Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

1. Introduction

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” is a philosophical treatise in which Judith Butler revisits and revises the theory of gender performativity first articulated in Gender Trouble (1990). The book is framed explicitly as a response to critics who claimed that Butler’s earlier work reduced bodies to language and ignored material reality. The introduction sets out the central problem: how to understand matter and the body without positing them as pre‑discursive givens or as mere linguistic effects.

Butler proposes materialization as the key concept. Bodies “matter” not simply because they exist as brute facts, but because norms, institutions, and discourses continually produce and stabilize what counts as a viable, intelligible body. The introduction contends that discourse is not opposed to materiality; rather, discursive practices are part of how materiality takes shape and gains persistence.

A second guiding theme is the “discursive limits of sex.” Butler questions the assumption that “sex” is an unproblematic biological substrate onto which gender is later constructed. She suggests instead that sex itself is normatively framed and that only some bodily configurations are able to appear as naturally sexed at all. This concern will orient the book’s analyses of heterosexuality, race, and abjection.

The introduction also clarifies what performativity does and does not mean. Against voluntarist or theatrical misreadings, Butler insists that performativity names a reiterative, compulsory process by which subjects are constituted. The introduction sketches how this process both constrains agency and opens limited possibilities for resignification of social norms.

Finally, Butler situates the project as a contribution to debates in feminist theory, queer politics, psychoanalysis, and post‑structuralist philosophy, indicating that the subsequent chapters will unfold through close readings of philosophical texts, legal and political discourses, and cultural representations such as drag performance and film.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

Bodies That Matter emerged in the early 1990s, a period marked by intense debates over essentialism, constructionism, and the status of the body in feminist and queer theory. Within feminism, disputes between materialist and poststructuralist approaches were especially prominent.

Feminist and Queer Debates

Many Anglo‑American feminists in the 1980s had treated sex as a stable biological base and gender as its social interpretation. By the time Butler was writing, this model was under pressure from:

Lesbian and gay studies were simultaneously being institutionalized and challenged by emergent queer theory, which questioned fixed identity categories. Butler’s work became one of the touchstones of this shift, but also provoked questions about political strategy, coalition, and embodiment.

Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis, and Marxism

The book is situated within broader poststructuralist engagements with power and subjectivity. Butler draws on Foucault’s account of sexuality as historically produced, Althusser’s theory of interpellation, and Derrida’s notion of iterability, while critically engaging Lacanian psychoanalysis on the symbolic and the real.

At the same time, Marxist and materialist feminists (such as Christine Delphy, Iris Marion Young, and others) worried that poststructuralist accounts of discourse neglected economic and bodily oppression. Bodies That Matter addresses such concerns by reconceiving materiality as an effect of power rather than a pre‑social basis.

Political and Cultural Backdrop

The book was written amid the HIV/AIDS crisis, escalating culture wars over sexuality, and legal debates about hate speech and censorship in the United States and Europe. These contexts inform Butler’s interest in injurious language, naming, and the vulnerability of bodies. The emergence of ballroom culture into mainstream visibility, via films like Paris Is Burning, provided a concrete site where race, class, gender, and sexuality intersected in spectacular forms of performance—crucial for the later chapters of the book.

3. Author, Composition, and Publication

Judith Butler, an American philosopher and critical theorist, composed Bodies That Matter in the early 1990s while teaching in the United States and engaging with international debates in feminist and queer theory. Trained in philosophy—especially German idealism, phenomenology, and poststructuralism—Butler was already widely known for Gender Trouble (1990), which helped popularize the concept of gender performativity.

Composition and Aims

Bodies That Matter was written partly in response to critical reception of Gender Trouble. Feminist materialists, psychoanalytic theorists, and activists raised questions about:

• The alleged linguistic idealism of the earlier work
• The status of sex and material bodies
• The political implications of destabilizing gender categories

Butler has indicated in interviews and later writings that the new book was intended to clarify misunderstandings, incorporate psychoanalytic insights more fully, and address concerns that the prior account neglected race and heteronormativity. The composition involved re‑working lectures, conference papers, and essays into a more systematic treatise.

Publication Context

The work was published in 1993 by Routledge, a major academic press associated with critical theory and cultural studies. It appeared within a series of texts that were consolidating “queer theory” as a recognizable field and was quickly taken up in graduate curricula in philosophy, literature, women’s studies, and sociology.

