Jeffrey Nealon

Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu

 

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York & London: Routledge, 1993.

 

Editor’s note: readers may also be interested in the PMC-MOO discussion of this book, archived here .

 

— JU

 

Judith Butler has certainly produced a body of work that matters. It matters not only because it takes “theory” into the realm of difficult socio-political analysis, but also because it does so without sacrificing the complexities, hesitations and difficulties that necessarily surround such a project. For Butler, theory matters precisely as practice, as material response to specific (and often horrific) political situations: it is an analysis of how these situations have come to be structured as they are, and how they can be changed without simply reinstituting the very same normative interpellating discourses that gave rise to such situations in the first place. In Bodies That Matter, Butler takes up “the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (9, italics removed). And it is precisely in accounting for identity as the product of still-conflicted exclusionary normative practices that Butler asks us to consider the possibility of reinscribing “our” heterogeneous present and future. While categories of identity certainly cannot and should not be abandoned in such a project, Butler nonetheless argues for the theoretical and political necessity “to learn a double movement: to invoke the category, and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest” (222). It is because her work has this relentlessly dual focus–calling for concrete responsive action in the present while preserving the possibility, indeed necessity, of a reinscribed future–that Butler’s work matters so singularly and crucially. Bodies That Matter is a book very much written in the margins of 1990’s Gender Trouble, itself a kind of feminist rewriting of Butler’s vastly underrated (or at least underquoted) book on Hegel and contemporary French thought, Subjects of Desire (1987). There is, in other words, a great deal of Bodies That Matter devoted to correcting or complicating certain (mis)readings of Gender Trouble, especially those readings that took it to be arguing for an understanding of gender as a performance. As Butler writes, if she were arguing that gender was a performance, “that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night” (Bodies, x).¹ But as Butler makes clear time and again in Bodies That Matter, her notion of gender as performative is not simply equatable with understanding gender as a performance; “The reduction of performativity to performance,” she writes, “would be a mistake” (234).

 

But how, then, are we to understand this crucial distinction? Drawing from Foucault’s work on discursive formation, Derrida on speech act theory and iterability, and Eve Sedgwick’s work on queer performativity, Butler fashions a notion of performative identity that “must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (2).² According to Butler, because the subject is the product of specific constraining normative frames, it cannot simply choose its gender as actors pick parts in plays; but, at the same time, because these compulsory normative frames never merely determine a subject without simultaneously opening spaces of resistance (in other words, because interpellation sometimes fails), agency is made possible and efficacious precisely because of and within these frames. “And if there is agency,” Butler writes, “it is to be found, paradoxically, in the possibilities opened up in and by that constrained appropriation of the regulatory law, by the materialization of that law, the compulsory appropriation and identification with those normative demands . . . Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical” (12).³ The subject, in other words, is itself a product of interpellating codes, and therefore it cannot simply enforce a critical distance between itself and these codes. If there is to be subversion of identities, it must be subversion from within, a reinscription rather than a supposed remaking ex nihilo.

 

As the book’s subtitle might suggest, Butler’s theoretical apparatus is quite specifically constructed out of a consideration of the category “sex” within the normative frames of compulsory heterosexuality. As Butler argues, “sex” is itself such a performative or citational practice:

 

“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 resignification, not creation ex nihilo. . . . [W]hat is invoked by the one who speaks or inscribes the law is the fiction of a speaker who wields the authority to make his [sic] words binding, the legal incarnation of the divine utterance. (107)

 

As speech-act theory argues, performatives seem to found a situation that they merely cite: the judge’s “I now pronounce you man and wife” or the midwife’s “It’s a girl” pretend to be the “legal incarnation of the divine utterance,” when on further examination either speech act is actually “a form of cultural iterability”: such performatives iterate interpellating codes; they do not somehow found a wholly new state. A subject is, then, always cited into an identity, but, in what is only a seeming paradox, it is precisely the necessity of repeating these interpellating citational codes–of constantly identifying oneself before the law–that offers possibilities for subverting or rearticulating identity. The necessity of repetition opens the possibility of repeating these codes with a difference: “I now pronounce you man aswife” or “It’s a lesbian.” As Butler writes, “Since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure” (108).

