Response to Bodies That Matter

First of all, I have to say, I would’ve been screwed with these articles if I hadn’t had a lecture on performance/performativity in my rhetorical criticism class on Monday. So thank you Dr. Torres. Now I half get what is going on with Butler.

When Butler states on page 242, “Identification is used here not as an imitative activity by which a conscious being models itself after another; on the contrary, identification is the assimilating passion by which an ego first emerges” I understood this in terms of transsexuals or even drag queens. They are not imitating the look, mannerisms, etc, of women, this is an identity that emerges from their ego. It definitely questions that idea of gender or sex (I can’t decide which one to use because they seem controversial to Butler. And I am confused about that…). I thought the psychoanalytical aspect related to what Butler earlier says is at stake in a “reformulation of the materiality of bodies” when she states, “the construal of ‘sex’ no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies” (236). I understood this to mean that sex and gender don’t really relate to the physical body, but the essence of sex and gender. Just because people are given bodies, or born with bodies, doesn’t mean they can relate to them physically or what people expect of bodies physically. They go beyond the cultural norms. People are more than cultural norms. They are challenging the cultural norms.