topic of language, (the materiality of) language is not the same as (strictly) materiality (as if one can say strictly materiality and separate the two, but still) but they're also not opposed. They're intertwined. Though there is no materiality outside of language, the body is not JUST language as "every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material” (37-8).
  
  4. Butler's textual analysis of Paris is Burning, Willa Cather's short stories and Nella Larsen's Passing is much more accessible and interesting (if at some points also very questionable). There are still moments of psychoanalysis, which she both uses and dismantles to discuss matter, gender and compulsive heteronormativity, but it's more tangible.
  
  Okay, that's it for now. More soon.
• 
  Μαρία Γεωργιάδου

  λίγο πιο απλά να τα 'γραφες ρε Τζούντιθ...
• 
  Erdem Tasdelen

  This certainly cleared up a few ideas that seemed vague in Gender Trouble. Butler asserts here that the performativity of gender does not imply an agency that allows one to put it on and take it off as one pleases, which is in dialogue with Spivak's elaboration of deconstruction where she dismisses the idea of free play. Performativity in this sense is a repetitive reiteration that imagines and images a coherent identity at the cost of its own complexity. It is not a matter of antagonizing the one who performs or the performance itself, but to make the distinction, which then results in the shattering of the heterosexual matrix.
  
  What still needs further elaboration within this discussion is the materiality of sex. I understand and concur with Butler's dismissal of the idea that sex is in a sense a tabula rasa free of identity onto which gender is projected. Sex, then, also enters our perception through discourse, and is made sense of discursively. But where does one draw the line? Which part of the materiality of the body is to be understood as that which is essential to sexuality? To say that our understanding of sex is shaped by discourse is one thing, but that requires a clarification of the extent to which genitality dictates sexuality. On the other hand I really admire Butler's suggestion that a project worth pursuing is of alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic pleasure. I was first introduced to this idea through Elizabeth Grosz's reading of desire in Spinoza, which led to a call for the proliferation of zones of pleasure, one that would not privilege genitality. I would certainly like to think and read more on this.
  
  I have to admit that I'm still not sure about Butler's insistance on psychoanalysis as a tool of empowerment that can be appropriated. It seems to me thus far that Lacan's phallogocentric discourse (along with Zizek's reading of Lacan and criticism of poststructuralism, feminism and particularly Foucault) is bluntly sexist, heterosexist and essentialist. I certainly like reading Butler's take on it, and there is some due credit to this idea of reversal (which can also be traced back to the appropriation of the word 'queer' itself by queer activists), but I'm not entirely convinced that this is the best way to deal with contemporary issues. I'd like to think that psychoanalysis has lost its widespread influence on how we make sense of the world.
  
  And just how beautiful is this: "The power of the terms 'women' or 'democracy' is not derived from their ability to describe adequately or comprehensively a political reality that already exists; on the contrary, the political signifier becomes efficacious by instituting and sustaining a set of connections as a political reality. In this sense, the political signifier in Zizek's view operates as a performative rather than a representational term. Paradoxically, the political efficacy of the signifier does not consist in its representational capacity; the term neither represents nor expresses some already existing subjects or their interests. The signifier's efficacy is confirmed by its capacity to structure and constitute the political field, to create new subject-positions and new interests."
• 
  Jamie

  Yes, it feels pretentious to give Butler 5-stars, or to consider this one of the best books I read this year, but I think she's just fantastic. People bitch and moan about her 'moonspeak' but frankly, I think it's rare to find a theorist or a philosopher more inclined to help the reader understand--there's a highly methodical, repetitive quality to the way she states her ideas. It's clear to me that she *wants* her reader to follow along, it's just that the ideas at hand are frequently so dense that it's near-impossible to 'master' them in the way she seems to. I know I've got many many readings of this text ahead of me, because even having read this a couple of months ago (and reread a couple of the chapters over the course of the semester for papers and such), I'm already losing my grasp in the quicksand of a lot of it. The introduction and the title chapter are perhaps the most dense and the most challenging to just read through, but both are well worth it. Some of the "Lesbian Phallus" chapter was over my head because of my limited experience with Freud, Lacan, and Irigaray--but it also had some really unexpected, hilarious lowbrow dick humor from Butler (she says at the beginning of the chapter something along the lines of "perhaps the promise of a phallus is always somewhat disappointing"). Her readings of Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the documentary-film 'Paris is Burning' are both simply awe-inspiring; for each, she breaks them down into their most basic components and offers compelling interpretations of each in the context of her own argument--and against others' arguments (this is particularly fun to watch in the chapter on 'Paris is Burning').
  
