Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "sex"

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Psychology Press, 1993 - 288 Seiten
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.

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Inhalt

Introduction
1
PART
16
Willa Cathers Masculine Names
143
Nella Larsens Psychoanalytic Challenge
167
Arguing with the Real
187
Critically Queer
223
Notes
243
Index
285
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Autoren-Profil (1993)

Judith Butler was born in 1956. She is nationally known for her writings on gender and sexuality. She argues that men and women are not dissimilar and that the notion they are is cultural not biological in books such as Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits Of "Sex" (1993), Excitable Speech: Contemporary Scenes Of Politics (1996), and The Psychic Life Of Power: Theories In Subjection (1997). In Gender Trouble (1990), the title a play on John Waters' camp classic Female Trouble (1975), Butler claims that both gender and drag are a kind of imitation for which there is no original. A professor of philosophy at University of California at Berkeley, Butler attended Yale, receiving a B.A. in 1978 and a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984.

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