ABSTRACT
The woman swallowing the oral contraceptive pill makes sense to us in the twentieth century. She has done since 1960. She is ‘intelligible’ in a way that a man swallowing hormones, or a post-menopausal woman swallowing the pill is not. We accept her body in a way that we do not accept a woman taking steroids for muscle-building, or a transsexual taking the pill. By using the example of the woman on the pill, I want to try to show how bodies are made culturally intelligible. I want to illustrate how the body of the woman swallowing the pill may (or may not) conform to the cultural matrix of what Judith Butler has called intelligible genders: ‘“Intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire’ (Butler 1990:17). The sexes/genders/desires (and races) that make sense to us are not natural or inevitable. The heterosexual, fertile woman on the pill, wanting to plan the size of her family, for example, makes sense. Her body is both legitimate and intelligible. Located in another position, such as the post-menopausal single woman, or even as a man, she is less ‘intelligible’.
