The Social Materiality of Sex: For and Beyond Judith Butler

Abstract

AbstractIn her chapter, The Social Materiality of sex: For and Beyond Judith Butler, Audrey Benoit begins with presenting the new perspective on sex adopted by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990): gender is not to culture as sex is to nature, because sex is not a physical fact. Butler thinks that sex is socially produced and established as “prediscursive”. It is through the social repetition of gender norms that the materiality of sex is constructed. The social performativity of the norm ensures its hold on the individual, even into the individual’s relationship to the materiality of his own body, permeated by social meaning. But the iteration of the norm also opens up the possibility of its subversion, through agency, namely every individual’s capacity to act. Benoit shows what extension she proposes to give to Butler’s thought. According to Benoit, the societal problem of the relation between sex and gender, encompasses a general philosophical problem about the standard conception of the relation between matter and discourse. Thus, Butler’s first works on gender enable Benoit to raise the problem of the discursive production of social norms in new materialist terms. For Marxists, it is the material aspect of social reality, as opposed to the idea-based and discursive aspect of ideology, that provides the bases of political criticism. Although this Marxist conception of materiality has little in common with the physical materiality of natural objects, it is nonetheless used as a criterion to distinguish between what derives from concrete social existence and what we can say about that social existence. Benoit sets out to show that Butler’s new materialist approach to language (Excitable Speech, 1997), integrating and going beyond the heritage left by Pierre Bourdieu, avoids the trap of dissociation between material social life and discourses. For instance, in a performative manner, an insult helps to constitute, in the interpellated person, a corporeal doxa that transforms the social reality of body. Benoit underlines that Butler opens a singular materialist path, which considers the productive effects of language in terms of corporeal materiality. According to Benoit, Butler’s thought thus invites us to reconsider social relations from the standpoint of their discursive materiality. Indeed, Benoit chooses the term discursive materialism to designate this critical approach, inspired by Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, that considers the discursively constructed dimension of the most concrete social existence.