She mentioned: “Every girl that meets Jeffrey begins off with giving him a massage. Little by little boys are the ones who’re denied kisses and caresses, the little lady continues to be doted upon, she is allowed to hide beneath her mother’s skirts, her father takes her on his knees and pats her hair. Most anal plugs are teardrop or egg designed with a tapered tip which makes it simpler to slide into tight spaces. Her declare will not be that ʻthe facts of biologyʼ are in themselves unknowable exterior of the discursive limits of their performative articulation as, say, femininity, but that ʻthe info of biologyʼ are only interesting to the human being in as far as they are lived or ʻexistedʼ in the full, concrete existential state of affairs wherein, and only by which, they’re meaningful designations of the being of being-human. Thus, even supposing the claim that the very being of the physique – its ontological modality – is conditioned in and by the mark of gender is coherent and, to my thoughts, plausible, as an existential ontological claim, it isn’t one which Butler would allow, as a result of for her ontology is a necessarily essentialist discourse.
ʻThat the gendered physique is performative suggests that it has no ontological standing other than the assorted acts which constitute its realityʼ:Sixty three this declare may now be re-learn as an assertion of the non-essentialist ontological standing of the body as performative, as a social(ized), historic ontology of the body – that’s, one which doesn’t take its ʻbeingʼ as fixed or foundational however ʻin processʼ, an idea acknowledged, maybe, in Butlerʼs earlier reference to ʻcontingent ontologiesʼ. Unwilling to entertain the concept of an existential ontology, which could be approached at the level of the ontic – at the extent of beings – not essentially but existentially understood, Butler seems to be committed to a sure discursive idealism, despite herself. This is, of course, the usual worry in criticism of Gender Trouble, but it is one that Butler herself encourages with the implication that the being of the physique, for example, is a discursive impact.Bodies That Matter, and particularly the essay that provides the book its title, is framed as a response to these criticisms – superficially, an try to right the ʻidealistʼ interpretation which works hand in hand with a voluntarist (mis)understanding of gender as a kind of wardrobe of identities.
Speaking again of the shift away from the earlier notion of ʻconstructionʼ, Butler says that she proposes, in its place, ʻa return to the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a strategy of materialization that stabilizes over time to supply the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matterʼ. This place can be clearly stated within the preface to Bodies That Matter, where Butler acknowledges the commonsensical point that bodies dwell and die; eat and sleep; feel ache, pleasure; endure sickness and violence; and these ʻfactsʼ, one might sceptically proclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere constructions. Always already interpreted as this or that, affirmed as this or that by whatever discursive means, de Beauvoirʼs insistent ʻfacts of biologyʼ (the ʻfacticityʼ of the body) refer to something extra just like the materialization of the matter of our bodies and bodies that matter. As this exhibits, Butlerʼs revised position owes more to Aristotle or to Greek ontology more generally than to de Beauvoir. For each de Beauvoir and Butler, then, it is the metaphysical substantialization of this mysterious factor, ʻwomanʼ or ʻfemininityʼ, that constitutes the article of crucial investigation, with the intention of its dissolution in the identify of a political challenge of social change.
The vital difference is that the being-always-already-interpreted of ʻthe facts of biologyʼ does not, for de Beauvoir, entail the dissolution of their ontological standing, and it’s because hers is precisely an existential – that is, a non-essentialist – ontology. Reading retrospectively, one thing like this belated acknowledgement of the possibility of radicalized ontology may even be glimpsed in Gender Trouble. The idea of the noumenon is similarly ʻproblematicʼ as, although its objective actuality might not in any method be recognized, the idea is in itself not contradictory: ʻthe idea of a noumenon is problematic, that is, it is the representation of a thing of which we will neither say that it is possible nor that it is impossibleʼ. It should be attainable to concede and affirm an array of ʻmaterialitiesʼ that pertain to the physique, that which is signified by the domains of biology, anatomy, physiology, hormonal and chemical composition, illness, age, weight, metabolism, life and dying. Their variations notwithstanding, nevertheless, the concept of ʻmaterializationʼ would seem to acknowledge the de Beauvoirian level that ʻbeingʼ may be (certainly, should be) understood in other than the essentialist phrases of the metaphysics of substance. This ʻfurther formation of the bodyʼ is theorized in Bodies That Matter by the concept of ʻmaterializationʼ, a term which is meant to exchange the extra deceptive ʻconstructionʼ used in Gender Trouble, and to cut throughout the philosophical dualism of materialism versus idealism.