 

If this were as far as Butler’s work went, it would certainly be a valuable enough contribution to feminist theory–which remains, on Butler’s reading, mired in an unproductive and divisive essentialism/constructionism debate. Certainly a notion of citational performativity allows us to see past the limiting binarisms of this debate to explore the ways in which particular historical and social interpellations give rise to specific subjectivities; likewise, and perhaps more importantly, it allows us to see the ways in which those interpellations contain the very terms of their own reinscription. If Butler’s work were to stop here, however, it would leave open the question of how one gets from a notion of the citational construction of identity to the subversion or reinscription of that identity; it would leave unanswered the question of how one gets from interpellation to resistance–or, more accurately and pressingly, how one gets from the possibility of resistance to its actual activation or articulation.

 

And it is precisely her intricate and nuanced consideration of this question that makes Butler’s Bodies That Matter not merely timely, incisive, and challenging reading, but essential reading. Bodies That Matter certainly clarifies Gender Trouble‘s arguments about an identificatory citational interpellation that carries the possibility of its own subversion; however, in Bodies That Matter Butler goes a step further, taking up the

 

critical question of how constraints not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies. The latter domain is not the opposite of the former. . . ; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside. . . . To claim that sex is already gendered, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced. (xi, italics removed)

 

Butler here asks us to take a step past the platitudinous understanding that “everything is socially constructed,” and move toward an examination of the specificexclusions by which social construction secures identities. As she writes, “thinking the body as constructed demands a rethinking of the meaning of construction itself” (xi), and such a rethinking entails accounting not only for the production of normative identities, but the simultaneous production of unlivable, abject identities–though such sites may turn out, in a painful paradox, to be primary among the potential sites for normative identity’s subversion.

 

In other words, while it is certainly important and productive to point out that “‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal … that will produce its remainder, its outside” (22), it is another matter altogether to account for the ways in which such “remainder” subjectivities are produced in specific historico-cultural situations as abjected, produced as by-products of the violent exclusions that secure normative identities. As Butler writes in the service of that project:

 

there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute ‘outside,’ an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside,’ it is that which can only be thought–when it can–in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. The debate between constructivism and essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction altogether, for the point has never been that ‘everything is discursively constructed’; that point . . . refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection, and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy. (8)

 

The upshot of Butler’s notion of performativity, in other words, is not that everything is structured, but rather that everything is dependent on structures–linguistic, institutional, political–that are cited and recited in any specific case; and, she argues, it is precisely an attention to the material specificity of the “constitutive ‘outside'” in any particular case that would allow us to respond to and reinscribe the multiple exclusions that make an identity possible or livable, while making other identities impossible or unlivable. The constructionism debate, in other words, needs to pay attention to the specificity of the restrictions that make possible the social construction of a particular normative ideal; as Butler insists, for example, an analysis of the workings of contemporary homophobia is notequal to or simply metaphorizable as an analysis of contemporary racism (18).

 

In fact, Butler argues that feminism itself is necessarily founded on similar exclusions, and loses much critical force if it does not engage its own grounding restrictions (29). For example, Butler takes up bell hooks’s thematization of the drag balls portrayed in Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning as misogynist. Butler points out that with this charge hooks “makes male homosexuality about women.” In turn, this reduction of the specificity of drag offers a troubling “way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual activity” (127). In other words, such feminist readings of Paris is Burning misfire when they read it solely in terms of a supposed male-identified femininity, rather than as a multiple, conflicted renegotiation or “site of the phantasmatic promise of a rescue from poverty, homophobia, and racist delegitimation” (130).⁴ Similarly, Butler argues that Irigaray’s work runs a parallel risk when it reads the exclusion of the feminine as the master or paradigmatic exclusion in philosophical, cultural or political life. While Butler affirms the importance of Irigaray’s feminist reading of Plato, she nevertheless hesitates, asking after the multiple exclusions that secure normative identity in Plato’s texts:

 

There are good reasons, however, to reject the notion that the feminine monopolizes the sphere of the excluded. . . . This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialized Others, and those whose ‘natures’ are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of laboring to reproduce the conditions of private life. . . . Irigaray does not always help matters here, for she fails to follow through the metonymic link between women and these other Others, idealizing and appropriating the ‘elsewhere’ as the feminine. But what is the ‘elsewhere’ of Irigaray’s ‘elsewhere’? (48-49)

 

It is this “metonymic link between women and these Others” that Butler’s text helps us to form. While it would seem that feminism loses critical force and focus if it concerns itself with exploring exclusions other than the exclusion of the feminine, Butler persuasively argues that the opposite is the case–that feminism is doomed to inefficacy unless it takes up the multiplicity of exclusions that actually form the seemingly totalized category “feminine.”

