Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

“It is not enough to argue that there is no prediscursive ‘sex’ that acts as the stable point of reference on which, or in relation to which, the cultural construction of gender proceeds. To claim that sex is already gendered, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced.”

In this quote from the Preface, Butler underscores the need to delve into the processes and forces that shape the materiality of sex within the context of gender construction. This quote announces her analysis of the complicated relationship between gender and sex as part of a dynamic of mutual reiteration. At the same time, Butler insists on the concreteness and materiality of sex outside its social signification.

“The category of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a ‘regulatory ideal.’ In this sense, then, ‘sex’ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls. Thus, ‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, ‘sex’ is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time.”

In this excerpt, Butler underscores the power of “sex” in actively producing and governing bodies. For Butler, who is influenced in her analysis by Michel Foucault, “sex” is a constructed “ideal” that compels materialization through specific, normative practices. Through her understanding of “sex,” Butler brings attention to the dynamic interplay between normativity, regulatory practices, and the ongoing construction of bodies in society.

“‘Sex’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility.”

With this argument, Butler aims to integrate sex as a concept into a cultural system. Sex is no longer, in her understanding, a fixed, unchanging fact but a category that can be contested and reworked. Butler also challenges the traditional relationship between sex and gender, according to which gender is the social dimension while sex is a biological fact. For Butler, both sex and gender are cultural constructs.

“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 of its full substantiation into gender or what, from a materialist point of view, might constitute a full desubstantiation.”

Butler further develops her thesis regarding the relationship between sex and gender. She posits that in the assumption of social meanings, sex is not an enduring opposition to gender but is rather renounced, giving way to gender as a term that fully substantiates and displaces the traditional, biological understanding of “sex.” This conceptual shift challenges the binary opposition between sex and gender and suggests a dynamic process in which gender absorbs, displaces, and transforms the materiality of sex.

“This exclusion of the feminine from the proprietary discourse of metaphysics takes place, Irigaray argues, in and through the formulation of ‘matter.’ Inasmuch as a distinction between form and matter is offered within phallogocentrism, it is articulated through a further materiality. In other words, every explicit distinction takes place in an inscriptional space that the distinction itself cannot accommodate. Matter as a site of inscription cannot be explicitly thematized. And this inscriptional site or space is, for Irigaray, a materiality that is not the same as the category of ‘matter’ whose articulation it conditions and enables.”

In engaging with Irigaray’s reading of metaphysics, Butler highlights the exclusion of the feminine from metaphysical discourse, particularly in the construction of the concept of matter. Irigaray’s critique centers on the metaphysical understanding of form and matter, emphasizing the presence of a materiality that eludes explicit thematic treatment. The feminine, however, is excluded from all metaphysical frameworks, remaining on the outside. Irigaray’s proposal, which Butler develops further in the first chapter of Bodies That Matter, is for a feminine intervention via mimesis, or imitation.

“The problem is not that the feminine is made to stand for matter or for universality; rather, the feminine is cast outside the form/matter and universal/particular binarisms. She will be neither the one nor the other, but the permanent and unchangeable condition of both—what can be construed as a nonthematizable materiality.”

Building on Irigaray’s critique of classical metaphysics, Butler clarifies that the feminine is placed outside the fundamental binaries of metaphysics. The critique lies in the denial of a fixed identity for the feminine, rendering it neither one nor the other but a perpetual condition encompassing both. This renders the feminine a nonthematizable materiality, challenging the binary frameworks that define and confine gender within predetermined categories.

“Insofar as the masculine is founded here through a prohibition which outlaws the spectre of a lesbian resemblance, that masculinist institution—and the phallogocentric homophobia it encodes—is not an origin, but only the effect of that very prohibition, fundamentally dependent on that which it must exclude.”

For Butler, the category of “masculinity” is a conceptual and cultural construct used to organize other concepts related to it. The masculine is, by default, exclusive of concepts that threaten it, such as the feminine and the queer. Thus, the masculine is fundamentally reliant on what it seeks to exclude. This highlights the dependent nature of the masculinist construction, emphasizing its reliance on the exclusion of certain identities for its perpetuation.