The book does not have a single formal dedicatee but acknowledges a community of friends, colleagues, and interlocutors in feminist, queer, and critical theory. Subsequent reprints and translations into multiple languages (including Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese) extended its influence well beyond Anglophone contexts.

Within Butler’s oeuvre, Bodies That Matter is often read as the second part of an informal trilogy on gender and subjectivity, situated between Gender Trouble and later collections such as Undoing Gender, where Butler further reflects on and revises the arguments first elaborated here.

4. Structure and Organization of the Work

Bodies That Matter is organized into an introduction and a series of thematically linked chapters that each approach the problem of sexed embodiment from different theoretical and empirical angles. The structure is both argumentative and exegetical, moving between conceptual exposition and close readings of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and cultural texts.

Overall Layout

Some editions present a coda or closing sections integrated into later chapters rather than as a standalone conclusion. Across the chapters, Butler maintains a pattern: she takes a central concept (materiality, phallus, identification, drag, the real, queer) and reads it through multiple theoretical interlocutors to show how it participates in processes of regulatory normalization and abjection.

Thematic Progression

The organization can be seen as moving:

1. From the ontological question of what it means for bodies to “matter” (Ch. 1)
2. Through psychoanalytic and fantasmatic accounts of sexed morphology and identification (Chs. 2–3)
3. To cultural and political analyses of drag performance and hate speech (Chs. 4 and 6)
4. While returning periodically to the contested notion of the real body and critiques of idealism (Ch. 5)

This structure allows Butler to develop a multi‑layered account of how norms materialize bodies across symbolic, psychic, and social domains, while keeping the discursive limits of “sex” as the unifying thread.

5. Materialization and the Question of the Body

The concept of materialization is central to Bodies That Matter. Butler introduces it to address how bodies come to appear as solid, natural, and prior to discourse, while still insisting that they are produced within normative frameworks.

Materiality as Process, Not Substance

Against views that treat matter as an inert substrate upon which culture acts, Butler proposes that matter is the effect of regulatory norms repeated over time. Materialization names this ongoing, never fully complete process through which bodies acquire a seemingly stable shape and boundary.

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“What will and will not count as a viable body is determined by norms that govern the materialization of bodies.”

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (paraphrased from early pages)

In this account, sexed anatomy, bodily contours, and even the distinction between inside and outside are not simply given but are articulated and enforced through discourses of medicine, law, kinship, and everyday interaction.

The Body as Site of Power and Constraint

Butler draws on Foucault to argue that power operates not only by repressing bodies but by producing them as intelligible and useful. Norms of sex, race, and ability specify which bodily features are legible, which must be hidden or corrected, and which render a person unintelligible.

By insisting on the durability, vulnerability, and resistance of bodies, Butler aims to avoid a purely textualist view. Materialization involves sedimented histories—racist, sexist, heteronormative—that are “written into” flesh, affecting health, mobility, and exposure to violence.

Limits and Exclusions

Materialization also entails exclusion. Some bodily configurations never fully materialize as recognizable “bodies” at all; they occupy zones of abjection where life is unlivable or ungrievable. The question “Which bodies matter?” thus becomes inseparable from questions about who counts as human, a theme developed more fully in subsequent chapters.

6. Performativity and the Discursive Limits of Sex

In Bodies That Matter, Butler refines the concept of performativity to address how “sex” is constituted and limited by discourse. Performativity is presented not as a theatrical role one chooses but as the reiterative citation of norms that constitute subjects and bodies.

Reiteration and Citationality

Drawing on Derrida’s notion of iterability and Althusser’s interpellation, Butler suggests that normative statements—such as those assigning a sex at birth—function performatively by bringing into being the subjects they name. These acts must be continually repeated in everyday practices (dress, comportment, institutional classification) to maintain the appearance of a stable sex.

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The “sex” of the body is not a simple fact but “a norm that can never be fully realized, a norm that produces its own approximations.”

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (paraphrased)

Performativity thus names the tension between the compulsory force of norms and their failure ever to be perfectly embodied, leaving room for variation and slippage.

Discursive Limits of “Sex”

The “discursive limits of sex” refer to the boundaries of what can be named, recognized, and sustained as sexed embodiment. Butler argues that:

• “Sex” is not a neutral biological category but is framed by heteronormative assumptions about reproduction and kinship.
• Only some configurations of chromosomes, genitals, hormones, and behaviors are permitted to count as properly sexed.
• Discursive regimes (medical, legal, religious) police the borders of intelligible sex, often rendering intersex, trans, and non‑heteronormative embodiments unintelligible or pathological.

