About book Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of "Sex" (1993)
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.
I would give this book two stars but it's Judith Butler and as someone who conducts research in the field of Gender and Sexuality, my work owes a considerable debt to her and to this book. With that being said, Bodies that Matter is a book that seeks to reposition bodies in relation to sexuality through the re-reading of psychoanalysis and Irigaray. Specifically, bodies that are white, female marked, cis, and queer. If this were all that the book is, I wouldn't be bothered because it is, obviously, quite wonderfully written, read, theorized, etc., but my problem is the problem that so many academics have noted is how Butler decides to theorize this repositioning through the use of genderqueers of color from the 1991 film Paris is Burning. Extending her use of drag queens as a way to theorize gender from Gender Trouble, Butler extends that use and misreads everything. While I am not the biggest fan of her use of drag queens in Gender Trouble, I find it to not be entirely problematic because she works off of Esther Newton's well researched book on drag queens, Mother Camp. Re-reading a text and using the imagined materiality of bodies in that context is one thing but Paris is Burning (especially when if first came out) is another issue. Firstly, Butler misreads bell hooks' evocative review of the film and takes hooks' statement about the misogyny found within the mis-use of drag within the black community (that was Eddie Murphy in a dress) to be how hooks' read the queens in the film that is not the case at all! When reading hooks' review you can see how she is challenging spectators to look at how race plays a role in the construction of their lives and wants to challenge the spectacle that the director, Jennie Livingston, created that offers no insight to the characters as beings. To hooks' they are constructed as props for the camera and this especially noted with the death of Venus Xtravaganza, who was trans not a drag queen. Returning to Butler, Livingston is interesting because she is a lesbian who possesses the power to turn these queens and Venus into women. No, no, no, it doesn't work like that. Trans people and drag queens do not exist for theorist to rethink their sexualities that have no relation to a trans person or drag queen's body or sexuality. Frankly, it's offensive and although it bears a small part of the book it leaves a sour taste in ones' mouth. Also, I'm not big on psychoanalysis as a methodology unless you're Teresa de Lauretis so the rest of the book didn't offer me much.
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A good start, followed by a 100 page tangent, an awkward 50 of tripping over zizek and a great closing chapter than summarises what the rest of the book was supposed to be about. While butler's (admittedly cherry picked) cultural reference points go some way to explaining her ideas in action, it does feel like your being beaten around the head with it. I guess it's difficult to explain performative actions without giving examples, yet a lot of this book is taken up with descriptions of things we're better off just reading ourselves.Paris is burning, yes we get it can we carry on please. Saved by a concise final chapter which really focuses in on performativity and particularly, clarifying her interpretation of it. Had the book been 200 pages like this.... Wow. Still point made, even if it was in a roundabout kind of way.
—goodreads
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?
—Joseph Sverker
this book confirms that judith butler is seriously a genius. it was Extremely helpful to read this book in class, rather than on my own, which is how i've attempted other butler. for instance, when you get to the chapter that follows Butler on Irigaray on Plato, it helps to have someone around that knows the French psychoanalysts. And when you start reading about mirrors, identity and Lacan, having someone versed in Freud is really a bonus.so yeah, unless you know a fair amount of Zizek (and I understand some people really do), I recommend finding a good wikipedia-type source before beginning. I would skip over her reading of _Paris is Burning_. it's the weakest part of the book and actually bits of it are offensive to me and probably would also be to some trans/ally readers.but reading butler and getting it makes me feel smart. and i like to watch her take down the Old Masters (Freud, Lacan, Plato, Aristotle). its nice.oh! and in the footnotes, butler starts off one particular reference saying that Donna Haraway made such and such a comment "in a hot tub in santa cruz". meaning that at one point in time, judith butler and donna haraway were in a hot tub together in santa cruz. now that's nice.
—simon