 

While such collective identifications under common-cause signifiers (“woman,” “queer,” “African American”) are indispensible for the project of recognition within a conflicted democracy, Butler argues that

 

the persistence of disidentification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of democratic contestation. Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized. Such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern. (4)

 

Again, Butler here reemphasizes the importance of a kind of double movement: the necessity of identification coupled with the necessity that this identificatory movement be open to reinscription. As she insists throughout Bodies That Matter, there is no stable identificatory site of “femininity” or “queerness,” and, in fact, ensuring the multiplicity of such identificatory sites is critical to feminist and queer body politics. I take the upshot of Butler’s discussion here to be that feminism, for example, cannot protect its identificatory sites from being inhabited by drag queens, Phyllis Schlafly, James Joyce or whomever. In fact, to turn a Foucaultian phrase, Butler asks us to consider what it costs us to protect such seemingly stable sites of contestation from contestation itself? In other words, what normativizing practices are reified and extended in protecting a site of stable identificatory femininity? This is perhaps Butler’s most poignant question to identity politics; as she writes, “it seems important, then, to question whether a political insistence on coherent identities can ever be the basis on which a crossing over into political alliance with other subordinated groups can take place, especially when such a conception of alliance fails to understand that the very subject-positions in question are themselves a kind of ‘crossing,’ are themselves the lived scene of a coalition’s difficulty” (115).

 

However, and just as importantly, Butler’s is not merely an empty celebratory gesture toward a contentless “postmodern” multiplicity.⁵ As she writes, “one might be tempted to say that identity categories are insufficient because every subject position is the site of converging relations of power that are not univocal. But such a formulation underestimates the radical challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply” (229-30). How is it, we might ask, that simply recognizing the multiplicity of possible identificatory sites (or is that cites?) “underestimates the radical challenge to the subject” that Butler wants to pose? To answer this question, perhaps we need to turn to Butler’s continuing engagement with Lacan. Butler takes very seriously Lacan’s Freudian vocabulary of “foreclosure” as the suturing constitution of the subject. Such foreclosure, of course, creates both the subject and the exclusions that she calls us to attend to throughout Bodies That Matter. For example, Butler points out that within the constraints of Lacan’s compulsory heterosexuality, the “feminized fag and phallicized dyke” become the uninhabitable positions which are foreclosed in the taking up of compulsory heterosexuality, “a move that excludes and abjects gay and lesbian possibilities” (96). But what happens, Butler asks, when those abjected sites, by and through their very exclusion or foreclosure, become sites of subversive desire and identification? What happens, in other words, “if the taboo becomes eroticized precisely for the transgressive sites that it produces” (97)? Certainly, Lacan would have taught us that this is just how desire works (98ff), but what happens when we subject the Lacanian analysis of sexual difference to a kind of symptomatic Lacanian reading?

 

What happens (if I can try to extrapolate from an intensely nuanced, sustained and careful reading) is that the monologizing Lacanian Oedipal law of signification–expropriation from the real into the symbolic under the threat of castration–loses its absolute privilege. Certainly, as Butler notes, Lacan’s version of resistance to interpellating norms–desire necessarily cathecting onto forbidden objects, the power of the imaginary to resist the law of the symbolic–has proven productive for his feminist readers. In fact, the imaginary has proven to be the productive hinge by which to read Lacan against Lacan’s own foreclosure of other economies. As Butler writes:

 

this version of resistance has constituted the promise of psychoanalysis to contest strictly opposed and hierarchical sexual positions for some feminist readers of Lacan. But does this view of resistance fail to consider the status of the symbolic as immutable law? And would the mutation of that law call into question not only the compulsory heterosexuality attributed to the symbolic, but also the stability and discreteness of the distinction between symbolic and imaginary registers within the Lacanian scheme? It seems crucial to question whether resistance to an immutable law is sufficient as a political contestation of compulsory heterosexuality, where this resistance is safely restricted to the imaginary and thereby restrained from entering into the structure of the symbolic itself. (106)

 

Here, Butler argues that we must pay attention to the specificity of the subject’s foreclosures and the resistances that they enable; in other words, resistance to the law of the father is to be found in inhabiting and reinscribing specific abjected subjectivities rather than simply lamenting the necessity of such foreclosures–reading them as necessary if regrettable symptoms of the law of the father–or concentrating on the imaginary spaces of freedom that such foreclosures seem to allow. Finally, Butler suggests that this resistance of and to foreclosure breaks down the wall between the Lacanian symbolic and imaginary: “if the figures of homosexualized abjection mustbe repudiated for sexed positions to be assumed,” she argues, “then the return of those figures as sites of erotic cathexis will refigure the domain of contested positionalities within the symbolic” (109).