“If erotogenicity is produced through the conveying of a bodily activity through an idea, then the idea and the conveying are phenomenologically coincident. As a result, it would not be possible to speak about a body part that precedes and gives rise to an idea, for it is the idea that emerges simultaneously with the phenomenologically accessible body, indeed, that guarantees its accessibility.”

Erotogenicity is a concept used in psychoanalysis and gender studies to designate the capacity of a body or physical part to respond to erotic stimulation. In the quote above, erotogenicity is considered in relation to a body’s ability to respond to an idea, highlighting the interplay between sexual arousal and the conceptualization that bodies experience. This quote challenges the notion of linear causality, in which a specific body part precedes and gives rise to an idea. Instead, Butler disrupts the conventional understanding of the body preceding the conceptual, inviting contemplation of how the interplay of ideas and bodily activities shapes our understanding of embodied experiences.

“The pathologization of erotogenic parts in Freud calls to be read as a discourse produced in guilt, and although the imaginary and projective possibilities of hypochondria are useful, they call to be dissociated from the metaphorics of illness that pervade the description of sexuality. This is especially urgent now that the pathologization of sexuality generally, and the specific description of homosexuality as the paradigm for the pathological as such, are symptomatic of homophobic discourse on AIDS.”

Butler, along with other feminist scholars, uses psychoanalysis to dissect the discourses that inform the societal construction of gender and sexuality. However, Butler also challenges some of the fundamental precepts of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, such as the tendency to conceptualize sexuality as a pathology, meaning a condition, behavior, or phenomenon that is abnormal, deviant, or indicative of a disorder. By urging a dissociation of pathology and sexuality, Butler asks for a nuanced understanding, pointing to the intersection of sexual pathologization, specifically regarding gay sex/identities and the AIDS crisis, inviting critical examination of the societal implications of these discursive practices.

“If the phallus is a privileged signifier, it gains that privilege through being reiterated. And if the cultural construction of sexuality compels a repetition of that signifier, there is nevertheless in the very force of repetition, understood as resignification or recirculation, the possibility of deprivileging that signifier.”

Butler highlights the fact that the recurrence of the phallus as a signifier in cultural discourse also holds the potential for deprivileging this signifier. They point to the inherent tension between the compulsion to repeat cultural norms and the subversive potential embedded within the act of repetition itself.

“Here, at the risk of repeating myself, I would suggest that performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject.”

For Butler, the concept of iterability—repetition—challenges a traditional understanding of agency, as it suggests that the subject is not the performer but is rather constituted through the very act of repetition. Here, agency is not located in individual willful actions but emerges through the reiterated and constrained practices that shape the subject. Although performativity does not exclude the subject’s agency, it relies on the repetition of discourses and acts rather than an individual’s will to act.

“‘Sex’ is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. This productive reiteration can be read as a kind of performativity. Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make. Paradoxically, however, this productive capacity of discourse is derivative, a form of cultural iterability or rearticulation, a practice of re signification, not creation ex nihilo. Generally speaking, a performative functions to produce that which it declares. As a discursive practice (performative ‘acts’ must be repeated to become efficacious), performatives constitute a locus of discursive production. No ‘act’ apart from a regularized and sanctioned practice can wield the power to produce that which it declares.”

The concept of iterability is crucial here, as it suggests that performativity involves the repeated rearticulation of cultural norms rather than spontaneous creation. Despite the seeming power of performative action to produce something (a sexed subject, for example), Butler argues that this production involves repeated practices. The discursive creation of identities is contingent on the repetition of norms over time.

“The despair evident in some forms of identity politics is marked by the elevation and regulation of identity-positions as a primary political policy. When the articulation of coherent identity becomes its own policy, then the policing of identity takes the place of a politics in which identity works dynamically in the service of a broader cultural struggle toward the rearticulation and empowerment of groups that seeks to overcome the dynamic of repudiation and exclusion by which ‘coherent subjects’ are constituted.”

Butler critiques the emphasis on identity as a policy in itself, which leads to regulatory practices that involve identity. Such regulatory practices work by excluding beings that do not conform to those identities. Instead, Butler advocates for a more dynamic political engagement in which identity functions in the service of an overall transformation of the cultural context.

