Transcription of On Judith Butler and Performativity
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On Judith Butler and Performativity
33On Judith Butler and PerformativitySARA SALIH Science and naturalness are discur-sive constructs and, although it mightseem strange to refute the authority of science after quoting apparently scientific data, the point Butler is making is clear: thebody is not a mute facticity (GT: 129), afact of nature, but like gender it is produced bydiscourses such as the ones Butler has beenanalyzing. As with gender, to suggest that thereis no body prior to cultural inscription will leadButler to argue that sex as well as gender canbe performatively reinscribed in ways thataccentuate its factitiousness ( its construct-edness) rather than its facticity ( the fact ofits existence). Such reinscriptions, or re-citationsas Butler will call them in Bodies That Matter,constitute the subject s agency within the law,in other words, the possibilities of subvertingthe law against itself. Agency is an importantconcept for Butler , since it signifies the oppor-tunities for subverting the law against itself toradical, political has collapsed the sex/gender distinctionin order to argue that there is no sex that is notalways already gender.
Butler’s argument that there is no identity out-side language leads her to reject the commonly accepted distinction between surface and depth, the Cartesian dualism between body and soul. In the third chapter of Gender Trouble she draws from Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish, in which he challenges “the doctrine of internalization ...
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