ABSTRACT

It is often argued that Butler’s account of performativity neglects the materiality of the specifically female body. Theorizing gender as performative in Gender Trouble involved denaturalizing the body and rejecting the idea that bodies in some way cause gender. Butler aimed to show that bodily categories such as sex, gender and sexuality are products of discourses and power relations rather than natural effects of the body, as discussed in Chapter 1. She argued instead that it is through the various bodily categories that ‘a sexed nature or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive”, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts’ (1990a: 7). Understanding the body as the foundation of these bodily categories is a product of regimes of power/knowledge in a Foucauldian sense, which have vested interests ‘in keeping the body bounded and constituted by the markers of sex’ (p. 129).