“In this sense, the argument that the category of ‘sex’ is the instrument or effect of ‘sexism’ or its interpellating moment, that ‘race’ is the instrument and effect of ‘racism’ or its interpellating moment, that ‘gender’ only exists in the service of heterosexism, does not entail that we ought never to make use of such terms, as if such terms could only and always reconsolidate the oppressive regimes of power by which they are spawned. On the contrary, precisely because such terms have been produced and constrained within such regimes, they ought to be repeated in directions that reverse and displace their originating aims.”

Although they acknowledge that terms such as “sex,” “race,” and “gender” are products of and constrained by oppressive systems, Butler argues against an absolute avoidance of these terms. Instead, they suggest a strategic repetition and redirection of these terms to subvert their original oppressive aims, emphasizing the potential for transformative and resistant uses of language within a broader political framework.

“Although many readers understood Gender Trouble to be arguing for the proliferation of drag performances as a way of subverting dominant gender norms, I want to underscore that there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and re-idealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms. At best, it seems, drag is a site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes.”

Butler complicates the commonly perceived relationship between drag performances and subversion of gender norms. Instead of considering drag to be a subversive practice by default, Butler sees drag as a practice with access to both subversive and power-reinforcing practices. By characterizing drag as a site of ambivalence, Butler highlights the complex situation gender performativity involves. In this quote, drag represents the entanglement of individuals in the same power structures they resist.

“The name, as part of a social pact and, indeed, a social system of signs, overrides the tenuousness of imaginary identification and confers on it a social durability and legitimacy. The instability of the ego is thus subsumed or stabilized by a symbolic function, designated through the name: the ‘permanent appearance over time’ of the human subject is, Lacan claims, ‘strictly only recognizable through the intermediary of the name. The name is the time of the object.’”

Butler uses Lacanian theory to emphasize the stabilizing role of names within the social construction of identity. A name operates as a symbolic anchor, imparting durability and legitimacy to the otherwise fragile and shifting realm of imaginary identification. In addition, Butler underscores the significance of linguistic and symbolic structures in conferring temporal continuity and recognition to the subjective experience.

“For women, then, propriety is achieved through having a changeable name, through the exchange of names, which means that the name is never permanent, and that the identity secured through the name is always dependent on the social exigencies of paternity and marriage. Expropriation is thus the condition of identity for women. Identity is secured precisely in and through the transfer of the name, the name as a site of transfer or substitution, the name, then, as precisely what is always impermanent, different from itself, more than itself, the non-self-identical.”

Butler discusses how women’s identity is tied to the fluidity and exchangeability of names within the social structures of patriarchy. Propriety for women is achieved through a constant negotiation of names, establishing a perpetual state of uncertainty. Since identity in society is dependent on name and fixed property, women are in an ambiguous situation.

“To coin Marx, then, let us remember that the reproduction of the species will be articulated as the reproduction of relations of reproduction, that is, as the cathected site of a racialized version of the species in pursuit of hegemony through perpetuity, that requires and produces a normative heterosexuality in its service. Conversely, the reproduction of heterosexuality will take different forms depending on how race and the reproduction of race are understood. And though there are clearly good historical reasons for keeping ‘race’ and ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual difference’ as separate analytic spheres, there are also quite pressing and significant historical reasons for asking how and where we might read not only their convergence, but the sites at which the one cannot be constituted save through the other.”

The fact that reproduction is a “cathected site” refers to the investment of emotional energy or affective attachment into an idea, object, or person. In Butler’s quote, this suggests that reproduction is not just a biological process but is also imbued with emotional and social significance, becoming a site where race and reproduction are tied together. Thus, Butler calls for an examination of how race and heterosexuality converge in historical and contemporary contexts.

“Within feminist debate, an increasing problem has been to reconcile the apparent need to formulate a politics which assumes the category of ‘women’ with the demand, often politically articulated, to problematize the category, interrogate its incoherence, its internal dissonance, its constitutive exclusions. The terms of identity have in recent years appeared to promise, and to promise in different ways, a full recognition. Within psychoanalytic terms, the impossibility of an identity category to fulfill that promise is a consequence of a set of exclusions which found the very subjects whose identities such categories are supposed to phenomenalize and represent. To the extent that we understand identity claims as rallying points for political mobilization, they appear to hold out the promise of unity, solidarity, universality. As a corollary, then, one might understand the resentment and rancor against identity as signs of a dissension and dissatisfaction that follow the failure of that.”

