ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that the interpretation of the body is crucial to understanding some of the underlying attitudes and beliefs that framed the way in which men and women were perceived, and indeed why they were treated differently, in past societies. Historians, philosophers and psychologists are just a few of the many people to have disagreed about the role of the body in the complex relationship between sex and gender. As Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble (1990) found, the peril of talking about gender as a social construction is that the body somehow ‘disappears’.1 By arguing in favour of the primary influence of socialization and performance in constructing male and female identity, her critics accused her of giving the impression that it is somehow possible, or has been possible in history, for a person to exist in a ‘pregendered’ state, as though the sexed body had no physical presence or experiential limits.2 Butler’s response was to write a riposte to her critics, Bodies That Matter (1993) in which she asserted the importance of the ‘materiality’ of the body, but defended the idea that bodies were as much subject to discursive interpretation as the social performance of gender.3 The controversy caused by Judith Butler’s work is in part reflective of the fact that, in the context of considering bodies from an historical or philosophical perspective, we are of course referring to discourses about bodies, and the universal idea of ‘the body’, rather than actual, specific bodies. Archaeologists and pathologists are among the few people who have access to human remains (in themselves limited as partial, material traces of inanimate corpses). Subjective reflections by people in past societies about their own bodies are just as fragmentary, constituting discourses framed by culture, and the constraints of what was understood and what could be named.
