Customer Reviews

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

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Although Bodies That Matter contains some interesting remarks on psychoanalysis and at some points critically builds upon some of Butler's earlier arguments, the matter of materiality, corporeality etc. remains utterly unresolved. In the introduction, Butler claims to address the topic of the materiality of bodies - how are bodies discursively constituted in their very materiality? - but this question dissapears mysteriously over the course of the next, sometimes rather dull, chapters. The one on the lesbian phallus is quite interesting, but as to the rest: save the trouble. 'Critically queer' may sound interesting, but is merely an abbridged version of Gender Trouble. Besides all this, the prose style of Bodies That Matter is at points undigestable, and I would gladly refer to some of Teresa de Lauretis' work, who adresses many of the same questions, and who is, without a doubt, just a better writer.

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.

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.

This book drove me almost entirely insane. The essay if you can call it that on the film Paris is Burning is simply incendiary to any person with a trace element of logic in their scalp. This essay argues that Venus Extravaganza was murdered for having been a transvestite. In the film itself it says she/he is killed -- but what the NYPD cannot solve Butler solves in the twinkling of a phrase -- she claims he/she is erased for playing with the sexual line. Not for burning a customer, or for simply being in a dangerous business. Whores are wiped out all day and night for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ever hear of the Green River Killer? Still Butler knows the motive. She just invents anything she wants, and calls it truth. She actually infers that anybody has the right to invent their own reality, and everybody else has to honor this reality. Only an extremely stupid person who has never had to work for a living could keep such a dumb idea down without puking. Do you mean if I think I'm a millionaire and walk into a bank, they will give me a million dollars? Do you mean if I have cellulite all over my legs and breasts that I can be a top model, I just have to really believe it? Do you mean that if I think I'm a genius, then others will agree? Feminist academics who've never worked, but who love to dramatize their own victimization, will love this book. Everybody else will simply puke from laughing so hard.

I would have to agree with the reader that said this book was completely incomprehensible!

Anyone interested in feminist and/or gender theory must read this book. Butler's challenging approaches to "sex" as a social construct, to performative resistance, and to other works are well worth the intellectual efforts of the reader. She brings a new perspective to theories about gender inequality and how gender shapes our lives.

Butler is one of the most rigourous and thoughtful feminist theorists writing today. In all her writings she follows through the consequences of her arguments with great care, something still lacking in much academic theoretical writing. Especially in writing on the 'body', there is still an awful lot of stuff out there which assumes that bodies are 'things' that speak their own meaning somehow... Butler in this book demonstrates the untenable aspects of that position, and works out brilliantly what some of the consequences are of working thoroughly and rigourously with the idea that the meanings of the body are constructed.

I found this book to be totally incomprehensible.