 

The key concept that Butler wants to rescue from Lacan is that of resistance, or more precisely, of the resistance to foreclosure through desire. While Foucault and Derrida are helpful in the project of enabling resistance–showing how it is possible if not inevitable–it seems that for Butler, Lacan allows us to demonstrate how resistance happens, how it is engendered and made concrete through foreclosure itself. Butler departs from Lacan, however, by questioning his reduction of all such response or subversion to the very terms of the originary loss or foreclosure of the real: in other words, Butler questions the monologizing reduction in Lacan of all laws to the symbolic law of failure, lack, and expropriation from the real. For Butler, Lacan (and, for that matter, Slavoj Zizek) reduces all resistance to a symptom of Oedipal expropriation–reduces all laws to the law of lack–and thereby reduces the complexity of specific historical and cultural power relations that foreclose specific identities at specific times to pave the way for normativity. In Lacan and Zizek, the consistent failures or misrecognitions of the subject all point to the same monologizing drama of Oedipal expropriation. For Butler, such subjective misrecognition calls to be read otherwise, not as a symptom of the Law of the Father but as the condition of its subversion. As she writes, “the resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation” (237, originial emphasis removed). If there is a notion of Lacanian failure or “lack” running through Butler’s work, it is, perhaps, “failure” as that which enables and calls for another reading, another response, another movement. Misrecognition is the moment or movement of critique in Butler’s work–the exposure of the weakness or inefficacy of the negative or normative; but it is this other or second move–working that weakness by reinscribing it–that makes Butler’s work so decisive and important. It is this movement that takes Bodies That Matter a step beyond Gender Trouble.⁶

 

Based on this theoretical ground, which I have only rather idiosyncratically begun to sketch here, Butler goes on to supply a series of painstakingly careful analyses of identity, race and gender in a wide range of discourses and texts–Lacan, Paris is Burning, ACT UP, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Slavoj Zizek, queer theory. It is here, with these specific analyses, that Butler makes a decisive intervention: a critical, insightful, necessary intervention. An intervention that matters.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib’s critique of Gender Trouble in Situating the Self (New York & London: Routledge, 1992): “Along with the dissolution of the subject into yet ‘another position in language’ disappear of course concepts of intentionality, accountability, self-reflexivity, and autonomy. The subject that is but another position in language can no longer master and create that distance between itself and the chain of significations in which it is immersed such that it can reflect upon them and creatively alter them. The strong version of the Death of the Subject thesis is not compatible with the goals of feminism. . . . If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself?” (214-15).

 

2. The linchpin figure here is Derrida, specifically his reading of performativity and speech act theory in “Signature Event Context” (in Margins of Philosophy. Tr. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 307-30). As Derrida writes, “Every sign . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring” (321). For Derrida, one can’t play substantives against performatives precisely because citational performatives make the supposed plenitude of substantives possible in the first place: “the condition of possibility for these effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity” (328).

 

3. Compare Butler’s Gender Trouble (New York & London: Routledge, 1990): “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (145).

 

4. Butler’s point, we should note, is certainly not that drag is unproblematically subversive: as she writes, there is “no necessary relation between drag and subversion” (125). See also 231 on this question.

 

5. As Butler writes about this kind of postmodern pragmatist constructionism, “it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification” (53). Butler likewise remains suspicious of the “liberal” multiculturalist position which would ask us to walk a mile in the other’s shoes: “sympathy involves a substitution of oneself for another that may well be a colonization of the other’s position as one’s own” (118).

 

6. Certainly, Gender Trouble formulates the questions before us in Bodies: “theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’ at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated ‘etc.’ that so often occurs at the end of such lines?” (Gender Trouble 143). Gender Trouble, it seems to me, gestures toward such readings, but does not actually supply them. Bodies That Matter goes on to demonstrate precisely the “political impetus” of a certain “failure.” This would, however, also be the point at which one could open a dialogue with Butler concerning the problematic Hegelian legacy of this notion of lack or misrecognition. In pursuing this question, which there is no time to do here, we could perhaps turn to Blanchot’s work on the weakening of the negative in Hegel (see, e.g., “Literature and the Right to Death” in Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus. Tr. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981, 21-62; and Le pas au-dela. Paris: Gallimard, 1973).