The Body
: Reconstructing Judith Butler’s Theory of Sex/Gender
I confess, however, that I am not a very good materialist.
Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language.
(Butler 2004b: 198)
This quotation from 2004 easily reads like an admission of guilt on Butler’s part, an
apology for her failure to ‘write about the body’ in a way that proves satisfactory to her critics
(who have been most vocal on this particular issue). Even though Butler uses the language of
confession, however, I think it more appropriate to read these lines as displaying a certain self-
awareness on Butler’s part about the way in which she approaches the body. Even in her most
concerted endeavour to ‘write about bodies’ in Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler contends that the
effort to describe matter is always just that: a writing about the body, a materialisation of the body
only in and through language. One can never get at the thing itself – certainly not in writing.
And in the preface to Bodies, written a decade before the above ‘confession’, Butler already em-
phasises that in trying to fix her gaze on the ‘materiality of the body’ she always finds herself in
‘other domains’ (1993: ix). How to get at the body that keeps slipping away, in light of critics’
insistence that she should, that she must?
Butler refuses to fix the body as primary, as antecedent to discourse. ‘The body posited
as prior to the sign is always posited or signified as prior’ (1993: 30). We cannot have any access to
the body except through discourse. Yet, this does not mean that the body can be reduced to dis-
course. Indeed, the body exceeds discourse, and reworks the very norms that would constrain it.
Dr. Samuel A. Chambers
Swansea University
5 July 2006
1
The title to this essay could easily be read rather morbidly. I hope so. Butler’s critics often focus on ‘the body’ as the
brute fact that Butler is reputed to ignore, dismiss, or overlook. When they use this phrase they mean for it to call up
the actual, lived, daily, existence of (women’s) lives. Thus, it strikes me as quite interesting that ‘body’ also signifies
lack of life. It is only a body when it is no longer lived. It is only truly a body when it finally, once and for all, lacks
the capacity for logos, when the only subject position in discourse that a person can take up is that of ‘the body’.
Joss Whedon gives the title of ‘The Body’ to his most critically-acclaimed episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he
does so precisely to direct our attention not to life but to death. Butler’s own concern with a livable life means that
her attention to bodies must always be mediated through discourses of life, of subjectivity, of practiced, lived exis-
tence. In other words, I wonder if, in their stubborn insistence that Butler pay attention to ‘the body’, her critics may
give the lie to the fact that they want Butler to deal not with real people, with real politics (as they imply) but merely
with ‘dead things’ (the title of another Buffy episode).
Convention