Performativity therefore does not deny material bodies but emphasizes that bodies become socially “real” as sexed through regulated patterns of citation. These patterns also create limits: bodies that cannot or do not conform remain outside the dominant frame of sex, a problem that motivates Butler’s analyses of abjection, race, and queer naming in later chapters.

7. Psychoanalysis, Phantasm, and the Lesbian Phallus

In the chapter “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” Butler turns to psychoanalysis to explore how sexual difference and bodily form are imagined and lived. She critically engages Freud and Lacan, as well as feminist revisions by Irigaray and others, to question the presumed link between the phallus and male anatomy.

Phantasmatic Identification

Butler uses the term phantasmatic identification to describe the way subjects come to occupy sexed positions by identifying with idealized or forbidden figures. These identifications occur in the realm of fantasy, shaping what bodies are desired, emulated, or repudiated. The morphological imaginary—the imagined shape and surface of the body—is thus structured by cultural norms of masculinity and femininity, but it is not fixed by anatomy.

In this context, Butler relates the assumption of a sexed body to unconscious melancholic processes, where disavowed or prohibited attachments continue to haunt the subject’s bodily self‑image.

Rethinking the Phallus

Psychoanalytic theory often treats the phallus as a symbolic position of power and signification, aligned with the paternal function and male genitalia. Butler interrogates this alignment, arguing that the phallus is not reducible to the penis and can be re‑signified in lesbian and queer contexts.

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The phallus is a “transferable” signifier, whose power does not belong essentially to the male body.

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (paraphrased)

The notion of a “lesbian phallus” is proposed to show that lesbian sexual practices can occupy and transform phallic symbolism without reproducing a simple masculinity. For Butler, this challenges both heterosexist assumptions that only men can wield phallic power and certain feminist critiques that regard the phallus as inherently oppressive.

By emphasizing fantasy, identification, and symbolic displacements, Butler integrates psychoanalytic accounts of the psyche with her broader theory of materialization, suggesting that the psychic “image” of the body is inseparable from social norms of sex and sexuality.

8. Abjection, Normativity, and the Boundaries of the Human

A recurring concern in Bodies That Matter is how norms of sex and gender establish boundaries of the human by producing zones of abjection. Abjection refers to those bodies, desires, and identities that are cast out as unthinkable, impossible, or monstrous, yet which paradoxically help stabilize what counts as normal.

Abjection as Constitutive Exclusion

Drawing on psychoanalytic notions (including Kristeva) and Foucauldian power, Butler suggests that normative identities depend on the expulsion of others:

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“The subject is constituted through the forcible exclusion of those abjected beings who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living and dying are required to circumscribe the domain of subjectivity.”

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (paraphrased)

In this view, heterosexual, properly sexed, racially normalized bodies become intelligible by defining themselves against abjected figures: the promiscuous, the transgender, the intersex, the racially marked, the pathologized.

Normativity and the Human

Butler links normativity to the question of who is recognized as fully human. Regulatory norms specify which lives are:

• Recognizable as persons
• Eligible for legal protection and mourning
• Exposed to violence or neglect without social consequence

The book highlights how these boundaries are not abstract but material, shaping access to healthcare, mobility, safety, and political representation. The “limits of intelligibility” are thus also limits of livability.

Ambivalence and Political Possibilities

Abjection is not purely external to the subject; the abjected other often resides within as a disavowed identification. This ambivalence complicates any simple distinction between insiders and outsiders to the norm. Butler intimates that critical politics might emerge from attending to these abjected positions and exposing the exclusions that ground the category of the human, a theme that intertwines with her analyses of race, drag, and queer naming elsewhere in the book.

9. Race, Drag, and Representation in “Gender is Burning”

In the chapter “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” Butler analyzes Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) to explore how drag performance, race, and class complicate the politics of gender subversion.

Drag and the Citation of Gender Norms

Butler reads the drag balls depicted in the film as sites where participants cite and exaggerate norms of gender, sexuality, and class—particularly through categories like “realness.” Drag is understood as a performative practice that both exposes the constructed nature of gender and reinscribes ideals of whiteness, wealth, and heterosexual normativity.

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Drag “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.”

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (paraphrased)

However, Butler cautions against celebrating drag as inherently subversive. She notes that many performances aim at approximating white, middle‑class femininity or masculinity, raising questions about whose norms are being idealized.