  In short, this was not my first experience with Butler, but it was my most in-depth--and it was so rewarding. I genuinely found this to be one of the most provocative, engaging, and all-around-best books I worked through this year. Looking forward to more experiences with good ol' Judy B.
• 
  Ty

  It's worth reading but I consider Butler much stronger on immigration and citizenship concerns than on those of sexuality. I recognize her lexicon makes a fair bit of her writing generally inaccessible but having taken on her works half a dozen times, I don't notice that anymore.
  
  From using the sole, individual, case of David Reimer to make sweeping statements on gender (which she conflates into sex at the most disturbing of times), imposing a change in pronouns onto someone else's repeatedly expressed preference to then declaring it supports transsexuals when in fact it is routinely used in anti-medical transition rhetoric, I struggle to voice my opposition to her work amidst the flood of praise she garners from most people in my circles.
• 
  Sabrarf

  This book is clearly a better version of her other book "gender trouble". It explains in much more detail the queering performativity which allows individuals to define themselves beyond just sexuality!
• 
  Daniela

  Butler not only looks like a mad German philosopher but writes like one.
• 
  Marta D'Agord

  Nesse livro, publicado originalmente em 1993, a autora analisa o ponto de vista heterocêntrico na relação entre sexo e gênero e desses dois com o racismo. A autora escreve esse livro em continuidade a outro, Problemas de Gênero, buscando desenvolver mais amplamente a noção de performatividade que teria produzido mal-entendidos em alguns leitores. Na tradução do inglês para o português, perdemos a duplicidade do matter, que diz do material, da materialidade, e também do que importa. Trata-se de um livro denso pois são muitas as referências filosóficas.
  Vou enfocar o que considero os pontos fortes do livro. O ponto de partida a ser sempre lembrado é a distinção de Gayle Rubin entre os domínios da sexualidade e gênero. Dos oito capítulos, destaco algumas partes: a análise histórica do uso do termo queer na língua inglesa e que me fez associar à breve análise freudiana do termo Unheimlich na língua alemã, encontrando na língua portuguesa duas traduções: estranho e infamiliar. Em dois capítulos, há uma análise literária da invisibilidade do homoerotismo e do racismo. Do romance My Ántonia, de Willa Cather, publicado em 1918, o gênero é trabalhado na questão do uso de personagens masculinos como uma forma de crossdressing. No outro capítulo, as questões imaginárias de homens e mulheres brancos em torno da sexualidade das mulheres negras são analisadas no romance Passing de Nella Larsen, publicado em 1929. O título envolve o “passar por” branco, no caso da personagem preta que convivia com brancos que, ao negarem o racismo, negavam que ela fosse preta.
  Outro capítulo analisa outras questões que vão além da performatividade de gênero na cena de bailes LGTB novaiorquinos da década de 1980 (a partir do documentário Paris is Burning de 1990). Ao final, Butler propõe focalizar as restrições como limites do que se pode e do que não se pode construir. Esses limites são relativos às formas hegemônicas de discurso. Se o uso do vocábulo queer fez com que seu sentido mudasse, foi porque um movimento político contra-hegemônico adotou esse vocábulo. Esse é um exemplo histórico de emergência de outras falas, outros discursos sobre o sexo e a sexualidade.
• 
  lucy

  ok i didn't technically "finish" this book but i read all the parts of it that i needed to!
• 
  M.

  This woman frustrates me greatly, for she thinks you can't pin her down, but she's so repetitive and obvious that even though this promises to provide the much needed clarifications to
  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, it just reaffirms everything I knew that was wrong with that book. In her vision, not only gender is a construct, but sex too.
  
  Of course she does not entirely reject the body, but says that there is nothing there which is not mediated by culture as if culture was bad on the whole. Of course, this is where the "BuT wHaT aBouT hErmApHrOdIteS?" argument comes from, failing to consider that even then, intersex people are a) extremely rare, and b)
  overwhelmingly genetically male. Sex is also determined by chromosomes rather than by a "phallogocentric Lacan dervided" construct. None of this takes away the reality of sex as such.
  
  Annoyingly enough, she has no better idea than to go on about psychology for a lot of time in the book, never considering that she's making up *constructs* to defy the constructs she dislikes.
  
  
  
  Science, folks.
  
• 
  Ruby

  i've been carrying this around for years now, reading bits of it. i don't think i'll ever read it in its entirety; not dedicated enough to wrestle with butler's style when i don't need to i suppose. nevertheless, the ideas in here are important and matter still 25 years later.
• 
  Kaitlyn Myers

  In a manner which echoes that of Faulkner and his long-winded contemporaries, Judith needs to practice getting to the point. She writes of important topics, yet the message is often hidden in a mish-mash of unnecessarily complex metaphors and/ or demonstrative stories.
• 
  Ayleen Julio

  Tan interesante como complicado de leer. Relectura necesaria e imperativa.
• 
  Jared

  The 20% I understood of this was BRILLIANT.
• 
  Caspar Bryant

  Ok it's Judith so it goes without saying this is a difficult text but even by their standards Bodies That Matter is a challenge. There's plenty of prep reading to do here, including one of the most difficult works of contemporary philosophy - Žižek's Sublime Object of Ideology . I don't think it's essential to read every text that JB has a chapter on here but certainly I think BTM asks for a level of Lacanian understanding and a competency with Derrida, who is especially present in the first half of the text. At the least watch Paris is Burning .
  
