Body of weight

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The book Body of Weight - published in 1993 under the English title Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of “sex”  - is a central work by the American feminist philosopher Judith Butler (* 1956). It is considered to be a further development of the theses in her work The Unease of the Sexes (Gender Trouble) from 1990, with which she deepens her rejection of the separating view of biological gender (sex) and gender ( gender ) . The German translation by Karin Wördemann was published in 1995.

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In Body of Weight: The Discursive Limits of Gender, Butler reacts to the criticism that she received in the controversies surrounding her book The Unease of the Sexes , published in 1990 . Critics accused her, among other things, of using a construct in which the sexual identity of a subject can be freely chosen by making use of the possibilities of performative gender attributions like from a wardrobe, or that she uses the "materiality" of the biological sex body dissolve, make the woman “disembodiment” and make “pure text” the basis of the body.

Butler describes in the foreword by Body of Weight that her theses have caused confusion and that this new book, after reconsidering it, is intended to stimulate “further reflection on the mode of operation of heterosexual hegemony in the design of sexual and political objects.” Butler sits down in the individual chapters deals with the issues arising from the criticism by addressing different authors, topics and concepts (e.g. Jacques Lacan , Freud's Psychoanalysis , Slavoj Žižek ) and analyzing them in the context of gender, thereby expanding and re-expanding her own ideas and concepts thinks.

Materiality of gender

For Butler, matter is always something that has become matter. The appearance of firmness, surface and duration, as well as of "irreducibility" (a quantity that cannot be traced back to underlying units) is an effect of power . By constantly repeating and quoting certain regulating norms, the discourse creates what it only seems to name. The concept of performativity is important in this context . This is "not understood as the act by which a subject gives existence what he / she names, but rather as that constantly repeating power of discourse to produce those phenomena which it regulates and restricts". Materiality must therefore be understood as the material effect of a power dynamic which it repeatedly constitutes historically specific. Power must not be understood as an external relationship; it can not be separated from the subjects .

Butler explicitly emphasizes that thinking of the body as constructed has nothing to do with arbitrariness or voluntariness. Bodies always arise within certain constraints, restrictions and distortions, within a gender matrix and as such themselves. The process of their materialization occurs on different levels. Butler looks in particular at the entanglement of language and matter, the psychological dimension of the physical shape in individuation processes and the mode of action of discourses on physical gender difference.

With regard to the materiality of the sex body or biological gender (sex) , she opposes the assumption of a factual, material physical gender, which is overwritten with a social construct (gender) . It assumes that the term “biological sex” and the related recourse to naturality itself is “a cultural norm that governs the materialization of bodies”.

Butler describes that for her it is not about dissolving the body, but rather about creating a return to the body, "The body as a lived place of possibility, the body as a place for a number of culturally expanding possibilities."

Gender (sex) is a “normative phantasm ” - at the same time socially constructed, culturally learned and consolidated and thus part of the doxa ; As a construct, it is subject to shifts and revaluations, but has to be consolidated as a phantasm through ritual performative practices .

naturalness

Butler's premises are connected with the effort to make materiality and naturalness visible as a cultural construct and thus rationally comprehensible, and to trace the symbolic forms of this normative discourse formation. In doing so, she consciously expands the terms of performativity and construction beyond the common understanding.

In order to be able to grasp the constructed nature of the biological sex without succumbing to constructivism in the common sense, Butler shows as a possibility of opening up a “phantasmatic field that constitutes the actual terrain of cultural intelligibility”, as a fiction “in whose necessities we are live and without which life itself would be unthinkable ”. With this, however, there is the danger of falling into the field of radical linguistic constructivism, in which the (pre-discursive) biological gender is constructed as a “misnomer” by the social gender.

In the question “If the subject is constructed, who then constructs the subject?” Butler sees a grammatical misperception to which only either a deterministic or a voluntaristic answer can be given. “Subjected to the social gender, but also made the subject by the social gender, the 'I' neither precedes nor follows this process of the creation of gender identity, but only arises within a matrix of gender-specific relationships and as this matrix itself. "

The social performance is more clearly outlined, for example, by the gender attribution of the prenatal child and the attribution “It is a girl!” With this designation, understood as a speech act , “the girl is made 'girlish'; she arrives at the by invoking the gender Area of ​​Language and Relationship ”, experiences for the first, but not the last time, the normative effectiveness of linguistic ascriptions and thus a first naturalization . “The naming simultaneously sets a limit and repeatedly sharpening a norm”.

With the terms naming and repeating the relevance of speech act theory comes to the fore. Norms must be strengthened through ritual repetition - this also and above all applies to linguistic rituals - and at the same time create the limitation of what is named through the linguistic identification of what is one's own or the constitutive exclusion of the other.

The analysis of this form of performative linguistic violence is called deconstruction .

literature

Expenditure:

  • Judith Butler : Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of "sex". Routledge, New York 1993, ISBN 0-415-90365-3 .
    • German: Body of weight: The discursive limits of sex. From the American by Karin Wördemann. Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8270-0152-8 .
    • German: Body of weight: The discursive limits of sex. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1997, ISBN 3-518-11737-8 .
  • Judith Butler: The Discomfort of the Sexes . From the American by Kathrina Menke. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-518-11722-X .

Secondary literature:

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Judith Butler 1995, p. 15.
  2. ↑ Judith Butler 1995, p. 22.
  3. ↑ a b Judith Butler 1995, p. 23.
  4. ↑ Judith Butler 1995, p. 11.
  5. ↑ Judith Butler 1995, p. 27.
  6. ↑ Judith Butler 1995, p. 28.
  7. ^ Judith Butler 1995, p. 29.
  • Other documents
  1. ↑ Eva von Redecker: On the topicality of Judith Butler: Introduction to her work. Wiesbaden 2011, p. 66.
  2. ↑ Barbara Duden : The woman without a lower body: To Judith Butler's disembodiment . In: Feminist Studies. Volume 11, 1993, pp. 24-33.