Race, Class, and Appropriation

The majority of performers in Paris Is Burning are Black and Latinx queer and trans people, while the film’s director and much of its art‑house audience are white. Butler examines this dynamic to consider cultural appropriation and spectatorial desire. Some commentators argue that the film risks commodifying the lives and performances of its subjects for a largely white public, while others see it as documenting a vibrant subculture and offering visibility.

Ambivalent Politics of Subversion

Butler emphasizes the ambivalence of drag as both a potential critique and an extension of dominant norms. Drag’s capacity to destabilize the naturalness of gender is weighed against its participation in racist and classed fantasies, particularly when Black and Brown bodies are framed as spectacular or tragic for white consumption.

This chapter therefore situates drag within a broader matrix of racialized and economic power, arguing that any account of gender performativity must attend to how race and class shape who can perform, who can be seen, and with what consequences.

10. Language, Injurious Speech, and Queer Naming

Bodies That Matter devotes significant attention to language as a site where bodies are constituted, injured, and potentially empowered. Butler revisits performativity to analyze injurious speech (such as slurs and hate speech) and the politics of reclaiming terms like “queer.”

Injurious Speech and the Force of Address

Against theories that see language as either mere expression or simple causation, Butler argues that injurious speech works by citing existing norms about race, gender, and sexuality. A slur wounds because it repeats a history of derogation, positioning the addressee within a field of devaluation.

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An injurious utterance “does not simply act, but reiterates a social relation; its force depends on a prior and future chain of citation.”

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (paraphrased)

This account complicates legal and moral debates about hate speech by emphasizing that the power of words is socially distributed and historically sedimented, not contained in individual intentions alone.

Queer Naming and Reclaiming Injury

In the essay “Critically Queer,” Butler examines the term “queer” as an example of how an injurious word can be reclaimed. Activists and theorists have used “queer” to forge coalitions and challenge heteronormative identity categories, turning a term of abuse into a badge of resistance.

Butler contends that such reclamation is a performative re‑citation that does not erase the word’s injurious history but reorients it. The risks are substantial: not all subjects can equally inhabit “queer,” and the term may re‑injure even as it empowers.

Agency, Vulnerability, and Censorship

A further theme is the ambivalent relation between vulnerability and agency in language. Because subjects are always already addressed—named, hailed, classified—they are exposed to injury. Yet this same condition of being constituted in language makes it possible to respond, resignify, and contest. Butler engages ongoing debates about censorship, suggesting that attempts to regulate injurious speech can sometimes reinforce the very norms they aim to oppose, although interpretations of her position vary among commentators.

11. The Real, Materialism, and Critiques of Idealism

In Bodies That Matter, especially in the chapter “Arguing with the Real,” Butler engages with the concept of the real body and responds to accusations of idealism. She addresses feminist and psychoanalytic thinkers who invoke a pre‑discursive real—whether anatomical, maternal, or semiotic—as a limit to constructionist accounts.

Appeals to the Real

Butler examines, among others, Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic and maternal body and Irigaray’s emphasis on sexual difference grounded in female morphology. These theorists often posit a resistant real that cannot be fully captured by symbolic structures and that is sometimes aligned with women’s embodied experience.

Proponents of such views argue that:

• A strong sense of the real body is necessary to contest biological and sexual oppression.
• Without reference to material difference, feminism risks collapsing into pure discourse.

Butler’s Reworking of Materialism

Butler does not deny the existence or importance of bodily realities but questions whether the “real” invoked by such arguments is itself free of normative framing. She claims that:

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“The ‘real’ is not simply what lies outside discourse, but is itself produced in part through discursive and psychic processes that mark certain limits as inevitable.”

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (paraphrased)

Her poststructuralist materialism suggests that:

Responses to Critiques of Idealism

Critics from Marxist and materialist feminism contend that Butler continues to prioritize signification and neglect economic and biological constraints. Butler’s defenders argue that her notion of materialization explicitly foregrounds the persistence, weight, and vulnerability of bodies without granting them a pre‑social essence.

The chapter does not resolve these disputes but reframes them, suggesting that the invocation of a pre‑discursive real often functions to re‑naturalize certain sexed and gendered arrangements. For Butler, contesting such appeals is part of a broader effort to keep the category of the body open to critical scrutiny and political transformation.

12. Philosophical Method and Theoretical Interlocutors

Bodies That Matter employs a distinctive philosophical method that combines close textual exegesis with conceptual innovation and political analysis. Butler’s approach is often described as deconstructive and genealogical, drawing on multiple traditions rather than adhering to a single school.