  Foucault Nietzsche Kristeva Irigaray Laclau Freud Kripke & bell hooks are others to have solid grasp of and I don't claim to possess this for all.
  
  It's a text that exists, in part, to tighten some of the screws of Gender Trouble , and I think it succeeds in that as well as developing new areas which seem even more fruitful than GT. will be coming back
• 
  anto

  ok i get it, butler is hard to read. they are, but so are most academic texts. and while i wholeheartedly agree that academia should be wayy more accessible, butler still is a linguistics and philosophy professor, so of course their writing is on another level of pretentiousness. and that’s fine. if you want digestible judith butler just watch one of their interviews on youtube. butler is still alive and gives talks and shit.
• 
  Anton

  I gave up trying to read this because it’s not in any way enjoyable to read and I have better things to do rather than trying to decipher this text. I might give this another shot at some point if I can find the book in my native language or have the energy to really focus on the text.
• 
  bella gaia

  Wow. This was so fascinating.
  
  This is very much a response to Butler’s earlier (and more well known) work ‘Gender Trouble’, and despite having read it a couple of years ago I think the two do work together very well. Here, Butler takes the body itself as her place of departure, exploring the ways in which discourse acts to constitute the body, and the power that constructs this discourse. I thought her use of Derridean citationality with reference to gender performativity and how it ultimately reveals the unstable and incoherent nature of gender itself was particularly fascinating, and her argument for a fundamentally intersectional queer theory with her analysis of Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ is brilliant. This is as dense as Butler always is, but absolutely worth the work.
• 
  Marissa Kessenich

  I chose to read Butler's second book because, in responding to and acknowledging some of the critiques of their first ("Gender Trouble"), this book is (relatively) more economical and approachable in its language. Butler's argument is much more lucid here, and all the stronger because of their response to critics. In conversation with writers like Derrida and Althusser, Butler argues that the subject is constituted through exclusion and abjection. The exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed also requires the production of "unlivable" or "uninhabitable" zones of social life. Therefore, in order to identify bodies that matter, there must also be bodies that do not.
  Butler still loves to discuss other writers' work at length (to the point that their own arguments get a little convoluted), but I was nonetheless impressed with two of their essays in Part II on Willa Cather and Nella Larsen (specifically on "Passing"). That being said, the chapter on Slavoj Zizek was truly incomprehensible.
• 
  Tori

  a very tentative five stars here because butler’s ideas, where intelligible, are incredibly prescient and useful, but her prose is of wildly varying quality.
  
  the run of chapters in the middle of the book where she writes on ‘paris is burning’, willa cather, and nella larsen’s ‘passing’ are wonderful, using their primary texts to enable a really clear articulation of otherwise difficult-to-conceptualise concepts; the book’s problem is that this goodwill is then squandered on a lengthy discussion of žižek’s thoughts on the ‘lacanian real’, an effort that’s both difficult to read and to understand the motivations behind (imo žižek’s theory leaving no space for women is less an issue of attention than a product of his reactionary misogyny).
  
  all this is to say that when ‘bodies that matter’ is good, it’s amazing; vital, challenging, and comprehensive. it’s hard work, though, and if i didn’t find the work it does so important i would criticise its flaws much more strongly than i have here.
• 
  Andy

  This text lived up to its reputation--challenging! Much tougher than her more recent works, and requiring a lot more psychoanalytic background. I'm definitely going to need a primer on Freud and Lacan before I come back to this.
  
  Another book from my embodiment reading list done!
• 
  Jimena Casillas

  What is gender?
• 
  Roger Green

  Almost 25 years after initial publication, Butler's work holds up as a classic. With readings of Freud, Lacan, the film Paris Burning, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau, this book has a massive scope. We often forget by focusing on Butler the theorist / philosopher just how solid she is at reading a variety of textual mediums.
• 
  Roy Oliver Corvera

  This book has tackled many fantastic ideas but fallen into a category of being inaccessible to many–by using critical words that could be simplified into more understandable, digestible ones-failing to reach and inform a set of diverse communities. With topics that concern and highlight the struggles of society, we must use a communication tool that is accessible not only to the part of the academe but also to the ordinary, underprivileged people.
• 
  Alex Lee

  Here Judith Butler expands on the agental role that "queering" performativity allows for the creation of individuals beyond sexuality. While most of the book is geared towards shoring up (and critiquing) psychoanalytic roles of sexual determination of identity and subjectivity, Butler also includes a few complex examples of how marked positions within the sexual dichotomy as it relates to phallics and sexual identity is problematized.
  
