Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” by Judith Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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.
