Bodies That Matter

Introduction

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993) answers critics who read Gender Trouble as saying that gender can be chosen like clothing, or that bodies dissolve into language. Butler argues that the materiality of the body is itself produced by norms that are cited and repeated, and that performativity is not voluntary play-acting but the compelled reiteration of norms. The book reads Plato, Freud, Lacan and Žižek, novels by Willa Cather and Nella Larsen, and the documentary Paris Is Burning about New York drag balls. It also discusses “abjection” – the bodies that norms exclude – and the political reclaiming of the word “queer”.

Connections

Builds on

• Signature Event Context1971 · Jacques Derrida
• Gender Trouble1990 · Judith Butler

Criticizes

• The Sublime Object of Ideology1989 · Slavoj Žižek

Taken up in

• Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject2005 · Saba Mahmood

More works by Judith Butler

• 1990Gender Trouble