With the growing popularisation of gender equity ideas, the topic of gender limitations and philosophies becomes even more popular. Feminists try to reconsider the meaning of gender through the prism of social limitations and norms. Judith Butler is rightly considered as one of the most outstanding feminist writers of her time. She has had an enormous philosophic impact on the theory and practice of culture.
Her multidisciplinary revelations on gender, sex, social normalization, and performativity have changed the direction of the feminist thought. Butler has caused a real flood of new ideas and ideals, which question the ofrelevance of the widely accepted gender norms. Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” is a logical continuation of her philosophic tradition.
At the center of Butler’s book are the notions of performativity, citational politics, and queerness. As always, Butler manipulates the concept of power to collapse the traditional distinction between gender and sex and proves that power constraints sex at all stages of life since the moment of conception.
To start with, Bodies that Matter is a logical continuation of the ideas and concepts described by Judith Butler in her earlier works, including Gender Trouble. The latter created a strong foundation for the development of a distinct gender theory, which Butler describes in her book. The focus of Bodies that Matter is the gradual reformulation of the complex relationship between power and sexuality.
Such reformulation takes place based on Butler’s feminist ideas. At the very beginning of her book, Butler cites the words of Donna Haraway: “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (1). In this way, Butler sets the framework for the discussion that follows.
She implies that, as a feminist scholar, she will use her talent for writing to reconceptualize the materiality of the human body in terms of gender and its performativity.
It is performativity that becomes one of the chief themes in Butler’s book. At the same time, performativity is of the most controversial elements of Butler’s philosophic discussion. In the view promoted by Butler, performativity is directly related to the concepts of gender, sex, sexuality, and materialization of the body (2). On the one hand, sexuality is viewed as a repetitive, continuous, and reiterative process that leads to the emergence of certain discourse practices (Butler 2). On the other hand,
“the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual perspective.” (Butler 2)
Simply stated, Butler perceives performativity as being inherently limited to the heterosexual norms imposed on sexuality and gender representations in contemporary society. At the same time, performativity is not a fixed phenomenon. Rather, it is a repetitive process, which leads to the creation of the desired appearance, gender ontology, or vision of sexuality that fits or does not fit into the accepted norm.
It is wrong to believe that Butler’s performativity is synonymous to the freedom of choice. As Butler writes, performativity as a process and sequence of repeated acts does not mean that a person is free to choose his/her gender (5). Butler confirms: her idea of performativity does not entail the freedom of choosing and reproducing a gender a person desires to have (3).
On the contrary, the materialization of sexuality through performativity occurs based on the gender assigned to the individual from the very beginning of his/her existence. Butler writes that the materialization of gender starts even before the baby is born. The first signs of gender development in the fetus create the basis for the materialization of gender and sexuality later in life.
As always, Butler attributes the emergence of new limits on the materialization of gender and sexuality to the forcible imposition of social norms. Still, for Butler, gender and sexuality are related to the process of doing and re-doing oneself, an act of sexual and gender becoming, and it is this sequence of repetitive acts that constitute gradual materialization of one’s gender identity and its public representation.
Here, the idea of performativity should be critically evaluated. The current understanding of the performativity idea cannot be limited to Butler’s Bodies that Matter, at least because the origins of the concept are found in her earlier works, including Gender Trouble. Furthermore, Butler denies the very fixity of physical body, describing gender and sexuality as purely cultural constructs (4).
For Butler, both sex and gender are not static features of personality but flexible elements of life, which vary depending on the changing conditions of cultural intelligibility (5). An impression persists that performativity does not have any performer. Butler writes that the performer does not matter since it is performativity that creates the image of sexuality and gender.
By zeroing the relevance of fixed physical categories, Butler implies that gender and sex emerge as a result of various cultural reformulations, all of which do not have any material basis. It is the process of cultural reformulation that matters in the creation of visible gender representations in society.