Butler addresses some of the issues that were in discussion regarding identity politics in the 1990s. One of these issues is the fact that any strictly imposed social category, such as the category called “women,” will create both solidarity and exclusion. Exclusion shapes the identities of the subjects these identities represent, which also creates internal tensions. The resentment directed at identity, therefore, can be understood as the response of the excluded category to the unmet promises of unity anticipated in identity-based political mobilization. Regarding the category “women,” the excluded category could be represented, for example, by transwomen or nonbinary folk.

“For Žižek, the political signifier is an empty term, a non-representational term whose semantic emptiness becomes the occasion for a set of phantasmatic investments to accrue and which, through being the site of such investments, wields the power to rally and mobilize, indeed, to produce the very political constituency it appears to ‘represent.’ For Žižek, then, the political signifier accrues those phantasmatic investments to the extent that it acts as a promise to return to a pleasurable satisfaction that is foreclosed by the onset of language itself; because there can be no return to this fantasized pleasure, and because such a return would entail the breaking of the prohibition that founds both language and the subject, the site of the lost origin is a site of unthematizable trauma. As a result, the promise of the signifier to make such a return is always already a broken one, but one nevertheless structured by that which must remain outside politicization and which must, for Žižek.”

Žižek’s work is of central focus for Butler, as the two thinkers were both involved in theoretical discussions regarding identity politics and psychoanalysis in the 1990s. Žižek sees political identity as lacking a fixed, inherent identity. Instead, it is the accumulation of desires and fantasies, with the promise, sometimes in the future, of satisfaction (for example, thinking that a revolution will liberate all individuals unjustly persecuted by society). Nevertheless, the impossibility of this pleasure is central to the constitution of the political signifier. The political signifier also works by creating an inside and outside: There are individuals who are represented by the signifier and those who are not.

“That there is always an ‘outside’ and, indeed, a ‘constitutive antagonism’ seems right, but to supply the character and content to a law that secures the borders between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of symbolic intelligibility is to preempt the specific social and historical analysis that is required, to conflate into ‘one’ law the effect of a convergence of many, and to preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation of that boundary which is central to the democratic project that Žižek, Laclau, and Mouffe promote.”

Butler critiques Žižek’s notion of an all-encompassing law because it takes away from the specificity of a category excluded by the law, leaving it without recourse in terms of political action. For example, for Žižek, the category “women” is excluded from symbolic intelligibility because it plays the role of the antagonist necessary for the law itself to function. Butler argues that this approach oversimplifies the complex social and historical dynamics at play. They argue that such a law stifles the potential for a democratic rearticulation of these boundaries in the future.

“To understand ‘women’ as a permanent site of contest, or as a feminist site of agonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy. In this sense, what is lamented as disunity and factionalization from the perspective informed by the descriptivist ideal is affirmed by the anti-descriptivist perspective as the open and democratizing potential of the category.”

Butler argues against the idea of a clear, unchanging category of “women.” They argue that such a closed category, which they associate with a strict description of what falls within that category, creates tensions that are not conducive to political action. Instead, they argue for an anti-descriptivist perspective, which keeps the category perpetually contested. By embracing the open and democratizing potential of the category, Butler contends that its political potential is maximized.

“Indeed, the term ‘queer’ itself has been precisely the discursive rallying point for younger lesbians and gay men and, in yet other contexts, for lesbian interventions and, in yet other contexts, for bisexuals and straights for whom the term expresses an affiliation with anti-homophobic politics. That it can become such a discursive site whose uses are not fully constrained in advance ought to be safeguarded not only for the purposes of continuing to democratize queer politics, but also to expose, affirm, and rework the specific historicity of the term.”

Butler emphasizes the dynamic and evolving nature of the term “queer,” pointing to its potential to reach beyond fixed categorizations. The multiplicity of uses and affiliations with “queer” is portrayed as vital for democratizing queer politics, allowing for a fluid and inclusive understanding that can adapt to diverse contexts. This observation of Butler’s has proven true; while “queer” was still widely used as a slur in the 1990s, it is a respected term in gender studies, LGBTQ+ communities, and cultural fields today.