  Although at times with terse sentences that sometimes say too much in one bite, I feel that Butler successfully sees both sides of the issue and navigates through this minefield with a fresh outlook on how sexuality plays a role in determining how we consider ourselves and how we consider others. Using the various figures of transgender and drag and so on, Butler ultimately demonstrates that the agency relationship of performativity still requires that dichotomous hetereosexual cut. Although the performative natures of drag and trans, "queering" normative roles is always a subversive possibility, the reliance of the dichotomous hetereosexual norms as a queering always has the possibility of retroactively reinforcing rather than subverting. Put on the street, a gay pride rally may make non-normative hetereosexuals express themselves with aplomb but it will also allow conservative types to dig further into their entrenchment simply because the dichotomy is always invoked as a way of identifying who we are and where we are located.
  
  This transcendental cut is a difficulty with queering, one that Butler does not seem able to resolve. In a way, this has to do with the fact that despite performativity's power in one's ability to redefine one's self, this is always in relation to how others can define one's self through their acts. Thus her chapter on "lesbian phallus" and the straight woman as a melancholy lesbian or the straight man as a melancholy straight man is a way to note that all positions are "queering" when we begin to eradicate the normative judgements socially and understand the relations on the sexual "phallic" transcendental as mere positional exchange. We may want to inhabit certain positions above others, and in that sense all identity is performative and "queering" when understood through alternate filters.
  
  In a way, Butler stops in an appropriate spot. She doesn't go too deep into critiquing transcendental reason (as obviously this would take us afar off field) but she doesn't shy away from mentioning either, when appropriate. I feel that her ending could be tighter, as she takes a very long time to conclude where she wants to end, but she does the best that she can in outlining the fact that identity is created through sexual performativity as blind truth procedure rather than as an ontological given. She engages feminist theorists to this end in a way that is appropriate, although I feel she spends a little too much time with psychoanalysis, simply because she needs a bulwark that is hetereo-normative in order to sexualize the field in order to make her point.
  
  The twist from ontology to procedure is really the takeaway key here, to how Butler redeploys social identity for all of us. Taken in that approach, in theory, we could have avoided sexuality all together in performativity, but the charged nature of sexuality as a key to identity allows Butler to tackle the subject all the more strongly. Bravo.
• 
  Joseph Sverker

  2014: This is supposedly Butler's reply and clarification on some of the critique she received for Gender Trouble. I write supposedly with regard to the clarification because to my mind this book is more difficult to understand and really penetrate than Gender Trouble. And, also, I is really quite complex to follow what Butler thinks about the body, which is the critique she received against Gender Trouble in the first place. So from that perspective this book might be something of a failure. Having said that, I think it is no failure whatsoever. Butler challenges me to think about my preconceptions about the body. It is easy to take one's bodiless for granted. Yet, it is certainly difficult to state clearly in what this bodiless entails, since how I think about my body is affected by exactly that, how I think about my body.
  
  Butler's use of Lacan and Freud is difficult to know exactly how to relate to. Butler is critical against much of Freud's conclusions for examples, but appears to still want to use much or some of Freud's thinking and method. With the help of Lacan it is no longer Freud the develop psychologist that we are talking about I suspect, but rather something much more linguistic than that. But still, how much psychoanalysis can one bring in and still be credible?
  
  The book has two parts of which the first one is more theoretical and dense in what might be uncarefully called queer theory (I don't think Butler can be limited to that field of thinking namely) and the second part can be seen as some application of the theory and method put forward in the first part.
  
  
  
  2013: I read this book over an extended period of time and I think it was too long because it is2 not a book that one should dip in and out of. It is simply a bit too complex for that and one should really try to have Butler's terminology fresh in mind since it is very demanding to follow her thinking and to remember her own definitions of the words she uses. Having said that, the book really needs its time and one should not try to read it with any speed in mind. I think I made that mistake too. But next time I read it I will certainly pay it more justice.
  
  There are so many things to discuss from this book that my mind is sort of confused at the moment. I have still not got my mind around the performativity and the constitutiveness of language as in a sense prior to "nature" or "essence". That I need to revisit at take it slowly. I think Butler has man interesting things to say about identity in this book and that I will certainly use for my research and as such I will revisit that too and try to relate what she says her with her more recent writings.
  
  One question I bring with me coming out of this book is how valid the focus on psychoanalysis really is. It is of course valid in the internal discussion in the discourse in which Butler can be found, but when she takes the conclusions from that discourse and wants to apply it to "the real world" (a very problematic phrase to use in this context, I know), then how valid and applicable is it considering that psychoanalytics is pretty much discarded as psychological theory today?