Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Paperback)

by Judith Butler (Author) "Within some quarters of feminist theory in recent years, there have been calls to retrieve the body from what is often characterized as the linguistic..." (more)
Key Phrases: erotogenic body parts, blindness that may, inscriptional space, Paris Is Burning, The Signification of the Phallus, Old Boys (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"As a philosopher of gender [Judith Butler] is unparalleled. . .." -- Village Voice

"Butler gives us a new way to think about the materiality of the body in the discursive performity operative in the materialization of sex. Following a common move in postmodern feminism, Butler sets out to demolish the sex/gender distinction that has fromed the mainstay of the de Beauvorian and radical feminism's notion that gender, as a cultural construction, could be critiqued and politicized againts the givenness of the body's biological sex....What is new in IBodies That Matter is Butler's attempt to write more directly about race.." -- Signs

"Extending the brilliant style of interrogation that made her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity a landmark of gender theory/queer theory, Butler here continues to refine our understandings of the complexly performative character of sexuality and gender and to trouble our assumptions about the inherent subversiveness of dissident sexualities. . . . indispensable reading across the wide range of concerns that queer theory is currently addressing." -- Artforum

"What the implications/limitations of ``sexing'' are and how the process works comprise the content of this strikingly perceptive book. . . . Butler has written a most significant and provocative work that addresses issues of immediate social concern." -- The Boston Book Review

As a philosopher of gender [Judith Butler] is unparalleled. . . -- Village Voice
Extending the brilliant style of interrogation that made her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity a landmark of gender theory/queer theory, Butler here continues to refine our understandings of the complexly performative character of sexuality and gender and to trouble our assumptions about the inherent subversiveness of dissident sexualities. . . . indispensable reading across the wide range of concerns that queer theory is currently addressing. -- Artforum
Butler gives us a new way to think about the materiality of the body in the discursive performity operative in the materialization of sex. Following a common move in postmodern feminism, Butler sets out to demolish the sex/gender distinction that has fromed the mainstay of the de Beauvorian and radical feminisms notion that gender, as a cultural construction, could be critiqued and politicized againts the givenness of the bodys biological sex...What is new in Bodies That Matter is Butlers attempt to write more directly about race. -- Signs
What the implications/limitations of sexing are and how the process works comprise the content of this strikingly perceptive book. . . . Butler has written a most significant and provocative work that addresses issues of immediate social concern. -- The Boston Book Review
As an intervention into the burgeoning field of lesbian and gay studies . . . Bodies That Matter is a powerful corrective to some of that young disciplines weaknesses. In particular, Butlers book works to prevent a theoretical tendency to look for the real queers, and to ascribe subversiveness to queer sexualities on the basis of their queerness alone. . . . Butlers readings of cultural objects in Bodies That Matter refuse the romantic--which makes all the more impressive how genuinely impassioned the book is. -- The Bookpress
Judith Butler, author of 1990s radical Gender Trouble, isnt one to sit quietly and wait for the heterosexual hegemony to crumble around her. In her newest offering, she seeks to virtually redefine both queer and feminist theory from the ground up. -- The Bay Guardian Lit.
With characteristic wit and polish, Butler rethinks questions about the construction and materiality of sexuality and critiques texts by Freud, Willa Cather and Nella Larsen as well as Jennie Livingstons film Paris Is Burning. -- Publishers Weekly
. . . astute, original, and compelling . . . the confidence with which Butler works queer pop culture into high theory makes Bodies That Matter fun to read and an important text in the evolving field of gay and lesbian studies. -- Lambda Book Report
Judith Butler is one of the most popular contemporary thinkers to hit the American academe since Baudrillard . . . This ambitious new collection of essays . . . [is] ground breaking in its attempts to free theory and politics from the errors of traditional epistemologies. -- Out
Bodies That Matter is a brilliant and original analysis. Butlers argumentation is rigorous and her insights always new and challenging. Her erudition is outstanding, and she engages with a broad sweep of texts, bringing exciting interpretations to all of her readings. This book will be essential reading in feminism, cultural studies, philosophy and political theory. -- Drucilla Cornell, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Bodies That Matter is destined to be a classic. With rare intellectual rigor and great style, Butler upsets many accepted presumptions about sexuality and subversion. Her formidable intellectual and political insight enables her to both utilize the work of important thinkers within the interlocking domains of poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theory and politics while at the same time establishing her own critical distance from them in order to continue, and depart from, her account of the politically transgressive potential of gender performativity developed in Gender Trouble. -- Elizabeth Grosz, Monash University
Judith Butlers philosophical sophistication and high level of sustained argumentation make this a demanding book, but one which is worth the effort. . . . Notions of agency, identity, intentionality, and `the subject central to psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and feminism are all reconceptualized here in light of an expanded and wide-ranging theory of performance as citation, and gender as iteration. . . . There is no doubt that Judith Butler is one of the most original and trenchant theorists of gender writing now, and this book will confirm her reputation. -- Margaret Whitford, University of London
Bodies That Matter responds explicitly to some of the criticisms that Butlers earlier book Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990) provoked..., but also implicitly to the plethora of contemporary social concerns revolving around the body, including AIDS, transvestism, transsexuality, and queerness. -- Canadian Review of American Studies
Working at the intersection between deconstruction, psychanalysis, feminist thought and queer theory, Judith Butler has produced an impressive new collection of essays. I use impressive in a generic way to convey my sense that the work left patterns on the sybstance of my mind in the form of sentences, arguements, insights, turns of phrase, an extraordinary dexterity of thought. Butler is without doubt one of the most provocative scholars working in the area of queer theory. She has given us an important book and an agenda to ponder. -- Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter
The book makes an important contribution to debates over social construction, particularly in its attention to the complex intersection of gender, race and sexuality. The book stands out in its breadth and sophistication--it takes on some of the most important and most difficult issues in cultural studies, feminist theory, queer theory, philosophy, and political theory, and does a remarkable job overall in addressing them. -- Sally Haslanger, International Studies in Philosophy

