Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

In Chapter 7, Butler challenges the common understanding of performativity as a performance or expression of human agency. Instead, Butler considers performativity to be shaped by discourse, independent of human will. Discourse, in turn, is the product of power in society and develops over time through the repetition of norms and exclusion. The exclusion applies to those who do not conform to society’s dictated norms. Performativity produces the identity of subjects within society. However, identity is an unstable category, shifting over time.

Butler then introduces Slavoj Žižek’s book, Sublime Objects of Ideology, in which he challenges poststructuralism, feminism, and other theories that focus on discourse as an umbrella category. Žižek argues that the reach of discourse is limited because it does not fully explain how subjects are formed in society. Instead, Žižek posits that it is important to include the Lacanian concept of foreclosure to explain the formation of the subject in society. Foreclosure represents the process of excluding one or multiple elements from symbolic discourse. According to Žižek, the subject retains an element of symbolic incoherence and is continuously defined by it. As a result, the process of subject formation is never complete, and the subject is never coherent.