Methodological Features

Key methodological elements include:

• Close reading: Butler engages in detailed analyses of philosophical and psychoanalytic texts, unpacking their internal tensions and latent assumptions about sex, gender, and the body.
• Genealogical critique: Influenced by Foucault, she traces how categories like “sex” and “the body” emerge within specific power/knowledge regimes rather than as timeless facts.
• Deconstructive strategy: Drawing on Derrida, Butler highlights how conceptual oppositions (e.g., material/ideal, inside/outside, sex/gender) depend on exclusions and are destabilized by their own logic.
• Interdisciplinarity: The book moves across philosophy, psychoanalysis, legal theory, film and literary studies, and queer of color critique.

Major Interlocutors

Butler often reads these figures against themselves, showing how their own concepts open possibilities they did not fully pursue. For example, she uses Lacan’s notion of the symbolic to question fixed sexual identities and Derrida’s iterability to theorize resignification.

Style and Accessibility

The method is reflected in a dense, layered prose style that stitches together multiple citations and theoretical vocabularies. Supporters view this as necessary for working within and transforming inherited discourses; critics see it as obscuring arguments and limiting accessibility. In either case, the method situates Bodies That Matter firmly within the traditions of continental philosophy and critical theory, while also addressing concrete political issues such as hate speech, queer naming, and racialized embodiment.

13. Reception, Debates, and Key Criticisms

Upon its publication in 1993, Bodies That Matter quickly became a central text in feminist theory, queer studies, and continental philosophy. It was widely discussed both as a clarification of Gender Trouble and as a more technically elaborate work in its own right.

Positive Reception and Influence

Many scholars welcomed the book’s:

• Elaboration of materialization, seen as addressing earlier worries about linguistic idealism.
• Integration of psychoanalysis with poststructuralist accounts of discourse.
• Attention to race, drag, and representation in “Gender is Burning,” which some regarded as an important intervention in discussions of queer of color cultural production.
• Analysis of injurious speech and queer naming, influential for debates on hate speech, censorship, and identity politics.

It became a staple in graduate seminars and is frequently cited in discussions of performativity, embodiment, and the politics of recognition.

Major Criticisms

At the same time, the book has generated substantial debate:

Ongoing Debates

The book continues to be a touchstone in disputes over:

• The relation between discourse and materiality
• The usefulness and limits of performativity as a political concept
• How to theorize race, trans embodiment, and disability within or against Butler’s framework

Subsequent works, including Butler’s Undoing Gender, as well as commentaries by scholars such as Sara Salih and Moya Lloyd, have further elaborated and contested the arguments of Bodies That Matter, indicating its lasting, if sometimes contentious, influence.

14. Legacy and Historical Significance

Bodies That Matter is widely regarded as a landmark text in late twentieth‑century feminist and queer theory. Its impact extends across multiple disciplines and has shaped how scholars and activists think about bodies, norms, and political agency.

Reframing Debates on Sex and Gender

The book helped shift theoretical debates from a nature vs. culture framework to questions about how norms materialize bodies. Rather than asking whether sex is biological and gender social, many subsequent discussions have focused on:

• The processes by which sex itself is normatively constructed
• How abjection and exclusion delimit the field of recognizable humans
• The ways in which race, class, and sexuality co‑constitute bodily intelligibility

This reframing has informed fields such as trans studies, queer of color critique, and new materialist feminism, even when these traditions diverge from or critique Butler’s positions.

Influence on Conceptual and Political Vocabulary

The book has contributed enduring concepts—materialization, abjection, citationality, the lesbian phallus, injurious speech, and the analysis of queer as a contested signifier—that continue to circulate in academic and activist contexts.

Relation to Later Developments

Subsequent works by Butler and others have extended, revised, or challenged the book’s theses. Undoing Gender and Frames of War revisit questions of livable lives, grievable bodies, and the politics of recognition, often cited as building on the groundwork laid in Bodies That Matter. New materialist and affect theories have sometimes criticized Butler’s continued emphasis on discourse, while also acknowledging her role in rethinking materiality as dynamic and power‑laden.

Overall, the historical significance of Bodies That Matter lies in its role in consolidating a poststructuralist materialist approach to sex and embodiment, influencing generations of scholarship and contributing to ongoing debates about how bodies come to “matter” socially, politically, and ethically.