Butler does not try to persuade her readers that performativity must have a performer. More importantly, she implies that performativity is linguistically and conceptually different from a performance. Performativity is closely connected to the emerging ideas of sex and gender as flexible categories imposed on a person by society, in which he/she is bound to exist.
What Butler says is that gender and sexuality cannot be tied to the physical features of the human body that become visible at birth. Rather, gender identity emerges and develops as a result of the complex interactions between nature and nurture, and the latter often plays a crucial role in how individuals bring their gender representations into being (Butler 24).
The role of language in constructing gender and sexuality discourses also should not be ignored. Butler calls it “citationality” (13).
The language of gender and sexuality is quite explicit but, at the same time, rather oppressive. As a feminist scholar, Butler criticizes her society for constraining the language of sexuality and gender to forcible notions and regulatory requirements (13). Simultaneously, she does not limit the discussion of her theory to the notions of sex.
Race emerges as a distinctive feature of Bodies that Matter, based on the discussion of Lacan and Freud in the later chapters of the book. Butler acknowledges that heterosexuality is not the only regime of bodily intelligibility imposed on individuals in the developed world (18).
For Butler, race exemplifies one of the central contours of the physical materialization of the human body, without which understanding the essence of social norms and power does not seem to be possible. Butler stands on a feminist position that links heterosexuality to the limits of race. Like heterosexuality is claimed to be a form of gender discrimination, racism is treated as discrimination based on the pre-given race (Butler 19).
For Judith Butler, the race is invariably one of the most interesting and emotional elements of the heterosexual power matrix (20). The scholar recognizes that the concept of race is not as flexible as the meaning of sexuality and gender (Butler 114). Also, it cannot be treated as subordinate to the meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Rather, both sex and race closely interact to reproduce or deny the prevalent mechanisms of power and established cultural imperatives (Butler 116). Certainly, Butler is not as interested in exploring the notion of race as she is curious about sexuality and gender.
Nevertheless, she recognizes the difficulties encountered by people due to their race. Moreover, Butler realizes the difference between “muted” sexuality and “muted” race (170). It is much more difficult for a person to conceal his/her race (or the color of skin) than to conceal and manage his/her representations of sexuality and gender.
Unfortunately, the sophisticated cultural ideas of Judith Butler are written in a no less sophisticated language, which makes the development of cultural knowledge increasingly problematic. The written style of Judith Butler is full of complexities, ambiguities, and obscurities.
Butler implies, instead of telling. She assumes, instead of asserting. Her audience is willing to grasp her ideas and translate them into actions, but many readers cannot come to terms with the language structures and sentence models used by Butler in her book. Many terms and concepts require additional explanations.
Many references to the earlier philosophers and works make it difficult for an ordinary reader to understand the complexity of Butler’s ideas. Still, even the complexity of the language forms in Bodies that Matter does not diminish the significance of her ideas, including the idea of queerness.
In Butler’s book, queerness is reconsidered from both sexual and racial perspectives. Queerness serves as an intermediate point between reiteration of sexuality and race. Butler implicitly votes for political mobilization based on queerness (Butler 22). In many senses, Butler’s entire book must stimulate the emergence of new conceptualizations, ideas, and powers against the hegemony of heterosexuality in the modern world.
In conclusion, Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter provides a unique insight into the challenging ideas of feminism, gender and sexuality constraints, the power and implications of race, and the role played by queerness in mobilizing the public against gender and racial oppression. Performativity remains one of the central themes in Butler’s book, implying that gender and sexuality are not fixed categories.
Rather, they operate as a complex set of repetitive acts and decisions that help to create an image of belonging to a specific gender. Performativity is also one of the most controversial concepts in Butler’s book and the entire feminist thought.
The complexity of Butler’s language, her obscurities, and linguistic assumptions create considerable difficulties for a common reader, who is not familiar with her ideas but wants to understand them in depth. As a result, this book can be recommended for professional reading.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.