Product Description
In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most ``material'' dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in Gender Trouble, Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the ``matter'' of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain ``sex'' from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers a clarification of the notion of ``performativity'' introduced in Gender Trouble and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; ``Paris is Burning,'' Nella Larsen's ``Passing,'' and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of ``performativity'' and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (September 20, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415903661
• ISBN-13: 978-0415903660
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #74,999 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking, March 15, 1999

By A Customer

This book clarifies much of Foucault was saying in History of Sexuality. Butler is careful, however, to not borrow the models Foucault uses, thereby, avoids some of the mistakes and gaps that occur in his thinking, namely the silence on women. Butler, more than Foucault, is not willing to settle the debate on sexuality merely as the obtaining and disseminating of pleasures and how those bodies perform them. Rather, she takes bodies as always already gender indeterminate and destablilizes their performatives further to show how bodies are marked by gender as well as race, class, sexulaity, etc. and how these categories are also destabilized within the perfomative. I highly recommend this book to feminist and queer theorists and well as anyone who is concerned about creating any sort of opposition to the reactionary right-wing forces that are attempting to further entrench their dominance over the rest of us.

26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Major work from a major thinker that doesn't quite convince, October 11, 2003

By A Customer

The best thing about Judith Butler is that she is always willing to think through the consequences of her earlier writings. This book was a response to the criticism that emerged out of the groundbreaking conclusion to GENDER TROUBLE that argued for an understanding of gender as performative. Critics took Butler to task for arguing that gender is something that is simply an act of performative volition - one can "be" whatever one wants to be - irrespective of the materiality of the body. Here, Butler turns the tables (in a neat deconstructive move) by showing how this criticism presupposes the a priori existence of "bodies" and "matter" separate from discourse. Yet, after a brilliant introduction, the book becomes weighted down by its own psychoanalytic presuppositions and its tediously dense prose style. There is often no reason for Butler's writing to be as incomprehensible as it is, especially given the giant claims she's making about the nature of gender (other than to "perform" her writing's own indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian critique).

Moreover, her work has been rightly faulted (partiucularly by Martha Nussbaum) by holding out an ideal of "subversion" that is something (in the terms of how she frames it) that ultimately DOES have very little to do with the ways sexual inequality is experienced outside of a somewhat narrow bourgeois American academic purview. But, finally, given the indisputable pervasiveness of Butler's ideas within the academy and without it (particularly in the ways in which sexuality is viewed today), the work is clearly a seminal text nonetheless.

32 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lacanian response, August 9, 2004

By	S. Whitworth "Malvolio29" (Bloomsburg, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When I first read this book, I was pleased to see that Butler was returning to the problem of "gender performativity" she raised in *Gender Trouble.* I do believe that she was misunderstood as having claimed in *Gender Trouble* that the performativity constitutive of gender implies an infinite "plasticity" or freedom from the constraints of gender. Yet after reading *Bodies,* I felt that she evaded the question with which she opened the book: in what way can the "materiality" of anatomical sex be construed as a "discursive limit" to ideological constructions of gender without being understood as existing outside of discourse? I believe that Butler is ultimately indecisive about the status of the materiality of sex as either a pre- or extra-discursive "hard kernel of the Real" or (just like gender) another aspect of discourse. This is what leads to her very wrong-headed "critique" of the concept of "objet petit a" in the work of Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan, very complex work which she oversimplifies and accuses of "reifying" or "essentializing" sex. Any serious student of Lacan knows that the a-object of fantasy is anything but "essential." It phantasmatically "dresses up" (to use Lacan's words in Seminar 14) a primordial psychic "hole," an *absence* or pure negativity where a "grounding" for discourse ought to be but is *lacking.* It's a shame that a book such as this which begins with a rigorous intellectual question degenerates into a sort of psychoanalytic dilettantism.